In 1608, Samuel de Champlain returned to the region as head of an exploration party. On July 3, 1608, with the support of King Henri IV, he founded the Habitation de Québec (now Quebec City) and made it the capital of New France and its regions (which, at the time, were Acadia, Canada and Plaisance in Newfoundland). The settlement was built as a permanent fur trading outpost, where First Nations traded their furs for French goods, such as metal objects, guns, alcohol, and clothing. Several missionary groups arrived in New France after the founding of Quebec City, like the Recollects in 1615, the Jésuites in 1625 and the Supliciens in 1657. Coureurs des bois and Catholic missionaries used river canoes to explore the interior of the North American continent and establish fur trading forts.
The Compagnie des Cent-Associés, which had been granted a royal mandate to manage New France in 1627, introduced the Custom of Paris and the seigneurial system, and forbade settlement in New France by anyone other than Roman Catholics. In 1629, Quebec surrendered, without battle, to English privateers led by David Kirke during the Anglo-French War; in 1632, the English king agreed to return the lands with the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve founded Ville-Marie (now Montreal) in 1642.
In 1663, the Company of New France ceded Canada to the King, King Louis XIV, who officially made New France into a royal province of France. New France was now a true colony administered by the Sovereign Council of New France from Quebec City, and functioned off triangular trade. A governor-general, assisted by the intendant of New France and the bishop of Quebec City, governed Canada and its administrative dependencies: Acadia, Louisiana and Plaisance. The French settlers were mostly farmers and were known as "Canadiens" or "Habitants". Though there was little immigration, the colony still grew because of the Habitants' high birth rates. In 1665, the Carignan-Salières regiment developed the string of fortifications known as the "Valley of Forts" to protect against Iroquois invasions and brought along with them 1,200 new men. To redress the severe gender imbalance and boost population growth, King Louis XIV sponsored the passage of approximately 800 young French women (les filles du roi) to the colony. In 1666, intendant Jean Talon organized the first census and counted 3,215 Habitants. Talon also enacted policies to diversify agriculture and encourage births, which, in 1672, had increased the population to 6,700.
New France's territory grew to extend from Hudson Bay all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and would also encompass the Great Lakes. In the early 1700s, Governor Callières concluded the Great Peace of Montreal, which not only confirmed the alliance between the Algonquian and New France, but also definitively ended the Iroquois Wars. From 1688 onwards, the fierce competition between the French and British to control North America's interior and monopolize the fur trade pitted New France and its Indigenous allies against the Iroquois and English in a series of four successive wars called the French and Indian Wars by Americans, and the Intercolonial Wars in Quebec. The first three of these wars were King William's War (1688–1697), Queen Anne's War (1702–1713), and King George's War (1744–1748). In 1690, the Battle of Quebec became the first time Quebec City's defences were tested. In 1713, following the Peace of Utrecht, the Duke of Orléans ceded Acadia and Plaisance Bay to Great Britain, but retained Île Saint-Jean, and Île-Royale (Cape Breton Island) where the Fortress of Louisbourg was subsequently erected. These losses were significant since Plaisance Bay was the primary communication route between New France and France, and Acadia contained 5,000 Acadians. In the siege of Louisbourg in 1745, the British were victorious, but returned the city to France after war concessions.
The last of the four French and Indian Wars was called the Seven Years' War ("The War of the Conquest" in Quebec) and lasted from 1754 to 1763. In 1754, tensions escalated for control of the Ohio Valley, as authorities in New France became more aggressive in their efforts to expel British traders and colonists from the area. In 1754, George Washington launched a surprise attack on a group of sleeping Canadien soldiers, known as the Battle of Jumonville Glen, the first battle of the war. In 1755, Governor Charles Lawrence and Officer Robert Monckton ordered the forceful Deportation of the Acadians. In 1758, on Île-Royale, British General James Wolfe besieged and captured the Fortress of Louisbourg. This allowed him to control access to the Gulf of St. Lawrence through the Cabot Strait. In 1759, he besieged Quebec for nearly three months from Île d'Orléans. Then, Wolfe stormed Quebec and fought against Montcalm for control of the city in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. After a British victory, the king's lieutenant and Lord of Ramezay concluded the Articles of Capitulation of Quebec. During the spring of 1760, the Chevalier de Lévis besieged Quebec City and forced the British to entrench themselves during the Battle of Sainte-Foy. However, the loss of the French vessels sent to resupply New France after the fall of Quebec City during the Battle of Restigouche marked the end of France's efforts to try to retake the colony. Governor Vaudreuil signed the Articles of Capitulation of Montreal on September 8, 1760.
While awaiting the results of the Seven Years' War in Europe, New France was put under a British military regime led by Governor James Murray. In 1762, Commander Jeffery Amherst ended the French presence in Newfoundland at the Battle of Signal Hill. Two months later, France ceded the western part of Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta to Spain via the Treaty of Fontainebleau. On February 10, 1763, the Treaty of Paris concluded the war. With the exception of the small islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, France ceded its North American possessions to Great Britain. Thus, France had put an end to New France and abandoned the remaining 60,000 Canadiens, who sided with the Catholic clergy in refusing to take an oath to the British Crown. The rupture from France would provoke a transformation within the descendants of the Canadiens that would eventually result in the birth of a new nation.


