Weekly History Quiz No.303

Portugal acquired a permanent lease for Macau in 1557, which it ruled until 1999. Portuguese settlement of Timor-Leste began in the 1560s, and continued until invasion by Indonesia in 1975. The Portuguese empire is the longest lived European colonial empire, beginning in 1415 and lasting until 1999.

Within 20 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, a significant number of Muslims were living in Cyprus. It is the site of the tomb of Umm Harâm, the Prophet Muhammad’s maternal aunt, who died in 648. Subsequent campaigns saw Muslim populations established across the Greek islands, Sicily, Malta, Portugal and Spain.

Khrushchev authorised the placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba. Brezhnev took over later, and Gorbachev decades after that.

Abraham Lincoln and William Berry ran a general store in New Salem, Illinois, with a liquor licence to sell alcoholic drinks by the glass. The venture failed in its first year, leaving Lincoln with significant debts.

In 1066 the group in present-day north-eastern Germany known as the Wends rebelled against Gottschalk, one of their rulers.
Gottschalk had converted to Christianity and wanted the pagan populace to follow suit. The uprising was bloody, with many Christian missionaries killed, including the bishop of Mecklenburg.

The shipyard strike united workers under Solidarity, a powerful anti-authoritarian social movement. Earlier protests lacked the same scale. Solidarity became the first independent trade union to be recognised in a Warsaw Pact country, and its leader, Lech Wałęsa, became the first democratically elected president of Poland since 1926.

The disease was once common across much of Europe, including the marshland areas of England from the 15th to 19th centuries. Oliver Cromwell succumbed to the disease in 1658.

The evacuation of the British colony ahead of the advancing Japanese was an unmitigated disaster. The racial hierarchy was shown in stark relief, with White residents (and even a pet monkey!) prioritised over Indian and Burmese residents. An estimated 80,000 Indians died of heat exhaustion, starvation, disease or were killed by Bamar gangs while trying to walk through what were called Burma's "jungles of death" to reach the safety of India. This was a key contributor to the beginning of the Quit India movement.

The 1968 massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians at My Lai in Vietnam by US troops became a symbol of US hypocrisy, and contributed to growing opposition to the war.

She was a member of the White Rose, a German anti-Nazi resistance group. After distributing anti-Nazi flyers at her university she was convicted of treason and executed by guillotine. She was just 21.