Indian History Quiz: World History: Revolutions and the World Wars

On that day a Paris crowd attacked the Bastille, a royal fortress used as a prison, which stood for the arbitrary authority of the monarchy; the date is celebrated in France as the national day.

His book The Social Contract, published in 1762, argued that legitimate political authority comes from the general will of the people and not from the divine right of a king, and it became the intellectual charter of the French Revolution.

He was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence adopted by the Continental Congress on 4 July 1776, and he later became the third President of the United States.

Watt added a separate condenser to the earlier Newcomen engine, patenting it in 1769, which made the steam engine efficient enough to drive factories, mines, railways and ships, and the unit of power is named after him.

In the October Revolution, which took place on 7 November 1917 by the Western calendar, the Bolshevik party led by Lenin overthrew the provisional government and took power in Petrograd, with Leon Trotsky organising the Red Guards.

The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was shot at Sarajevo in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, and Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia a month later, after which the alliance system drew in the other powers.

The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the Sarajevo assassination.

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and Britain and France, which had guaranteed Polish independence, declared war on Germany two days later, turning the attack into a world war.

The United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on that day, and the date is observed worldwide as Hiroshima Day.

The League of Nations, proposed in the Fourteen Points of President Woodrow Wilson and created under the Treaty of Versailles, began work in 1920 with its headquarters at Geneva in Switzerland; it failed to stop aggression in Manchuria, Abyssinia and Europe and was replaced by the United Nations in 1945.