Located in the eastern part of Canada, Quebec occupies a territory nearly three times the size of France or Texas. Most of Quebec is very sparsely populated. The most populous physiographic region is the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence Lowlands. The combination of rich soils and Quebec's relatively warm climate makes this valley the most prolific agricultural area of Quebec. The rural part of the landscape is divided into narrow rectangular tracts of land that extend from the river and date back to the seigneurial system.
Quebec's topography is very different from one region to another due to the varying composition of the ground, the climate, and the proximity to water. More than 95% of Quebec's territory, including the Labrador Peninsula, lies within the Canadian Shield. It is generally a quite flat and exposed mountainous terrain interspersed with higher points such as the Laurentian Mountains in southern Quebec, the Otish Mountains in central Quebec and the Torngat Mountains near Ungava Bay. While low and medium altitude peaks extend from western Quebec to the far north, high altitudes mountains emerge in the Capitale-Nationale region to the extreme east. Quebec's highest point at 1,652 metres (5,420 ft) is Mont d'Iberville, known in English as Mount Caubvick. In the Labrador Peninsula portion of the Shield, the far northern region of Nunavik includes the Ungava Peninsula and consists of flat Arctic tundra inhabited mostly by the Inuit. Further south is the Eastern Canadian Shield taiga ecoregion and the Central Canadian Shield forests. The Appalachian region has a narrow strip of ancient mountains along the southeastern border of Quebec.
Quebec has one of the world's largest reserves of fresh water, occupying 12% of its surface and representing 3% of the world's renewable fresh water. More than half a million lakes and 4,500 rivers empty into the Atlantic Ocean, through the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Arctic Ocean, by James, Hudson, and Ungava bays. The largest inland body of water is the Caniapiscau Reservoir; Lake Mistassini is the largest natural lake. The Saint Lawrence River has some of the world's largest sustaining inland Atlantic ports. Since 1959, the Saint Lawrence Seaway has provided a navigable link between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes.
The public lands of Quebec cover approximately 92% of the Québécois territory, including almost all of the bodies of water. Protected areas can be classified into about twenty different legal designations (ex. exceptional forest ecosystem, protected marine environment, national park, biodiversity reserve, wildlife reserve, zone d'exploitation contrôlée (ZEC), etc.). More than 2,500 sites in Quebec today are protected areas. As of 2013, protected areas comprise 9.14% of the Québécois territory.


The name Québec comes from an Algonquin word meaning 'narrow passage' or 'strait'. The name originally referred to the area around Quebec City where the Saint Lawrence River narrows to a cliff-lined gap. Early variations in the spelling included Québecq and Kébec. French explorer Samuel de Champlain chose the name Québec in 1608 for the colonial outpost he would use as the administrative seat for New France.


