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The Aztec culture was filled with creativity and beauty. The craftsmanship valued by the
Aztec Indians was art , music , poetry & tattoos . Their art functioned as an expression of religion and warfare and many examples of this aspect of the Aztec culture can be found in the form of paintings on the walls of temples, masks and pottery. With religion playing such a vital role in the Aztec culture, it is interesting to learn how Aztec life was impacted by these beliefs. In fact, nearly every act in which the Aztecs engaged was linked in one way or another to their gods .
For the Aztec Indians, life was a constant struggle of hard work meant to please the gods in order to keep the universe in balance.
The temples are one of the few remaining signs of the Aztecs and their grandeur signifies how important religion was in this ancient society.

July 24, 1783 - December
17,1830
Simon Bolivar was the greatest leader of Latin America's independence movement from Spain. On April 19,
1810, the people of Caracas declared a provisional independence from Spain late 1812 he went to New Granada
(now Colombia) to look for a commission as an officer in the growing Independence movement there. He was given 200 men and control of a remote outpost. He aggressively attacked all Spanish forces in the area, and his prestige and. By the beginning of 1813 he was ready to lead a sizeable army into
Venezuela. The royalists in Venezuela could not beat him head-on, but rather tried to surround him with a number of smaller armies. Bolívar did what everyone least expected and made a maarmy grewd dash for
Caracas. The gamble paid off, and on
August 7, 1813, Bolivar rode victoriously into Caracas at the head of his army. This dazzling march became known as the Admirable
Campaign .

august 13,1926-( )
Fidel is an 89 year old man that is living history. He is a Cuban dictator known for successfully overthrowing Cuban leader
Batista , and then became prime minister of Cuba. In 1952 Castro ran for a seat at
Cuba's House of Representatives.
However, that year General Fulgencio
Batista overthrew the existing government and cancelled the elections.
Castro began to organize a revolution.
Fidel and his brother, Raul, tried to take over the government, but were captured and sent to prison. He was released two years later. Castro did not give up, however. He went to Mexico and planned his next revolution. There he met
Guevara who would become an important leader in his revolution. Castro and Guevara returned with a small army to Cuba on December 2, 1956. They were quickly defeated again by Batista's army.
However, this time Castro, Guevara, and
Raul escaped into the hills. They began a guerrilla war against Batista. Over time they gathered many supporters and eventually overthrew Batista's government on January 1, 1959.

The Columbian Exchange was also known as the Grand Exchange. Both refer to the widespread transfer of animals, plants, culture, human populations, diseases, technology and ideas between the American and
Afro-Eurasian hemispheres in the
15th and 16th centuries, related to
European colonization. Beginning after Columbus' discovery in 1492 the exchange lasted throughout the years of expansion and discovery. The
Columbian Exchange impacted the social and cultural makeup of both sides of the Atlantic. Advancements in agricultural production, evolution of warfare, increased mortality rates and education are a few examples of the effect of the Columbian Exchange on both Europeans and Native
Americans.

1485- 1547
In 1518, Cortés was to command his own expedition to Mexico, but
Velázquez canceled it. Cortés ignored the order and set sail for
Mexico with more than 500 men and 11 ships . In February 1519, the expedition reached the Mexican coast. Cortés became allies with some of the native peoples he encountered, but with others he used deadly force to conquer
Mexico. He fought Tlaxacan and
Cholula warriors and then planned on taking over the Aztec empire.
He marched to Tenochtitlán, the
Aztec capital and home to ruler
Montezuma II. Cortés took
Montezuma hostage and his soldiers raided the city. Cortés left the city after learning that Spanish troops were coming to arrest him for disobeying orders.

