Describing historical events

World events often move fast, but it is hard to match the pace and power of change in 1989.

It culminated in one of the most famous scenes in recent history - the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The wall came down partly because of a bureaucratic accident but it fell amid a wave of revolutions that left the Soviet-led communist bloc teetering on the brink of collapse and helped define a new world order.

It was on 9 November 1989, five days after half a million people gathered in East Berlin in a mass protest, that the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Germany from West Germany crumbled.

The fall of Tenochtitlan on 13 August 1521 was a decisive moment in the dramatic collapse of the Aztec empire which had dominated Mesoamerica.

Led by Hernán Cortés (1485-1547), the Spanish conquistadors enjoyed superior weapons and tactics. In addition, the Old World visitors brought with them terrible new diseases that caused massive loss of life amongst the indigenous Americans.

The Aztecs (or Mexica) were themselves a conquering people, and this meant that many of the cities they had subjugated were only too willing to join forces with the Spanish. Tenochtitlan was the political and religious capital of the Aztec world, and the defenders put up a prolonged and fierce resistance.

Victory for the Spanish and their allies meant the looting and destruction of this once great city, the largest in the Americas, but it was eventually rebuilt and became what is today Mexico City.

Traders, religious missionaries, and colonial authorities all sought to reshape Indian society and culture. But as settlers spread over the land, they threatened Indians’ ways of life more completely than any company of soldiers or group of bureaucrats.

As settlers fenced in more and more land and introduced new crops and livestock, the natural environment changed in ways that undermined traditional Indian agriculture and hunting. Pigs and cattle roamed freely, trampling Indian cornfields and gardens. The need for wood to build and heat homes and export to England depleted forests on which Indians relied for hunting. The rapid expansion of the fur trade diminished the population of beaver and other animals.

“Since you are here strangers, and come into our country,” one group of Indians told early settlers in the Chesapeake, “you should rather conform yourselves to the customs of our country, than impose yours on us.” But it was the Indians whose lives were most powerfully altered by the changes set in motion in 1607 when English colonists landed at Jamestown.

Jamestown lay beside a swamp containing malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and the garbage settlers dumped into the local river bred germs that caused dysentery and typhoid fever.

Disease and lack of food took a heavy toll. By the end of the first year, the original population of 104 had fallen by half. New arrivals (including the first two women, who landed in 1608) brought the numbers up to 400 in 1609, but by 1610, after a winter long remembered as the “starving time,” only 65 settlers remained alive.

At one point, the survivors abandoned Jamestown and sailed for England, only to be intercepted and persuaded to return to Virginia by ships carrying a new governor, 250 colonists, and supplies.

By 1616, about 80 percent of the immigrants who had arrived in the first decade were dead.