The Paleo-Indians, who are theorized to have migrated from Asia to America between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago, were the first people to establish themselves on the lands of Quebec, arriving there after the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted, roughly 11,000 years ago. From them, many ethnocultural groups emerged. At the time of the European explorations of the 1500s, there were eleven Indigenous peoples: the Inuit and ten First Nations –  the Abenakis, Algonquins (or Anichinabés), Atikamekw, Cree, Huron-Wyandot, Maliseet (also known as Wolastoqiyik or Etchemin), Miꞌkmaqs, Iroquois, Innu (or Montagnais) and Naskapis. At the time, Algonquians organized into seven political entities and lived nomadic lives based on hunting, gathering, and fishing. Inuit, on the other hand, fished and hunted whales and seals along the coasts of Hudson and Ungava Bay.
In the 14th century, the Byzantine Empire fell, prompting Western Europeans to search for new sea routes to the Far East. Around 1522–1523, Giovanni da Verrazzano persuaded King Francis I of France to commission an expedition to find a western route to Cathay (China) via a Northwest Passage. Though this expedition was unsuccessful, it established the name "New France" for northeastern North America. In his first expedition ordered from the Kingdom of France, Jacques Cartier became the first European explorer to discover and map Quebec when he landed in Gaspé on July 24, 1534. The second expedition, in 1535, included three ships: the Grande Hermine, the Petite Hermine and the Emérillon. That year, Jacques Cartier explored the lands of Stadacona and decided to name the village and its surrounding territories Canada (from kanata, 'village' in Iroquois). After wintering in Stadacona, Cartier returned to France with about 10 St. Lawrence Iroquoians, including Chief Donnacona. In 1540, Donnacona told the legend of the Kingdom of Saguenay to the King of France. This inspired the king to order a third expedition, this time led by Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval; it was unsuccessful in its goal of finding the kingdom.
After these expeditions, France mostly abandoned North America for 50 years because of its financial crisis; France was involved in the Italian Wars and there were religious wars between Protestants and Catholics. Around 1580, the rise of the fur trade (particularly the demand for beaver pelts) reignited French interest; New France became a colonial trading post. In 1603, Samuel de Champlain travelled to the Saint Lawrence River and, on Pointe Saint-Mathieu, established a defence pact with the Innu, Wolastoqiyik and Micmacs, that would be "a decisive factor in the maintenance of a French colonial enterprise in America despite an enormous numerical disadvantage vis-à-vis the British". Thus also began French military support to the Algonquian and Huron peoples against Iroquois attacks; these would become known as the Iroquois Wars and would last from the early 1600s to the early 1700s.


