History terms in Conflict (from 750 CE onwards)

The movement to abolish slavery or the slave trade; in the USA before 1861 it demanded the end of slavery and turned it into a moral and political question for many Northerners.

A warship with a flight deck from which aircraft take off and land, which became the most important type of warship in the Pacific War.

The network of treaties that divided the European great powers into two blocs before 1914, the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente.

The Armée de Libération Nationale, the armed wing of the FLN during the Algerian War, with guerrilla units inside Algeria and a larger army based in Tunisia and Morocco.

A legal pardon for past offences, usually for a whole group, granted to help end a conflict or reconcile former enemies.

The Union strategy proposed by General Winfield Scott in 1861: a naval blockade of the Confederate coast and control of the Mississippi River to split and strangle the Confederacy.

The deportation and mass killing of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire from 1915, in which most estimates put the dead at between about 600,000 and 1.5 million. Türkiye rejects the term genocide.

An agreement between the sides in a war to stop fighting while the terms of peace are worked out. It ends the fighting but is not itself a peace settlement.

The clause of Japan's 1947 constitution by which the Japanese people renounce war and the threat or use of force to settle international disputes.

A strategy of wearing down the enemy's soldiers, equipment and will through continuous losses instead of seeking one decisive battle. It favours the side with greater reserves.

Laws passed by Southern states in 1865–1866 to control the labour, movement and legal rights of freed African Americans.

A secret Serbian nationalist society of army officers, founded in 1911 and led by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, which helped arm the assassins of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

Germany's promise of 5–6 July 1914 to support Austria-Hungary fully in whatever action it took against Serbia after the Sarajevo assassination.

An administrative discharge from the US armed forces, neither honourable nor dishonourable, given during the Second World War to many gay and lesbian service members; it cost them veterans' benefits and carried a lasting stigma.

A riot by people, often women, protesting against the price or shortage of food, usually by seizing bread and other goods from shops, as in Richmond, Virginia, in April 1863.

A railway of about 415 km built by the Japanese in 1942–1943 using Allied prisoners of war and Asian forced labourers, of whom about 12,000 prisoners and about 90,000 labourers died.

The Greek-speaking, Christian continuation of the Roman Empire in the east, ruled from Constantinople until its capture by the Ottomans in 1453.

The African labourers used in their hundreds of thousands by Britain and Germany in the East African campaign of the First World War to carry supplies on foot; tens of thousands died.

An agreement to halt military operations, sometimes only in one area or for a set time, usually as a first step towards negotiations.

The French offensive of 1959–1960 under General Maurice Challe, in which mobile forces with helicopters destroyed ALN units inside Algeria region by region.

About 140,000 Chinese workers recruited by Britain and France in the First World War to dig trenches, unload ships and do other labour behind the Western Front.

A person who is not a member of an armed force and takes no direct part in fighting.

An alliance of states, rulers or armed groups that fight together while keeping their own interests and commanders.

The set of special rules and punishments, applied without trial by colonial officials, that governed colonised subjects in French Algeria (from 1881) and other French colonies until its abolition in 1944–1946.

The rule of one people by another, usually from a distant country, in which the colonising power controls the colony's government, land and economy and treats its people as subjects.

A member of an armed force who takes a direct part in fighting.

Fighting by using different weapons and branches (infantry, artillery, tanks, aircraft) together so that each covers the weaknesses of the others.

The euphemism used for women and girls forced into sexual slavery in brothels run by or for the Japanese military from the 1930s to 1945, mostly from Korea and China.

The informal settlement of the disputed presidential election of 1876, by which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president and federal troops were withdrawn from the South, ending Reconstruction.

The Confederate States of America, formed in February 1861 by Southern states that seceded from the United States to protect slavery; it was defeated in 1865.

A person who refuses to serve in the armed forces on grounds of conscience, usually religious or moral; about 16,000 men did so in Britain in the First World War.

In the US Civil War, an enslaved person who escaped to Union lines and was treated as enemy property that could be kept rather than returned, from General Butler's ruling of May 1861.

The grouping of merchant ships to sail together under the protection of warships, which made them harder for submarines to find and attack.

A medieval siege engine whose throwing arm is swung by a heavy falling weight, able to throw larger stones further and more accurately than engines worked by pulling teams.

The charge, first used at the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, of planning, starting or waging a war of aggression.

A holy war called by the papacy, in which participants took a vow and received spiritual rewards; above all the expeditions to recover Jerusalem from Muslim rule from 1095 onwards.

