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Robert Huber was born in Munich, Germany, on February 20, 1937. This was the most dramatic time in the nation's history. The economic and political chaos of the late Weimar Republic created the conditions that allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to come to power. By the time of Huber's birth, Germany was completely dominated by the Nazis, who, by his second birthday, had invaded Poland and started World War II. In 1943, Huber entered the German educational system. Within nine months, the Allies successfully invaded Western Europe at Normandy and the fate of Germany was sealed. The next eighteen months were terrible ones for the German people, especially the children. Instead of practicing fire drills, Huber and his classmates participated in real-life air raid drills. Hundreds of German children were killed during the most severe bombing in history. Huber woke up every morning not knowing if it would be the last for him or one of his beloved family members. When the war ended in May, 1945, more than ten million German soldiers had been killed or wounded. With the help of the Marshall Plan, Huber's new country, the Federal Republic of Germany, was one of the first Western European nations to recover from the war. The German educational system recognized young Huber's talent and drive and placed him in the college-bound tract. When he was graduated from the Gymnasium, he studied at the Technical University of Munich. He received his Ph.D. from the university in 1972. Huber accomplished what many of his fellow scientists believed was impossible: He and his research team crystallized the membrane proteins that take part in the chemical process known as photosynthesis. To grasp the importance of this accomplishment, an understanding of some of the working parts of the cell and of the process of photosynthesis is needed. INSET: Robert Huber.

David Hunter Hubel, the son of a chemist, grew up in the city of Montreal. From an early age, he was fascinated by science. His first recorded experiment took place in his Montreal neighborhood. One day, young David created a mixture of potassium chlorate and sugar and placed it in the barrel of a toy brass cannon. Much to his neighbors' surprise, he proved the volatile characteristics of the mixture. Little did the Montreal police know that the source of their nuisance call would some day be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Hubel's academic success can be traced to his early days at high school, from which he was graduated with honors. All of his teachers predicted that Hubel would have a great college career, and their confidence was well founded. The next stop on his academic journey was McGill University, where he was accepted to study in the selective physics department. During the latter half of his undergraduate career, he began to read about contemporary research in the field of medicine and decided to give up physics in order to attend medical school. Upon his graduation, McGill accepted Hubel as a first-year medical student even though he had never taken a biology course in his life. He had never experienced the smell of formaldehyde or performed any laboratory work related to biology. Once again, he did outstanding work and was graduated among the top of his class. Hubel was given a research appointment at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C. From there, he went to The Johns Hopkins University and then to Harvard. At Harvard, Hubel completed the work for which he won the Nobel Prize, his study of the visual cortex. The cortex is the outer shell of the brain. Each part of the cortex has a particular function. The part that interested Hubel was the area that dealt with vision. He wanted to know how the brain processes images of the world into recognizable objects. INSET: David H. Hubel.

Date: Beginning in 1945

The rise of the Fujiwara clan coincided with the establishment of the Heian period (794-1185). At this time in Japanese history, the Fujiwara family was one of many aristocratic clans vying for power in the newly established capital at Heian-kyō (modern-day Kyoto). Initially, the Fujiwara clan consisted of four main families, and over the next half century, the Hokke branch of the family established itself as the dominant power within the clan.

Much of early Japanese culture was influenced by the intellectual systems of China. This cultural diffusion reached a high point during the Tang Dynasty (T’ang; 618-907). Once the Tang solidified their power on the mainland, they launched a series of military expeditions against Korea and Vietnam. Tang foreign policy was based on the Confucian principle of superior/subordinate relationships and the belief that China was truly the Middle Kingdom at the center of the earth. Thus, the Tang Dynasty established a tributary relationship with the governments in Korea and Vietnam. This international system was based on the model of hierarchy, obedience, and discipline. The Tang emperor was at the top of the power pyramid, and every other official paid tribute to his rank.