After the British officially acquired Canada in 1763, King George III reorganized the constitution of Canada using the Royal Proclamation. From this point on, the Canadiens were subordinated to the government of the British Empire and circumscribed to a region of the St. Lawrence Valley and Anticosti Island called the Province of Quebec. With unrest growing in the colonies to the south, the British were worried that the Canadiens (the majority of the Quebec population) might support what would become the American Revolution. To secure the allegiance of Canadiens to the British crown, Governor James Murray and later Governor Guy Carleton promoted the need for accommodations, resulting in the enactment of the Quebec Act of 1774. This act allowed Canadiens to regain their civil customs, return to the seigneural system, regain certain rights (including the use of the French language), and reappropriate their old territories: Labrador, the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, Illinois Country and the Indian Territory.
As early as 1774, the Continental Congress of the separatist Thirteen Colonies attempted to rally the Canadiens to its cause. However, its military troops failed to defeat the British counteroffensive during its Invasion of Quebec in 1775. Most Canadiens remained neutral, although some patriotic regiments allied themselves with the Americans in the Saratoga campaign of 1777. When the British Empire recognized the independence of the rebel colonies at the signing of the Treaty of Paris of 1783, it conceded Illinois and the Ohio Valley to the newly formed United States and denoted the 45th parallel as its border, drastically reducing Quebec's size.
United Empire Loyalists from the US migrated to Quebec and populated various regions, including the Niagara Peninsula, the Eastern Townships and Thousand Islands. Dissatisfied with the many rights granted to Canadiens and wanting to use the British legal system to which they were accustomed, the Loyalists protested to British authorities until the Constitutional Act of 1791 was enacted, dividing the Province of Quebec into two distinct colonies starting from the Ottawa River: Upper Canada to the west (predominantly Anglo-Protestant) and Lower Canada to the east (predominantly Franco-Catholic). Lower Canada's lands consisted of the coasts of the Saint Lawrence River, Labrador and Anticosti Island, with the territory extending north to the boundary of Rupert's Land, and extending south, east and west to the borders with the US, New Brunswick, and Upper Canada. The creation of Upper and Lower Canada allowed Loyalists to live under British laws and institutions, while Canadiens could maintain their familiar French civil law and Catholic religion. Furthermore, Governor Haldimand drew Loyalists away from Quebec City and Montreal by offering free land on the northern shore of Lake Ontario to anyone willing to swear allegiance to George III. In 1813, Charles-Michel de Salaberry became a hero by leading the Canadian troops to victory at the Battle of Chateauguay, during the War of 1812. This loss caused the Americans to abandon the Saint Lawrence Campaign, their major strategic effort to conquer Canada.
Gradually, the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, who represented the people, came into conflict with the superior authority of the Crown and its appointed representatives. Starting in 1791, the government of Lower Canada was criticized and contested by the Parti canadien. In 1834, the Parti canadien presented its 92 resolutions, a series of political demands which expressed a loss of confidence in the British monarchy. Discontentment intensified throughout the public meetings of 1837, and the Rebellion of the Patriotes began in 1837. In 1837, Louis-Joseph Papineau and Robert Nelson led residents of Lower Canada to form an armed resistance group called the Patriotes. They made a Declaration of Independence in 1838, guaranteeing human rights and equality for all citizens without discrimination. Their actions resulted in rebellions in both Lower and Upper Canada. The Patriotes forces were victorious in their first battle, the Battle of Saint-Denis. However, the Patriotes were unorganized and badly equipped, leading to their loss against the British army in their second battle, the Battle of Saint-Charles, and their defeat in their final battle, the Battle of Saint-Eustache.
In response to the rebellions, Lord Durham was asked to undertake a study and prepare a report offering a solution to the British Parliament. In his report, Lord Durham recommended that Canadiens be culturally assimilated, with English as their only official language. In order to do this, the British passed the Act of Union of 1840, which merged Upper Canada and Lower Canada into a single colony: the Province of Canada. Lower Canada became the francophone and densely populated Canada East, and Upper Canada became the anglophone and sparsely populated Canada West. This union, unsurprisingly, was the main source of political instability until 1867. Despite their population gap, both Canada East and Canada West obtained an identical number of seats in the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, which created representation problems. In the beginning, Canada East was under-represented because of its superior population size. Over time, however, massive immigration from the British Isles to Canada West occurred, which increased its population. Since the two regions continued to have equal representation in the Parliament, this meant that it was now Canada West that was under-represented. The representation issues were frequently called into question by debates on "Representation by Population", or "Rep by Pop". In this period, the Loyalists and immigrants from the British Isles appropriated the term "Canadian", referring to Canada, their place of residence. The "Old Canadians" responded to this appropriation of identity by henceforth identifying with their ethnic community, under the name "French Canadian".
As access to new lands remained problematic because they were still monopolized by the Clique du Château, an exodus of Canadiens towards New England began and went on for the next one hundred years. This phenomenon is known as the Grande Hémorragie and greatly threatened the survival of the Canadien nation. The massive British immigration ordered from London that soon followed the failed rebellion compounded this problem. In order to combat this, the Church adopted the revenge of the cradle policy. In 1844, the capital of the Province of Canada was moved from Kingston to Montreal.
Political unrest came to a head in 1849, when English Canadian rioters set fire to the Parliament Building in Montreal following the enactment of the Rebellion Losses Bill, a law that compensated French Canadians whose properties were destroyed during the rebellions of 1837–1838. This bill, resulting from the Baldwin-La Fontaine coalition and Lord Elgin's advice, was a very important one as it established the notion of responsible government. In 1854, the seigneurial system was abolished, the Grand Trunk Railway was built and the Canadian–American Reciprocity Treaty was implemented. In 1866, the Civil Code of Lower Canada was adopted.


