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The term “9/11” is shorthand for the events of 11 September 2001. On that date, four U.S. planes were hijacked by nineteen members of the Al-Qaeda terrorist group. The surprisingly low-tech hijackings—relying largely on boxcutters and pepper spray—were the product of years of careful preparation and surveillance, much of it in the United States. Leaders of the group, for instance, received flight training at American schools. In the early morning, three of the hijacked planes were used as blunt-force missiles loaded with jet fuel. Two of these struck the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, a symbol of American financial might and long a target of international terrorism. The third struck the side of the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C., which houses the Department of Defense. The fourth jet crashed into the rural Pennsylvania countryside—brought down, it seems, during a fight between the hijackers and passengers who had been in communication with friends and family on the ground by cell phone and were thus aware of the broader significance of their plane's takeover. At the World Trade Center the heat from burning jet fuel ultimately led to the complete and catastrophic collapse of the towers. At the Pentagon, where hundreds died, the secretary of defense, ...

Indigenous occupation of the Australian continent dates back to 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, with full occupation, across all environmental zones, occurring between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago. Current estimates of the population at the point of British colonization in ...

[This entry includes two subentries, an overview and a discussion of abortion in the United States. See also Birth Control...

[This entry includes two subentries, an overview of advertising worldwide and a discussion of advertising in the United States....

Afghanistan's location connecting Central Asia with South Asia has affected its history profoundly, as conquerors have invaded it and various ethnic groups have settled there. This is evident today from the existence in the country of some thirty languages belonging to four linguistic groups—Indo-Aryan, Turkic-Mongolian, Semitic, and Dravidian—with Pashto and Farsi as the lingua franca of the country....

A poor, mountainous central Asian country which has struggled to find stability, between persistent interference from outside powers on the one hand, and the domestic religiousness of the population which opposed the formation of a secular state on the other....

African American history in the United States constitutes a legacy involving self-determination and struggles for freedom. It is, in part, the story of how blacks of African descent fought to survive on and off the continent. With the initiation of the Atlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage represented death and enslavement as well as a conduit for the migration of African cultures and values....

[This entry includes seven subentries:

Overview

Africa

East Asia

Latin America

North America

South Asia

Southeast Asia

AIDS and HIV are acronyms for “acquired immune deficiency syndrome” and for the “human immunodeficiency virus.” HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. The virus is transmitted through sexual intercourse and through exposure to semen, genital secretions, blood, and breast milk. HIV can be transmitted by women to their babies during pregnancy or birth. HIV progressively destroys the body's immune system and leads to the development of a complex of opportunistic infections known as AIDS, a syndrome that is fatal unless treated with anti-retroviral drugs. AIDS was first defined by the Center for Disease Control in the United States in ...

The term “transport” customarily includes air transport, land transport, and sea transport, but the first of these categories has existed, for all practical purposes, for only a century. Not until ...

A Balkan country which, in order to evade persistent foreign intervention, became the most isolated European state in the second half of the twentieth century....

Algeria has exerted a profound influence upon the course of modern world history in a number of realms. For Europe, precolonial Algiers embodied the “threat” of the Barbary pirates because, among the North African states, it boasted the largest corsair fleet in the seventeenth century and came to be associated with an important literary genre, the captivity narrative. Much of the Barbary threat was more myth than true menace; many captivity accounts were fictitious rather than documentary. Yet the Barbary legend was significant because it played a critical role in the historical process of racial and religious “Othering” that preceded colonialism. In ...

Africa's second largest country was shaped, first, by French colonial rule, and then by an autocratic regime trying to avert the rise of Islamic fundamentalism....

The American Civil War of 1861–1865 was not a civil war at all, because—unlike the Russian civil war, the Spanish civil war, or the English civil war—it was not a contest between two forces desirous of controlling a national government. The Confederate States, as the seceding states styled themselves, had no desire to control the United States. Rather, the issue at stake in the war was whether thirteen states could secede from the United States and form an independent country. Ultimately, the United States subjugated the seceding states, as ...

American trade unionists entered the 20th century battered by a series of savage defeats which, by 1896, brought the end of an era when millions of Americans had joined mass movements seeking alternatives to corporate-dominated, wage-labor capitalism. Labor reformers’ post-Civil War dream of emancipating American laborers from the wage system and their hopes for the creation of a producers’ republic based on principles of cooperation and commonwealth had been shattered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on ...

From its colonial beginnings through the nineteenth century, American literature struggled to find a voice independent from Britain, the mother country of the original American colonies. American literature contributed crucially to the debates surrounding the definition of the values and beliefs of the new country. American literary works closely paralleled the American Revolution's call for independence and celebrated the potentialities of American individuals to create a future for themselves. During the twentieth century, the literary canon expanded to include important voices that had been previously silenced. The contributions of Native Americans, slaves, African Americans, women, gays, and lesbians, as well as those of authors from Jewish, Latin American, Asian, and other ethnic backgrounds, were increasingly recognized. The emergence of these different voices has shown the definition of American literary history as one that derived primarily from Puritan and Yankee roots to be too limited....

The American Revolution began as an internal conflict between Great Britain and its North American colonies. The revolution grew into a global conflict over the control of colonial possessions by several European powers....

This eastern part of the Pacific islands of Samoa came under US control in 1899. Under the formal government of the US Navy, it remained effectively governed by Samoan chiefs, who rejected unification with Western ...

Anarchism is known for its diversity. Its accepted varieties range from the egoism of Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar Schmidt...

A tiny state (468 km², 180 square miles) in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, whose Constitution is based on a treaty of ...