By the middle of the eighth century, the Tang Dynasty (T’ang; 618-907) began to fall victim to bureaucratic corruption and military weakness. Years of governmental inefficiency and the decline of the equal-field system led to widespread peasant unrest. A series of devastating rebellions weakened the dynasty’s ability to maintain a peaceful and prosperous environment.

In 907, the Tang Dynasty (T’ang; 618-907) fell as a result of a series of uprisings that were caused by high taxes that had forced peasants off their lands and had also led to widespread poverty and starvation. The first and most important of these rebellions was led by Huang Chao, a Chinese intellectual who was enraged because he had failed to pass a series of civil service examinations that would have placed him at the highest levels of power in the Tang bureaucracy.

The sinking of the Lusitania was the result of a naval strategy whose foundation lay in the writings of the renowned geopolitical theorist and naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan. Firmly rooted in the Western imperialism that dominated much of the period, Mahan’s writings emphasized the connection between a nation’s ability to project its power around the world and the likelihood of its success in the international arena. A nation’s destiny, Mahan believed, was directly affected by the size and power of its navy.

Wudi succeeded to the throne of the Han Dynasty (206 b.c.e.-220 c.e.) in 141 b.c.e. and became one of the most important emperors in Chinese history. He inherited a government that was politically unstable and torn apart by internal strife, and by instituting a series of reforms, he created a dynasty that would dominate East Asia for the next three centuries.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, there were significant philosophical attempts to define the nature of the human condition. This intellectual activity culminated in the work of Herbert Spencer, who adapted Charles Darwin’s model of the biological evolution of species to describe the development of cultures and social groups. Spencer’s application of the principle of natural selection to human history became extremely influential, not only in philosophical circles but also among politicians designing public policy and social reformers in general.

Mikhail Bakunin’s writings influenced many of the young Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bakunin rejected what he perceived as the dangerous and dehumanizing structure of nineteenth century European society. As a result of this rejection, he engaged in revolutionary theory and practice designed to bring about a better society. He was as critical of other revolutionaries as he was of their mutual enemies, and he produced critical analyses of both the Paris Commune and the First International. In 1868, he founded the Social Democratic Alliance as an underground organization within the First International. It operated in that capacity until 1872, when Bakunin and his fellows were expelled from the First International after losing a power struggle with Karl Marx.

In the early eighteenth century, Russia was significantly behind its Western counterparts in appreciating and understanding the great advances of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Earlier in its history, Russia had been cut off from the advances of the Renaissance by a Mongol occupation. The Mongols, nomadic warriors, instituted a policy of absolute rule that was ruthlessly enforced by a brutal secret police force that forbade any contact with the West.

Neo-Confucianism was the intellectual progeny of a sophisticated system of thought originally put forward by China’s great philosophical sage, Confucius, in the sixth century b.c.e. Using his ideas as their foundation, Neo-Confucian scholars of the Song Dynasty (Sung; 960-1279) created an intellectual paradigm based upon three philosophical concepts. The primary premise of this new system was that the universe and human society were based upon natural laws and that these laws could be discovered and understood through the use of reason. Furthermore, Neo-Confucian philosophers believed that the laws governing the world and society represented objective truths that were both universal and unchanging.

No other agricultural product had the vast market appeal of pepper. It became the first international cash crop purposely cultivated for world consumption. The sale of this important resource accelerated the expansion of the Southeast Asian economy, providing thousands of jobs and increasing the standard of living across the region. It was the foundation of the Southeast Asian sector of the new world economic order.