The Quiet Revolution was a period of intense modernization, secularization and social reform where, in a collective awakening, French Canadians clearly expressed their concern and dissatisfaction with their inferior socioeconomic position and the cultural assimilation of francophone minorities in the English-majority provinces. It resulted, among many other things, in the formation of the modern Québécois identity and Québécois nation. In 1960, the Liberal Party of Quebec was brought to power with a two-seat majority, having campaigned with the slogan "C'est l'temps qu'ça change" ("It's time for things to change"). This government made many reforms in the fields of social policy, education, health and economic development. It created the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Labour Code, Ministry of Social Affairs, Ministry of Education, Office québécois de la langue française, Régie des rentes and Société générale de financement. In 1962, the government of Quebec nationalized its electricity and dismantled the financial syndicates of Saint Jacques Street.
The Quiet Revolution was particularly characterized by the 1962 Liberal Party's slogan "Maîtres chez nous" ("Masters in our own house"), which, to the Anglo-American conglomerates that dominated the economy and natural resources of Quebec, announced a collective will for freedom of the French-Canadian people. As a result of confrontations between the lower clergy and the laity, state institutions began to deliver services without the assistance of the church, and many parts of civil society began to be more secular. During the Second Vatican Council, the reform of Quebec's institutions was overseen and supported by the Holy See. In 1965, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism wrote a preliminary report underlining Quebec's distinct character, and promoted open federalism, a political attitude guaranteeing Quebec to a minimum amount of consideration. To favour Quebec during its Quiet Revolution, Lester B. Pearson adopted a policy of open federalism. In 1966, the Union Nationale was re-elected and continued on with major reforms.
In 1967, President of France Charles de Gaulle visited Quebec, the first French head of state to do so, to attend Expo 67. There, he addressed a crowd of more than 100,000, making a speech ending with the exclamation: "Vive le Québec libre!" ("Long live free Quebec"). This declaration had a profound effect on Quebec by bolstering the burgeoning modern Quebec sovereignty movement and resulting in a political crisis between France and Canada. Following this, various civilian groups developed, sometimes confronting public authority, for example in the October Crisis of 1970. The meetings of the Estates General of French Canada in November 1967 marked a tipping point where relations between francophones of America, and especially francophones of Canada, ruptured. This breakdown greatly affected Quebec society's evolution.
In 1968, class conflicts and changes in mentalities intensified. That year, Option Quebec sparked a constitutional debate on the political future of the province by pitting federalist and sovereignist doctrines against each other. In 1973, the liberal government of Robert Bourassa initiated the James Bay Project on La Grande River. In 1974, it enacted the Official Language Act, which made French the official language of Quebec. In 1975, it established the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement.
Quebec's first modern sovereignist government, led by René Lévesque, materialized when the Parti Québécois was brought to power in the 1976 Quebec general election. The Charter of the French Language came into force the following year, strengthening the linguistic rights of Quebecois. Between 1966 and 1969, the Estates General of French Canada confirmed the state of Quebec to be the nation's fundamental political milieu and for it to have the right to self-determination. In the 1980 referendum on sovereignty, 60% of the votes were against. After the referendum, Lévesque went back to Ottawa to start negotiating constitutional changes. On the night of November 4, 1981, the Kitchen Accord took place. Delegations from the other nine provinces and the federal government reached an agreement in the absence of Quebec's delegation, which had left for the night. Because of this, the National Assembly refused to recognize the new Constitution Act, 1982, which patriated the Canadian constitution and made numerous modifications to it. The 1982 amendments apply to Quebec despite Quebec never having consented to it.
Between 1982 and 1992, the Quebec government's attitude changed to prioritize reforming the federation. The subsequent attempts at constitutional amendments by the Mulroney and Bourassa governments ended in failure with both the Meech Lake Accord of 1987 and the Charlottetown Accord of 1992, resulting in the creation of the Bloc Québécois. In 1995, Jacques Parizeau called a referendum on Quebec's independence from Canada. This consultation ended in failure for sovereignists, though the outcome was very close: 50.6% "no" and 49.4% "yes". The Unity Rally, a controversial event paid for by sponsors outside Quebec, supporting the "no" side, took place on the eve of the referendum.
In 1998, following the Supreme Court of Canada's decision on the Reference Re Secession of Quebec, the Parliaments of Canada and Quebec defined the legal frameworks within which their respective governments would act in another referendum. On October 30, 2003, the National Assembly voted unanimously to affirm "that the people of Québec form a nation". On November 27, 2006, the House of Commons passed a symbolic motion declaring "that this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada." In March 2007, the Parti Québécois was pushed back to official opposition in the National Assembly, with the Liberal party leading. During the 2011 Canadian federal elections, Quebec voters rejected the Bloc Québécois in favour of the previously minor New Democratic Party (NDP). As the NDP's logo is orange, this was called the "orange wave". After three subsequent Liberal governments, the Parti Québécois regained power in 2012 and its leader, Pauline Marois, became the first female premier of Quebec. The Liberal Party of Quebec then returned to power in 2014. In 2018, the Coalition Avenir Québec won the provincial general elections. Between 2020 and 2021, Quebec took measures to protect itself against the COVID-19 pandemic.


