Weekly History Quiz No.302

Amin took power in a military coup in 1971, presiding over a brutal regime that expelled hundreds of thousands of its citizens based on their ethnicity, as well as killing hundreds of thousands more for minor offences against the regime. In 1978 the Ugandan army launched an incursion into Tanzania. The Tanzanian military responded, pushing out the Ugandans, before continuing to Kampala, where they forced Amin to flee into exile.

Proust began work on À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) in 1908. The novel consists of seven volumes totaling around 1.25 million words, exploring themes of memory, art, love, high society and the human experience through the narrator's recollections.

King Edward VIII proposed to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite who was divorced from her first husband and was in the process of divorcing her second. This was inconsistent with his position as the head of the Church of England, which at this time did not allow divorced people to remarry in church if their ex-spouses were still alive.

Edward’s relationship with Wallis Simpson was widely speculated upon in the European and American media, but the fact that no mention of that relationship was ever made in the British papers is a sign of the respect in which the monarchy was held at the time.

Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federation in 1991 after the USSR dissolved. Gorbachev was the last Soviet leader.

South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded, forming the Confederacy.

The culmination of the Romanian War of Independence, part of the Russo-Turkish War, saw Romania fight on the Russian side, and gain independence from the Ottoman Empire.

The Act was a direct reaction to persistent criticism from playwrights of Walpole’s government. Under the Act only two patent theatres – Drury Lane and Covent Garden – were permitted to present plays, which were subject to heavy censorship. This was the case until 1788, when a more liberal government under William Pitt the Younger loosened the restrictions of the Act.

The first northern settlement was a British military garrison that was supposed to become a trading port to rival Singapore. In actuality, the garrison was struck by tropical diseases, the local Tiwi resisted, spearing many, and no one ever came to trade.

The company's highly profitable business had been affected by the Guatemalan government outlawing the exploitative labor practices that had previously been used by the company.
The coup was supported by the US government, via a CIA covert operation code-named PBSuccess.

Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance, he was born in Florence, where one of his neighbours was Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the Americas were named.