The revolution began in 1952, when former army Sergeant Fulgencio
Batista seized power during a hotly contested election. Batista had been president from 1940-1944 and ran for president in 1952. When it became apparent that he would lose, he seized power before the elections, which were cancelled.
Many people in Cuba were disgusted by his power grab, preferring Cuba’s democracy, as flawed as it was. One such person was rising political star Fidel
Castro, who would likely have won a seat in Congress had the 1952 elections taken place. Castro immediately began plotting
Batista’s downfall.
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DateEvent July 1953Fidel Castro attacks
Fulgencio Batista was the ruler of Cuba. Fidel Castro led an uprising against him by attacking the military barracks at Santiago de Cuba. October 1953Castro stands up for himself
After getting criticized for the Santiago attack, Fidel Castro made a speech. He said what he had done was right. 1954Cuba gets a president
Fulgencio Batista made himself the president. He was now the sole leader of the country.
1955Castro is released from prison
After being put in prison for his actions, Fidel is released by President Batista. Fidel Castro and his brother go to Mexico. June 1955The Castro brothers meet Che Guevara
The Castro brothers met Che Guevara in Mexico. He helped stir them up to continue their cause.
1956They return to Cuba
The Castro brothers took Che Guevara and 80 other insurgents on a boat. They returned to Cuba.
January 1957Their first victory
When they arrived in Cuba they quickly took over an army outpost on the coast. Their victory spurred others in the country to take their side. 1957The revolutionary movement catches on
More people joined Fidel Castro's side as the year moved on. College students stormed the presidential palace and protestors were killed in the streets. 1958The US boycotts Cuba
The United States stopped sending aid to Cuba because of the brutal fighting between its people.
April 1958A country-wide strike
The people flocked behind Fidel Castro, so when he told them to quit working, they all went on strike. It hurt the country's economy. May 1958The president takes a stand
President Batista sent an army of 10,000 men to fight against Fidel Castro. Castro's small army defeated Batista's larger one. November 1958A plane is hijacked
A Cuban plane flying out of Miami, FL, was hijacked. The hijackers wanted to use the plane to deliver weapons to Fidel Castro's troops. January 1959Castro's forces advance
Fidel Castro leads his troops into Havana, and the president flees the city. February 1959A new government is set up
The rebel leader Fidel Castro became the Prime Minister, and elections were set up to elect other officials. April 1959Castro visits the US
The people in America greeted Castro like a hero, but some were nervous around him because they had heard he was a communist. They later learn they were right.

Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was a
Mexican Catholic priest. On
September 16, 1810, Father Hidalgo rang the church bell to announce revolution against the Spanish.
Indians and mestizos marched with
Hidalgo and captured major cities but were halted at the gates of the capital.
Hidalgo fled north but was caught and shot in 1811. The anniversary of his call is celebrated as Mexico's
Independence Day. Hidalgo often hosted gatherings at his home where he would talk about whether it was the duty of the people to obey or overthrow an unjust tyrant. Hidalgo believed the Spanish crown was such a tyrant: a royal collection of debt had ruined the finances of the Hidalgo family, and he saw injustice daily in his work with the poor. There was a conspiracy for independence in
Querétaro at this time: the conspiracy felt that they needed someone with moral authority, a relationship with the lower classes and good connections. Hidalgo was recruited and joined without reservation.

In the early 15th century the town of Cuzco is a small place, the headquarters of one of many competing tribes within the region which was once ruled from
Tiwanaku . But in about 1438 a younger son of the ruler defeats the neighbouring Chanca people, usurps power, gives himself the resounding title Pachacuti
('transformer of the earth') and begins an astonishing process of military expansion. The policy is continued by his son, Topa Inca
(also sometimes called Tupac Inca).
You can visit this website for more info http://www.historyworld.net/wrl dhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?histor
yid=ac84#ixzz3QjWSdG9w

Indigenous populations are communities that live within, or are attached to, geographically distinct traditional habitats or ancestral territories, and who identify themselves as being part of a distinct cultural group, descended from groups present in the area before modern states were created and current borders defined. They generally maintain cultural and social identities, and social, economic, cultural and political institutions, separate from the mainstream or dominant society or culture.

May 20,1743-April 7, 1803
Toussaint L'Ouverture was born into slavery on May
20, 1743. He was the son of an educated slave, and in a sudden slave rebellion (August 1791), he discerned the ineptitude of the rebel leaders and scorned their willingness to compromise with European radicals.
Collecting an army of his own, L'Ouverture trained his followers in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, and by
1795, he was widely renowned for ending slavery on the island.
The events of August 22, 1791, the
“Night of Fire” in which slaves revolted by setting fire to plantation houses and fields and killing whites, convinced the 48-year-old
L’Ouverture that he should join the growing insurgency, although not before securing the safety of his wife and children in the Spanishcontrolled eastern half of the island (Santo
Domingo) and assuring that Bayon de Libertad and his wife were safely onboard a ship bound for the United States. Inspired by French
Revolutionary ideology and angered by generations of abuse at the hands of white planters, the initial slave uprising was quelled within several days, but ongoing fighting between the slaves, free blacks, and planters continued. Although he was free, L’Ouverture joined the slave insurgency and quickly developed a reputation first as a capable soldier and then as military secretary to Georges
Biassou, one of the insurgency’s leaders. When the insurgency’s leadership chose to ally itself with Spain against France , L’Ouverture followed. Threatened by Spain and Britain ’s attempts to control the island, the French
National Convention acted to preserve its colonial rule in 1794 by securing the loyalty of the black population; France granted citizenship rights and freedom to all blacks within the empire.