Siberia (/saɪˈbɪəriə/; Russian: Сибирь, tr. Sibir', IPA: [sʲɪˈbʲirʲ] (listen)) is an extensive geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a part of Russia since the latter half of the 16th century, after the Russians conquered lands east of the Ural Mountains. Siberia is vast and sparsely populated, covering an area of over 13.1 million square kilometres (5,100,000 sq mi), but home to merely one-fifth of Russia's population. Novosibirsk and Omsk are the largest cities in the region.
Because Siberia is a geographic and historic region and not a political entity, there is no single precise  definition of its territorial borders. Traditionally, Siberia extends eastwards from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and includes most of the drainage basin of the Arctic Ocean. The river Yenisey divides Siberia into two parts, Western and Eastern. Siberia stretches southwards from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and to the northern parts of Mongolia and China. The central part of Siberia (West and East Siberian economic regions) was considered the core part of the region in the Soviet Union. Beyond the core, Siberia's western part includes some territories of the Ural region, and the far eastern part has been historically called the Russian Far East.
Siberia is known worldwide primarily for its long, harsh winters, with a January average of −25 °C (−13 °F). It is geographically situated in Asia; however, due to it being colonized and incorporated into Russia, it is culturally and politically a part of Europe. European cultural influences, specifically Russian, predominate throughout the region, due to it having had Russian emigration from Europe since the 16th century, forming the Siberian Russian sub-ethnic group. Over 85% of the region's population is of European descent.


The origin of the name is unknown. Some sources say that "Siberia" originates from the Siberian Tatar word for "sleeping land" (Sib ir). The modern usage of the name was recorded in the Russian language after the Empire's conquest of the Siberian Khanate. A further variant claims that the region was named after the Xibe people. The Polish historian Chyliczkowski has proposed that the name derives from the proto-Slavic word for "north" (север, sever), same as Severia. Anatole Baikaloff has dismissed this explanation. He said that the neighbouring Chinese, Turks, and Mongolians, who have similar names for the region, would not have known Russian. He suggests that the name might be a combination of two words with Turkic origin, "su" (water) and "bir" (wild land). Another account sees the name as the ancient tribal ethnonym of the Sirtya (also "Syopyr" (sʲɵpᵻr), a Paleoasiatic ethnic group assimilated by the Nenets.


Central Siberian Plateau
Central Yakutian Lowland
East Siberian Lowland
East Siberian Mountains
North Siberian Lowland
South Siberian Mountains
West Siberian Lowland


During past millennia different groups of nomads – such as the Enets, the Nenets, the Huns, the Xiongnu, the Scythians and the Uyghurs inhabited various parts of Siberia. The proto-Mongol Khitan people also occupied parts of the region. In the year 630 the Khan of Sibir in the vicinity of modern Tobolsk was known as a prominent figure who endorsed Kubrat as Khagan of Old Great Bulgaria. In the 13th century, during the period of the Mongol Empire, the Mongols conquered a large part of this area.
With the breakup of the Golden Horde, the autonomous Khanate of Sibir formed in the late-15th century. Turkic-speaking Yakut migrated north from the Lake Baikal region under pressure from the Mongol tribes during the 13th to 15th century. Siberia remained a sparsely populated area. Historian John F. Richards wrote: "... it is doubtful that the total early modern Siberian population exceeded 300,000 persons".
The growing power of Russia in the West began to undermine the Siberian Khanate in the 16th century. First, groups of traders and Cossacks began to enter the area. The Russian Army was directed to establish forts farther and farther east to protect new Russian settlers who migrated from Europe. Towns such as Mangazeya, Tara, Yeniseysk and Tobolsk developed, the last becoming the de facto capital of Siberia from 1590. At this time, Sibir was the name of a fortress at Qashlik, near Tobolsk. Gerardus Mercator, in a map published in 1595, marks Sibier both as the name of a settlement and of the surrounding territory along a left tributary of the Ob. Other sources contend that the Xibe, an indigenous Tungusic people, offered fierce resistance to Russian expansion beyond the Urals. Some suggest that the term "Siberia" is a russification of their ethnonym.