The 1924 agreement that rescheduled German reparation payments and provided American loans to stabilise the German economy.

A British law of 8 August 1914, extended during the war, that gave the government wide powers to take over industry and land, censor the press and restrict daily life.

An administrative division of France. Algeria was organised as three French départements from 1848, so most French politicians saw it as part of France rather than a colony.

German for a dictated order; the name many Germans gave the Treaty of Versailles because Germany was not allowed to negotiate its terms.

The defensive alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary signed in 1879, the core of the Triple Alliance.

A group of early-twentieth-century historians, named after William A. Dunning, who portrayed Reconstruction as a corrupt failure imposed on the South; their views reflected and supported segregation.

Lincoln's order, in force from 1 January 1863, declaring enslaved people in areas in rebellion free and allowing Black men to serve in the Union armed forces.

The agreements of April 1904 by which Britain and France settled their colonial disputes; an understanding rather than a military alliance.

The agreements signed by France and the Algerian provisional government on 18 March 1962 that set a ceasefire, a vote on self-determination and the terms of Algerian independence and cooperation with France.

The order signed by President Roosevelt on 19 February 1942 that allowed military commanders to exclude people from designated areas; it was used to remove Japanese Americans from the west coast.

The debate set off by Fritz Fischer's book of 1961 arguing that Germany's leaders sought or deliberately risked a general war in 1914 to make Germany a world power.

President Woodrow Wilson's statement of war aims and principles for peace, given to Congress on 8 January 1918, including open diplomacy, arms reduction, borders drawn by nationality and a League of Nations.

The amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1868, that made everyone born in the United States a citizen and promised all citizens the equal protection of the laws.

The federal agency created in March 1865 to help formerly enslaved people with food, schools, labour contracts and legal disputes; it worked until 1872.

The Algerian nationalist movement that began the armed struggle against French rule on 1 November 1954 and led Algeria to independence in 1962.

Community courts in Rwanda, working nationally from 2005 to 2012, that tried nearly two million cases against people accused of taking part in the 1994 genocide, combining punishment with confession and reconciliation.

The failed seizure of power in Algiers on 21–26 April 1961 by four French generals who opposed de Gaulle's move towards Algerian self-determination.

The deliberate destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 and made a crime by the UN Genocide Convention of 1948.

The Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, set up by the FLN in exile in September 1958 to speak for Algeria in diplomacy and, later, in negotiations with France.

The paper dollar issued by the Union government under the Legal Tender Act of 1862, not backed by gold, used to help pay for the Civil War.

The German plan of August 1916 to greatly increase the production of guns, shells and other munitions by directing industry and labour to the war.

The civilian population and economy of a country at war, whose work, morale and supplies support the armed forces.

The US proposal handed to Japan by Secretary of State Cordell Hull on 26 November 1941, which demanded Japanese withdrawal from China and Indochina; Japan treated it as an ultimatum.

The series of Allied attacks on the Western Front from the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918 to the armistice of 11 November 1918, which drove the German army back.

The policy of a state extending its power and rule over other territories and peoples, by conquest, colonisation or economic and political control.

The forced seizure of goods, animals or labour for military use; in the Confederacy, the army's taking of food, livestock and enslaved labourers.

In the medieval Catholic Church, a grant that reduced the punishment in purgatory due for sins, often obtained in return for a payment or a pious act and issued on written or printed forms.

A general and sustained rise in prices, which reduces the value of money, wages and savings. Wars often caused it when governments printed money to pay for them.

The advantage of a side whose forces are positioned between its enemies or inside a territory, so that it can move troops between fronts by shorter routes than the enemy.

The Allied court that tried Japan's wartime leaders in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948 for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity; all 25 defendants judged were convicted and seven were hanged.

The struggle in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries between the popes and lay rulers, above all the German emperors, over who had the right to appoint bishops and abbots.

In the medieval Islamic world, a grant of the tax revenue from an area of land to a soldier or commander in return for military service.

The American strategy in the Pacific from 1943 of capturing selected islands as bases while bypassing and isolating strongly held Japanese positions.

The forced removal of about 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them US citizens, from the US west coast in 1942 and their detention in camps until 1945–1946.

In Islam, a struggle or striving in the path of God; in a military sense, a war to defend or extend Muslim lands, a cause invoked by leaders from Saladin to nineteenth-century West African reformers such as Usman dan Fodio.