The causes of the Taiping Rebellion reach back into the fifteenth century, when the Chinese emperor decided to adopt an isolationist policy. Over the next three and a half centuries, China’s power slowly declined, mainly because China refused to adjust to changes in the world order produced by new industrial and technological developments. China took the position that it had nothing to learn from the rest of the world. By the early nineteenth century, China was losing the battle to maintain its political, economic, and cultural autonomy because of the impact of Western imperialism. A scene of the Taiping Rebellion, 1850-1864. By Wu Youru (http://www.battle-of-qurman.com.cn/e/hist.htm) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons A historic monument to the Tai Ping Heavenly Kingdom, an early seat of Government of the Taiping Rebellion. By Meumo (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) was the result of the political, economic, and geopolitical factors that directed the struggle for control of China in the years following the end of World War I. When the founder of the Chinese Republic, Sun Yixian (also known as Sun Yat-sen), died in 1925, the leadership of the Chinese Kuomintang Party passed into the hands of a young military officer named Chiang Kai-shek. During this period, China was a decentralized state with large regions, especially in the north, which was controlled by independent warlords. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Party joined forces with the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong and launched a military campaign called the Northern Expedition to reclaim the northeast part of China from the warlords.

The conflict in World War II’s Pacific theater had its origins in the geopolitical struggle between the United States and Japan that extended back into the last decades of the nineteenth century. The United States began to develop its global reach during the presidencies of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt . Under their administrations, America became a major participant in the new world system and sought to establish itself as a dominant power in the international struggle to control world markets and raw materials.

The Russo-Swedish Wars were directly linked to the larger Europe-wide historical epoch of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Most important, both Russia and Sweden were caught in the middle of an early nineteenth century geopolitical “cold war” that pitted Europe’s most dominant land power, France, against its strongest naval power, Great Britain: Napoleon Bonaparte’s major obstacle to creating his new empire was the British Royal Navy. His hopes of destroying Britain’s naval strength ended at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). There, off the coast of Spain, Admiral Lord Nelson defeated the combined navies of Spain and France. This decisive British victory both ended the hopes of a French invasion of the British Isles and ensured that Great Britain would continue to dominate the sea lanes for years to come.

Johann Gottfried Herder’s philosophy of history was a reaction against the eighteenth century European Enlightenment, which was based upon an ultrarationalist worldview. Most accurately represented by Newtonian physics, Enlightenment intellectuals thought that every aspect of the universe was governed by natural laws. These laws were believed to be universal and unchanging, and through the use of reason humankind could discover and understand their operations. In turn, this knowledge could be used to improve the quality of life by creating social structures that were compatible with these universal truths.

The “Space Race” was a Cold War-era period of scientific and political competition between the United States and the former Soviet Union. The “battlefield” of the Space Race occurred venue above the Earth’s atmosphere and in associated efforts by both countries to publicize their accomplishments. Space became an arena where both countries sought to demonstrate the superiority of their economic and political systems of governance to win the cooperation or allegiance of other global nations. The signature prize of the Space Race was to be the first country to land its citizens on the moon and safely return. After the United States successfully accomplished this feat in 1969, space was reduced in strategic importance as both countries turned to more cooperative efforts.

After the collapse of the Han Dynasty in 220 c.e., China drifted into a period of political chaos during which it was controlled by a number of rival regional kingdoms. However, by the sixth century, Yang Jian (Yang Chien), also known as Wendi (Wen-ti; 541-604), a successful military commander, had won the support of the majority of the regional leaders in the north to reestablish a central authority that eventually brought most of traditional China under his control. By 589 the Sui (Sui) Dynasty (581-618) had set in motion a number of reforms that increased and stabilized the Chinese standard of living. Yang Jian instituted a new system of taxation that brought needed financial relief to most of the peasantry. He also constructed a series of regional granaries, which both lowered prices and ensured the equal distribution of food. This newfound prosperity was short-lived, however, because the emperor was assassinated by his eldest son, Yangdi (Yangti; 569-618). As emperor, Yangdi began a series of extensive civil engineering projects in an attempt to improve transportation and tie the vast empire together. He also started a series of military campaigns to gain control of the northern portion of the Korean Peninsula. Both actions greatly disrupted the economy and were especially hard on the peasant population. Violent political uprisings broke out in every corner of the empire, and Yangdi was finally assassinated by a group of his ministers in an attempt to quell the fighting and reestablish political order.