The region has paleontological significance, as it contains bodies of prehistoric animals from the Pleistocene Epoch, preserved in ice or in permafrost. Specimens of Goldfuss cave lion cubs, Yuka the mammoth and another woolly mammoth from Oymyakon, a woolly rhinoceros from the Kolyma, and bison and horses from Yukagir have been found.
The Siberian Traps were formed by one of the largest-known volcanic events of the last 251 million years of Earth's geological history. Their activity continued for a million years and some scientists consider it a possible cause of the "Great Dying" about 250 million years ago, – estimated to have killed 90% of species existing at the time.
At least three species of human lived in Southern Siberia around 40,000 years ago: H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, and the Denisovans.
In 2010 DNA evidence identified the last as a separate species.


By the mid-17th century Russia had established areas of control that extended to the Pacific Ocean. Some 230,000 Russians had settled in Siberia by 1709. Siberia became one of the destinations for sending internal exiles. Exile was the main Russian punitive practice with more than 800,000 people exiled during the nineteenth century.
The first great modern change in Siberia was the Trans-Siberian Railway, constructed during 1891–1916. It linked Siberia more closely to the rapidly industrialising Russia of Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917). Around seven million Russians moved to Siberia from Europe between 1801 and 1914. Between 1859 and 1917 more than half a million people migrated to the Russian Far East. Siberia has extensive natural resources: during the 20th century, large-scale exploitation of these took place, and industrial towns cropped up throughout the region.
At 7:15 a.m. on 30 June 1908 the Tunguska Event felled millions of trees near the Podkamennaya Tunguska (Stony Tunguska) in central Siberia. Most scientists believe this resulted from the air burst of a meteor or a comet. Even though no crater has ever been found, the landscape in the (sparsely inhabited) area still bears the scars of this event.


Siberia spans an area of 13.1 million square kilometres (5,100,000 sq mi), covering the vast majority of Russia's total territory, and almost 9% of Earth's land surface (148,940,000 km², 57,510,000 sq mi). It geographically falls in Asia, but is culturally and politically considered European, since it is a part of Russia. Major geographical zones within Siberia include the West Siberian Plain and the Central Siberian Plateau.
Eastern and central Sakha comprises numerous north–south mountain ranges of various ages. These mountains extend up to almost 3,000 metres (9,800 ft), but above a few hundred metres they are almost completely devoid of vegetation. The Verkhoyansk Range was extensively glaciated in the Pleistocene, but the climate was too dry for glaciation to extend to low elevations. At these low elevations are numerous valleys, many of them deep and covered with larch forest, except in the extreme north where the tundra dominates. Soils are mainly turbels (a type of gelisol). The active layer tends to be less than one metre deep, except near rivers.
The highest point in Siberia is the active volcano Klyuchevskaya Sopka, on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Its peak reaches 4,750 metres (15,580 ft).


July – Charles W. King sets sail on the American merchant ship Morrison. In the Morrison incident, he is turned away from Japanese ports with cannon fire.
July 13 – Queen Victoria moves from Kensington Palace into Buckingham Palace, the first reigning British monarch to make this, rather than St James's Palace, her London home.
August 16 – The Dutch sack the fortress of Bonjol, Indonesia, ending the Padri War.
September 19 – First Carlist War: Battle of Aranzueque – The liberal forces loyal to Queen Isabel II of Spain are victorious, ending the Carlist campaign known as the Expedición Real.
September 26–October 9 – The destructive "Racer's hurricane" sweeps across the Caribbean, northeastern Mexico, the Republic of Texas and the Gulf Coast of the United States.
September 28 – Samuel Morse files a caveat for a patent for the telegraph.


