The Columbian Exchange was mostly beneficial to the European population as a whole. Very nutritional crops such as peppers, maize, and potatoes traveled to Europe. Europeans would benefit immensely from these new crops. Sliver and gold deposits from the Western Hemisphere lined the coffers of European leaders. European losses in manpower due to emigration to the new world were negligible. The only substantial disease to come to Europe from the Western Hemisphere was syphilis, which created no epidemics comparable to those suffered by the indigenous populations of the Americas.   

The Third French Republic was inaugurated after the overthrow of Emperor Napoleon III. It reinstated a parliamentary-based Republican form of government to France in 1871. Despite its Republican nature, the Parliament actually was composed mainly by a majority of various Royalists rather than Republicans, although they were split between the rival Orleanist, Legitimist, and Bonapartist groups. As the Third Republic moved towards the twentieth century, more liberal groups, including Socialists and Communists, would find a place in French politics.

Henry VII was the founder of the Tudor dynasty in England, and his son was Henry VIII. In turn, Edward VI and Elizabeth I were both children of Henry VIII who ruled over England. Elizabeth I had no heirs upon her death, and the throne passed to James I, who inaugurated the Stuart dynasty.

The Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. It outlined the beliefs of communism and socialism, providing a unique approach to historical study. Marx portrayed history as a battle of the classes, with the merchant and middle class finally overcoming the landed aristocracy in the nineteenth century; Marx predicted that the working class would shortly overcome the middle and upper classes.

Reactionary, as a political term, means opposed to reform or intent on returning to an even less progressive period in the past. On the European nineteenth-century spectrum, reactionary is as far to the right as you can go, further past conservative, and the polar opposite of radical. Reactionaries in nineteenth-century Europe were the absolute monarchs and nobles who opposed any political or social reform to improve the conditions and power of the lower classes.

In the famous 1902 pamphlet What is to be done?, Lenin outlined his vision of the "vanguard," a dedicated group of effective and professional revolutionaries that educated the workings class on class issues and effected political mobilization. Lenin believed that labor organizations such as unions were, on their own, insufficient to effectively bring about revolution. The revolution needed elites or intellectuals who understood how society worked outside of the narrow views available to the members of one particular class.

Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party was founded in 1921; it was the first European fascist movement that came to power after Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922. Though fascism would later come to influence movements in many other countries, the ideology's roots lay in Italy. Mussolini's party formed from a split in the Italian Socialist Party. Mussolini and the other future fascists supported Italian intervention in the war in order defeat the traditionalist regimes in Germany and Austria. Fascism was heavily influenced by the left wing of turn-of-the-century European politics, despite the fact that the movement later came to be seen as a far-right movement. Fascism held on to its radical roots, but it came to criticize the class-based view of society of left-wingers. Fascists came to view history as a struggle of nations or races, and most fascist movements came to argue for class cooperation in order to benefit the state or the race.

Queen Anne was the last of the Stuart monarchs, and while she gave birth multiple times, none of her children survived into adulthood, leaving no clear heir. Parliament feared that there would be an attempt by Catholic members of the Stuart family to take the throne after her death, which would have resulted in a great deal of violence and bloodshed. In order to ensure that the monarchy stayed with a Protestant, the Act of Settlement of 1701 was passed, which stated that the heir to the throne was to be Sophia of Hanover, a German noblewoman who was the granddaughter of James I of England, and that the line of succession would extend through her descendants as long as they were not Catholic. Sophia died before Anne did, and then upon Anne’s death, Sophia’s son, George, became King George I of England.

The acceptance of Protestant beliefs in the sixteenth century, even by monarchs, was rarely uniform and often quite complicated. England, Scotland, and Denmark, all of which became firmly Protestant, had Protestant monarchs briefly ascend to the throne in the middle of their reformations, while Catholic France had a Protestant on the throne in Henry IV, until he converted to Catholicism in 1593. The Holy Roman Empire, while being the home of Martin Luther and many other reformers, was always ruled in the era by the staunchly Catholic Habsburg dynasty.

Mary I, eldest child of Henry VIII, came to power after the death of her brother, Edward VI. Mary had been displaced in the line of succession when Henry had his marriage with her mother annulled so that he could marry again and father a male heir. This, combined with the fact that she was a devout Catholic, made Mary bitter at her family. When she became queen in 1553, she reinstated Roman Catholicism as the official religion of England, although she declared that people did not have to practice her religion. Mary then went about arresting and trying many Protestant leaders for heresy in helping England break away from the Church and for helping to implement the new religion. Overall around two hundred and eighty “heretics” were sentenced to death as a result of these trials, giving Mary I the infamous nickname of “Bloody Mary.” Upon her death in 1558, she was succeeded by her sister, Elizabeth I.