He is sometimes called Montezuma II to distinguish him from Montezuma I
(ruled 1440–69), who carried on conquests around Tenochtitlán . His reign was marked by incessant warfare, and his despotic rule caused grave unrest. When Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico he was thus able to gain native allies, notably in the province of the Tlaxcala. Montezuma, believing the Spanish to be descendants of the god Quetzalcoatl , tried to persuade them to leave by offering rich gifts. That failing, he received them in his splendid court at
Tenochtitlán in Nov., 1519. Cortés later seized him as a hostage and attempted to govern through him. In
June, 1520, the Aztec rose against the
Spanish. Montezuma was killed, although whether by the Spanish or the Aztec is not certain. His successor died a few months later and was replaced by Cuauhtémoc .
Montezuma's name is linked by a legend to fabulous treasures that the
Spanish appropriated and presumably lost at sea.

Spanish explorer and conquistador Francisco
Pizarro helped Vasco Núñez de Balboa discover the Pacific Ocean, and after conquering Peru, founded its capital city,
Lima. In 1513, Pizarro joined conquistador
Vasco Núñez de Balboa in his march to the
"South Sea," across the Isthmus of Panama.
During their journey, Balboa and Pizarro discovered what is now known as the Pacific
Ocean, although Balboa allegedly spied it first, and was therefore credited with the ocean's first European discovery.
Ironically, Pizarro later arrested Balboa under the orders of Pedro Arias de Ávila
(also known as Pedrarias), Balboa's rival and a known tyrant. Afterward, Pizarro stayed in
Panama for a time, where he was awarded an estate, served as mayor of Panama City and amassed a small fortune. In 1524, Pizarro teamed up with navigator Diego de Almagro and a priest named Fernando de Luque. The first of their reconnaissance voyages went as far as the San Juan River. The next gave
Pizarro the chance to explore further south along the coast. In the meantime, Pizarro's chief navigator, Bartolomé Ruiz, forged across the equator and then returned with word of those regions south of the equator.

Portugal occupies the western part of the Iberian
Peninsula and is slightly smaller than Indiana.
The country is crossed by three large rivers that rise in Spain, flow into the Atlantic, and divide the country into three geographic areas. The
Minho River, part of the northern boundary, cuts through a mountainous area that extends south to the vicinity of the Douro River. South of the
Douro, the mountains slope to the plains around the Tejo River. The remaining division is the southern one of Alentejo. The Azores stretch over
340 mi (547 km) in the Atlantic and consist of nine islands with a total area of 902 sq mi (2,335 sq km). Madeira, consisting of two inhabited islands,
Madeira and Porto Santo, and two groups of uninhabited islands, lie in the Atlantic about 535 mi (861 km) southwest of Lisbon. They have a parliamentary democracy.
Read more here: Portugal: Maps, History,
Geography, Government, Culture, Facts, Guide &
Travel/Holidays/Cities http://www.infoplease.com/country/portugal.h
tml#ixzz3QvUAu3DI

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Spain is Europe 's fourth largest country including the
Canary and Balearic island groups.
It follows the Central European time which runs 1 hr
• behind GMT. Normal working hours for shops across the country are from 9 am to 8 pm from Monday to
Saturday. During the afternoon, shops normally stay closed. However, large business houses stay open throughout the day. Restaurants and bars, especially in the city of Madrid , stay closed during the holidays in
August.
•
Generally remain closed on Mondays and public holidays but stay open on Sunday mornings. Museum
• hours vary with each season.
Banks: They function on all days throughout the week till Saturday from 9 am till midday or 1 pm. Banking hours are however longer in summers.
Taxis for hire are easily identifiable with the green light overhead but tourists should be careful with the meter.
•
Late night journeys demand extra payment.
The people of Spain are not used to big tipping but if one is satisfied with the food one can leave few coins which will be appreciated.
•
•
Spain observes its national day on 12 th October, because significantly ,on the same date in 1492
Columbus set foot in the Americas .
It depicts a Coat of Arms which is the exact replica of the original Coat of Arms worn by King Ferdinand.
•
Airports: Spain has almost 61 airports with unpaved runways.
These disputes with the U.K. And Portugal actually
• dates back to almost 200 years in history. Dispute with
U.K. Exists over the Rock of Gibraltar and over
Olivenza with Portugal .
Spain 's vast stretches of coastline serve as the largest area for narcotics trafficking into Europe .
•
Spain has almost 3.7 million foreigners residing within
• its territory,almost one-third of the nation's population.
Spain 's economy is the 7 th largest in the world and this is one of the important Fact about Spain which any one will admire to know.