The diplomatic crisis between the assassination at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 and the outbreak of a general European war in early August 1914.

The Confederate strategy of using Europe's dependence on Southern cotton to force Britain and France to recognise the Confederacy and break the Union blockade.

The Japanese army stationed in north-east China from 1906 to guard Japan's railway interests; its officers staged the Mukden incident of 1931 and seized Manchuria without government approval.

The international organisation set up by the peace settlement of 1919, which came into being in January 1920, to settle disputes peacefully and protect its members through collective security.

The argument, made by historians such as Gary Sheffield, that the British army learned from its costly failures on the Western Front and became highly effective by 1918.

A custom by which a widow marries her dead husband's brother or another male relative of his family; practised by the Mongols and imposed at first on some Chinese widows under the Yuan.

The agreements of 1925 in which Germany, France and Belgium accepted their shared borders, guaranteed by Britain and Italy, opening a brief period of reconciliation in Europe.

The forced march of about 8,000–9,000 Navajo people in 1864 by the US army to a reservation at Bosque Redondo, New Mexico, during which many died.

An interpretation of the Civil War spread by former Confederates, which presented the Confederacy as a noble cause defeated only by numbers and played down slavery as its cause.

The puppet state set up by Japan in Manchuria in 1932, nominally ruled by the last Qing emperor, Puyi, but controlled by the Japanese army until 1945.

The arrangement under which former German colonies and Ottoman territories were governed after 1919 by Allied powers on behalf of the League of Nations, in theory as a step towards self-government.

Non-Arab converts to Islam in the early caliphates, who were attached as clients to Arab tribes and often treated as second-class Muslims; their grievances helped the Abbasid Revolution of 747–750.

The belief that a country should maintain strong armed forces and be ready to use them, often with the glorification of military values and a large political role for the armed forces.

The principles an armed force follows about how to fight: how units are organised, how weapons work together and how commanders decide.

The organisation of a society's population, wealth, industry, food and transport for war, including raising soldiers, money and war production.

The fortified barrier of electrified fences, minefields and radar built by France along Algeria's border with Tunisia from 1957 to stop ALN fighters and arms crossing.

A woman who worked in a British munitions factory in the First World War; nearly a million did so by 1918.

The mass killing and rape of Chinese prisoners and civilians by Japanese troops after the capture of Nanjing in December 1937; estimates of the dead range from tens of thousands to more than 300,000.

The belief that people who share a language, culture, history or descent form a nation that should have its own state and govern itself.

Peace understood as the absence of war and direct violence, without necessarily removing the injustices behind a conflict (Johan Galtung's term).

The aim announced by Japanese Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro in November 1938 of a bloc of Japan, Manchukuo and China under Japanese leadership; it was widened in 1940 into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Four days of rioting in New York City in July 1863 against the Union draft, in which mainly Irish immigrant workers attacked draft offices, the homes of the rich and Black New Yorkers; more than a hundred people died.

The French law of September 1947 that created an Algerian Assembly of 120 members, half elected by Europeans and a small minority of Muslims and half by more than eight million Muslim Algerians.

A clandestine organisation of French army officers and settlers formed in 1961 that used bombings and assassinations to prevent Algerian independence.

The nineteenth-century movement for the unity of the Slav peoples, which in Russia became the belief that Russia should protect and lead the Slavs, especially in the Balkans.

The conference of the victorious powers, opened in January 1919, that drew up the treaties ending the First World War, including the Treaty of Versailles.

Church movements of the tenth and eleventh centuries that tried to protect clergy, the poor and property from knights' violence and to ban fighting on certain days.

A formal written agreement between states that ends a state of war and sets the terms of peace, such as borders, compensation and limits on armed forces.

The longer work after a conflict of preventing it from starting again: reconstruction, new institutions, the rule of law, economic recovery, disarmament and the return of soldiers and refugees.

A person of European origin born or settled in French Algeria; about 800,000 left for France in 1962.

A long period of unusually wet climate, such as the fifteen years of above-average moisture in central Mongolia from 1211 to 1225 shown by tree rings.

In the United States of the 1850s, the principle that the settlers of a territory should decide for themselves whether to allow slavery; more generally, the idea that political authority comes from the people.

A deeper peace in which the injustices that caused or followed a conflict have also been addressed through justice, rights and reconciliation (Johan Galtung's term).

The French counter-insurgency method in Algeria of dividing the country into a grid of sectors, each permanently held by its own garrison.

