This historical research guide provides students and their teachers with 600 term paper ideas and cites more than a thousand print and nonprint sources on the 100 most important events that have shaped 20th-century world history. Organized in chronological order, the guide features entries on key events in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America that are covered in the world history curriculum in secondary schools and colleges. From the 1905 revolution in Russia to the Chinese economy at the end of the 20th century, a wide range of political, economic, social, and cultural...

Midway through his reign, in the critical decade of the 1680s, the lusty image of Louis XIV paled and was replaced by that of a straitlaced monarch committed to locking up blasphemers, debtors, gamblers, and prostitutes in wretched, foul-smelling prisons that dispensed ample doses of Catholic-Reformation virtue. The author demonstrates how this attack on sin expressed the punitive social policy of the French Catholic Reformation and how Louis's actions clarified the legal and moral distinctions between crime and sin.

As a hot-blooded young prince, Louis XIV paid little attention to...