conquistador, ( Spanish: “conqueror”, ) plural
Conquistadores, or Conquistadors, any one of the leaders in the Spanish conquest of America, especially of Mexico and Peru, in the 16th century.
An expedition against Aztec Mexico was led by
Hernán Cortés , who set up a base camp at
Veracruz in 1519 to prepare for an advance inland. Cortés marched inland with about 400 men and secured an alliance with the independent city of Tlaxcala, with whose aid he conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (now
Mexico City). Between 1522 and 1524, Michoacán and the Pacific coastal regions were conquered, and in 1524, expeditions led by Pedro de
Alvarado and Cristóbal de Olid , respectively, were sent to Mayan Guatemala and the Bay of
Honduras .
The conquest of Inca Peru was led by Francisco
Pizarro and Diego de Almagro , adventurers from
Spain who had originally settled in Panama .
Pizarro departed for Peru in 1531 with 180 men and 37 horses. Taking advantage of a civil war among the natives, Pizarro captured the reigning
Inca ruler, Atahualpa , and, when Almagro arrived from Panama, conquered the capital city of Cuzco in November 1533. Pizarro founded a new capital, Lima, in 1535. Meanwhile, Alvarado arrived from Guatemala with intent to capture
Quito, but he was persuaded to sell his army and ships to Almagro and Pizarro. Later a quarrel between Almagro and Pizarro erupted in 1538 into a civil war, which Pizarro won. Pizarro himself was murdered in 1541.

Triangular trade, is a historical term indicating trade among three ports or regions. Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come. At least two overlapping patterns of trans-Atlantic trade developed in the colonial era whereby profits from rum and other American and British manufactured goods sold on the west coast of Africa financed the purchase of enslaved
Africans. Those slaves were then taken to the
Americas, where their sale in turn funded the shipment of sugar, molasses, and other New
World raw materials to the point of origin for the manufactured products. There the whole three-cornered process began anew. In one version of this triangular trade, the manufactured goods originated in British ports, notably Liverpool. In the similar
American triangular trade route, the manufactured goods, especially rum, went from New England ports to the Gold Coast of
Africa. In both patterns, the second leg of the triangle became known as the infamous
"middle passage" in which enslaved Africans were carried to destinations in the Americas, usually islands in the West Indies, but in some instances locations on the North
American mainland, especially Charleston,
South Carolina.

Leader of the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century, Emiliano
Zapata was born on August 8, 1879, in
Anencuilco in the southern state of
Morelos and died in an ambush on
April 10, 1919. Zapata was the revolution ’ s leading advocate of agrarian issues and one of Mexico ’ s most renowned and mythological heroes. The iconic image of Zapata dressed in a broad sombrero with a black mustache and cartridge belts across his chest appears commonly across Mexico. Contemporaries and subsequent scholars have alternatively interpreted Zapata as a bandit or a social revolutionary. The division between rural supporters who viewed Zapata as their champion and urban dwellers who denounced him as the Attila of the South points to persistent social divisions that run through the country.

The term “Zapatistas” broadly refers to the group of people participating in the anti-globalization struggle for democracy and land reform in Chiapas, Mexico, organized around the EZLN (Zapatista National
Liberation Front). With the goal of disrupting the state and creating a space for the “democratization of democracy,” the EZLN guerrilla forces, in cooperation with indigenous peoples, incited a rebellion in San
Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas on January 1, 1994
(Carvey, 1998). Though the signing of NAFTA is generally agreed to be the most direct catalyst for the rebellion, additional significant factors include “a combination of ecological crisis, lack of available productive land, the drying up of nonagricultural sources of income, the political and religious reorganization of indigenous communities since the
1960s, and the re-articulation of ethnic identities with emancipatory political discourses” (Harvey, 1998).
We, the men and women of the EZLN, full and free are conscious that the war that we have declared is a last resort, but also a just one. The dictators have been applying an undeclared genocidal war against our people for many years.
Therefore we ask for your participation in and support of this plan that struggles for work, land housing, food, healthcare, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace. We declare that we will not stop fighting until the basic demands of our people have been met by forming a government of our country that is free and democratic.
—First Declaration from the Lancandon Jungle

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