The adoption of an isolationist policy by the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) began a period of decline that ended in the downfall of the regime. This decline became evident by the beginning of the sixteenth century and was accelerated by the corruption of the bureaucratic infrastructure that destroyed the effectiveness of the central government. China’s most significant domestic problem was the collapse of the empire’s vast public works system. Widespread corruption led to misappropriation of funds meant for the construction and repair of the dikes and irrigation systems upon which China’s agricultural life depended. This shortfall led to starvation and open rebellion and invasion by the Manchus from Mongolia. The Manchus captured Beijing in 1644, and by 1647 they had brought the rest of the nation under their control.

It became obvious by late 1945 that a significant political and strategic rift was forming between the Soviet Union and its wartime allies. During the German retreat from Russia, Soviet troops had occupied most of the nations of Eastern Europe. In time, the United States and Great Britain accepted the fact that the Soviet Union was intent upon creating a strategic buffer zone out of these nations by making them satellites of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union gave military and economic support to the Marxist groups in these countries, and by 1948 the entire Eastern bloc was under Soviet control. Concurrently, World War II had unleashed the atomic age and introduced the use of long-range weapons of destruction. Both the United States and the Soviet Union recognized the potential strategic power of placing atomic bombs on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The economic and political pressures of the Cold War necessitated that each side have a clear understanding of the strategic capabilities of its opponent. The Soviet Union and the United States created a system of spy satellites that was used as an important tool in curtailing the spread of nuclear weapons. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower expanded the use of robotic spacecraft because they were less expensive to build and maintain than conventional weapons. Spy satellites had the added advantage of taking the human factor out of the military equation. If a robotic spacecraft crashed in enemy territory, there was no danger of the embarrassment of a pilot standing trial before the international community.

The Warring States Period is one of the most important eras in Chinese history. The social, political, and philosophical systems that emerged during this time would form the foundation of Chinese civilization for almost two millennia. Politically, this era is seen as a crisis of the old regime. The ancient political power structure rested on the relationship between the emperor and the traditional noble families. This noble class formed the foundation of the early Chinese military. The most important strategic weapon at this time was the war chariot. This mode of warfare demanded horses, bronze weapons, and the chariot itself. The nobles were the only segment of Chinese society that could afford to maintain this equipment. This made these aristocrats extremely important to the welfare of the nation.

Eunuchs played a significant role in government and the military during the Ming Dynasty. In the early fourteenth century, when China was ravaged by civil war, military detachments of eunuchs were given the duty of protecting the royal family. Their military skill was so impressive that the emperor, Yonglo (r. 1402-1424), began to send these excellent fighters to the most dangerous parts of the empire. Companies of eunuchs had considerable success in battles against the Mongols on China’s northern borders, while other groups successfully controlled the problem of marauding pirates along China’s seacoasts.

China’s strategic history has always been dominated by the threat of invasion by nomadic tribes who occupied the vast territory north of China. These tensions were the result of a clash of civilizations that brought a highly aggressive, nomadic warrior culture into conflict with a sophisticated and very often extremely “soft,” sedentary Chinese state. The vast material wealth generated by the Chinese economy was the constant target of thousands of nomadic warriors from all over Central Asia.

When the Han Dynasty (206 b.c.e.-200 c.e.) collapsed, China slipped into 350 years of political and social chaos. This period of instability eventually ended when the Sui Dynasty (581-618) came to power and set China back on the road toward political unity. The new emperor, Wendi, set in motion a series of public works projects; among the most notable was the construction of the Grand Canal . To create this waterway, Wendi’s civil engineers essentially connected a series of preexisting canals that would form a 1,200-mile (1,930-kilometer) corridor linking the economies of northern and southern China.

At the time of his death, Dong Zhongshu was already recognized for his philosophical writings. His work reflected the attempt by intellectuals of the Han Dynasty (206 b.c.e.-220 c.e.) to create a model that would ensure that China would not suffer from the chaotic and repressive governments that were so representative of its early political history. He combined Confucian ideals with his own philosophy of history to produce an operational model that would create an environment of peace and prosperity for the Chinese people.