The members of the Republican Party in Congress who pressed for emancipation during the Civil War and for strong federal protection of Black civil and political rights during Reconstruction.

A government system that limits how much of a scarce good (food, fuel, clothing) each person may buy, to share supplies fairly in wartime.

The period from 1865 to 1877 in which the defeated Confederate states were brought back into the United States and the rights of freed African Americans were defined, enforced and then abandoned.

A settlement into which the French army moved rural Algerians during the Algerian War to cut the guerrillas off from the population; later estimates put the number moved at about two million.

The US political party founded in 1854 by opponents of the expansion of slavery into the western territories; its candidate Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860.

The seizure of goods (food, animals, vehicles, buildings) or labour by an army or government for war use, usually with little or no payment.

The change in US occupation policy in Japan from about 1948, when economic recovery and anti-communism took priority over the earlier reforms.

The attacks by bands of crusaders on the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz and other Rhineland towns in May and June 1096, at the start of the First Crusade.

Labourers, mainly from Java, forced or pressed into work by the Japanese occupation authorities in Southeast Asia during the Second World War.

A tax of one-tenth of income and movable goods imposed in England and France in 1188 to pay for the Third Crusade, on everyone who did not take the cross.

Germany's pre-1914 war plan for a war against France and Russia: defeat France quickly by marching through Belgium, then turn east against the slower Russian army.

The formal withdrawal of a state or region from a larger political union, such as the departure of eleven Southern states from the United States in 1860–1861.

The empire of the Seljuk Turks, Sunni Muslim rulers who took Baghdad in 1055 and defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071; it broke into rival states after 1092.

The name used in the First World War for the psychological breakdown of soldiers caused by prolonged exposure to bombardment and combat, now understood as a form of post-traumatic stress.

The misapplication of Darwin's theory of natural selection to nations, races and classes, claiming that they competed in a struggle in which only the strongest deserved to survive.

A member of the Song educated class who refused to serve the Mongol Yuan dynasty after 1279 and kept the memory of the Song alive through art and writing.

The series of German attacks on the Western Front from March to July 1918, which gained ground but failed to win the war before American troops arrived.

The false claim, spread by German nationalists after 1918, that the German army had not been defeated in the field but betrayed by revolutionaries and politicians at home.

The doctrine that the individual states of the USA kept powers the federal government could not override; before 1861 it was used above all to defend slavery and to justify secession.

A plan for winning a war or campaign as a whole: which enemy forces or places to attack, in what order and for what political aim.

The title of General Douglas MacArthur as head of the occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951, also used for his headquarters.

The methods used to win a particular battle or engagement: how troops are arranged and moved and how weapons are combined.

A war in which states direct their whole economies and populations to the war effort, and in which civilians, industry and food supplies become targets.

The truce agreed in September 1192 between Richard I and Saladin that ended the Third Crusade: the crusaders kept the coast from Tyre to Jaffa, Jerusalem stayed under Muslim rule, and Christian pilgrims could visit it.

The treaty signed in September 1951 by Japan and 48 other countries that formally ended the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific and restored Japanese sovereignty in 1952.

The treaty signed by Germany, Italy and Japan on 27 September 1940, in which each promised to help the others if attacked by a power not yet in the war, meaning above all the United States.

The alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy formed in 1882; Italy declared neutrality in 1914 and joined the other side in 1915.

The informal grouping of France, Russia and Britain formed by the Franco-Russian Alliance (1894), the Entente Cordiale (1904) and the Anglo-Russian Entente (1907).

A temporary suspension of fighting for an agreed period, after which war may resume unless a peace is made.

The winter of 1916–1917 in Germany, when a failed potato harvest and the Allied blockade forced people to live largely on swede turnips.

A final set of demands, with a time limit, whose rejection will lead to war or other serious action; for example, Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia of 23 July 1914.

A surrender in which the defeated side gives up its armed forces and its government's authority without negotiating any terms; the victors decide what follows.

The segregated regiments of Black soldiers, most of them formerly enslaved, who served in the Union army under white officers from 1863.

The sinking of merchant ships, including neutral ones, without warning by submarines; resumed by Germany on 1 February 1917, it helped bring the USA into the First World War.

A peace settlement whose terms are set by the winning side and imposed on the defeated, as opposed to a compromise negotiated between equals.

A revolutionary movement of young South Slav nationalists in Bosnia and Herzegovina before 1914; its member Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The dynasty proclaimed by the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan in 1271, which ruled all of China after the conquest of the Song in 1279 until 1368.