Charles Dickens famously called the era of the French Revolution the best and worst of times. For 10 years, from 1789 to 1799, France struggled to inaugurate a new European order based on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the process, men wrote constitutions, women marched for bread, politicians condemned innocent people to death, and a little Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte came to dominate the continent. Read about this remarkable period of European history in The French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon.

Learn the reasons behind the 1959 overthrow of the Fulgencio Batista regime by Fidel Castro and his troops and the subsequent successes and failures of Castro's almost 50 year rule of the island nation.

An insult. A diplomatic crisis. A French king eager to cement his power. Many different factors led to the French invasion of Algeria in June 1830, but the result was the establishment of a French colony in North Africa that would last 132 years. For more than a century, Algeria was marked by sharp divisions between its European colonizers and the mainly Muslim people who had occupied the land prior to the arrival of French troops. Discrimination, prejudice, and injustice separated these two groups until a war for independence began on November 1, 1954. After nearly eight years of violence,...