When Athens began to emerge as a Greek city state in the ninth century, it was a poor city, built on and surrounded by undesirable land, which could support only a few poor crops and olive trees. As it grew it was forced to import much of its food, and while it was near the centre of the Greek world, it was far from being a vital trading juncture like Corinth. Its army was, by the standards of cities such as Sparta, weak. Yet somehow it became the most prominent of the Greek city states, the one remembered while contemporaries such as Sparta are often forgotten. It was the world's first democracy of a substantial size (and, in some ways, though certainly not others, one of the few true democracies the world has ever seen), producing art and fine architecture in unprecedented amounts. It became a centre of thinking and literature, producing philosophers and playwrights like Socrates and Aristophanes. But most strikingly of all, it was the one Greek city that managed to control an empire spanning the Aegean sea. During the course of this essay I will attempt to explain how tiny Athens managed to acquire this formidable empire, and why she became Greece's most prominent city state, rather than cities which seemed to have more going for them like Sparta or Corinth.
The first major action of the Sons of Liberty was to protest the Stamp Act. They took direct action by harassing the stamp tax distributors who worked for the British government. ... Their protests worked and the tax was soon repealed by the British government.
On the 11th of November 1918, the Allies signed an Armistice with Germany to end the war. This included the subdivision of the German territories between the Allies countries. Unfortunatly Italy did not receive the lands they was promised when they entered the war. This was later called by Gabriele D'annunzio a 'Mutilated Victory'.