April 12 – The conglomerate of Procter & Gamble has its origins, when British-born businessmen William Procter and James Gamble begin selling their first manufactured goods (soap and candles) in Cincinnati, Ohio.
April 24–26 – The great fire in Surat city of India caused more than 500 deaths and the destruction of more than 9000 houses.
May – W. F. Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patent a system of electrical telegraph.
May 10 – The Panic of 1837 begins in New York City.
June 5 – The settlement of Houston is incorporated, by the Republic of Texas.
June 11 – The Broad Street Riot occurs in Boston, Massachusetts, fueled by ethnic tensions between the Irish and the Yankees.
June 20 – Queen Victoria, 18, accedes to the throne of the United Kingdom, on the death of her uncle William IV without legitimate heirs (she will reign for more than 63 years). Under Salic law, the Kingdom of Hanover passes to William's brother, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, ending the personal union of Britain and Hanover which has persisted since 1714.


October 10–13 – The French army under Sylvain Charles Valée besieges and captures Constantine in French Algeria.
October 30 – The Tsarskoye Selo Railway, the first in the Russian Empire, opens between Saint Petersburg Tsarskoselsky station and Zarskoje Selo (modern-day Pushkin), engineered by Franz Anton von Gerstner.
October 31 – World's leading consumer goods brand, Procter & Gamble is founded in Ohio, United States.
November 7 – American abolitionist and newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy is killed by a pro-slavery mob, at his warehouse in Alton, Illinois.
November 8 – Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, later Mount Holyoke College, is founded in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
November 17 – An earthquake in Valdivia, south-central Chile, causes tsunamies that led to significant destruction along Japan's coast.
November–December – In the Canadas, William Lyon Mackenzie leads the Upper Canada Rebellion, and Louis-Joseph Papineau leads the Lower Canada Rebellion.
December 17 – Fire breaks out in the Winter Palace, in Saint Petersburg, Russia killing 30 guards
December 29 – The Caroline Affair, on the Niagara River, becomes the basis for the Caroline test for anticipatory self-defence in international relations.


January 8 – Duke Wilhelm in Bavaria, Great-grandfather of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (b. 1752)
January 20 – John Soane, British architect (b. 1753)
January 23 – John Field, Irish composer (b. 1782)
February 7 – Gustav IV Adolf, ex-King of Sweden (b. 1778)
February 10 – Alexander Pushkin, Russian author (b. 1799)
February 13 – Mariano José de Larra, Spanish author (b. 1809)
February 19 – Georg Büchner, German playwright (b. 1813)
March 31 – John Constable, English painter (b. 1776)
April 4 – Louis-Sébastien Lenormand, French chemist, physicist, and inventor (b. 1757)
April 28 – Joseph Souham, French general (b. 1760)
May 5 – Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli, Italian composer (b. 1752)
May 9 – Osgood Johnson, 5th Principal of Phillips Academy (b. 1803)
May 20 – Prince Frederick of Hesse-Kassel (b. 1747)
June 14 – Giacomo Leopardi, Italian writer (b. 1798)
June 29 – Nathaniel Macon, American politician (b. 1757)
June 20 – King William IV of the United Kingdom and Hannover (b. 1765)


1837 (MDCCCXXXVII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar, the 1837th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 837th  year of the 2nd millennium, the 37th  year of the 19th century, and the  8th   year of the 1830s decade. As of the start of 1837, the Gregorian calendar was 12 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.


Used in 1542 by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo to describe a Pacific Coast Range (Santa Cruz Mountains), the term "Sierra Nevada" was a general identification of less familiar ranges toward the interior. In 1776, Pedro Font's map applied the name to the range currently known as the Sierra Nevada.
The literal translation is "snowy mountains", from sierra "a range of mountains", 1610s, from Spanish sierra "jagged mountain range", lit. "saw", from Latin serra "a saw"; and from fem. of Spanish nevado "snowy".
While many mountain ranges are unanimously referred to in the plural (Smokies, Rockies, Cascades, etc.), since Sierra is already pluralized in its native language, some locals who live in "the Sierra" are not hesitant to admonish those who refer to the area as "the Sierras".  However, there are historical and literary references that use the plural, such as the 1871 collection of Joaquin Miller poems, Songs of the Sierras.


The Sierra Nevada lies primarily in central and eastern California, with the Carson Range, a small but historically important spur, extending into Nevada. West-to-east, the Sierra Nevada's elevation increases gradually from 500 feet (150 m) in the Central Valley to more than 14,000 feet (4,300 m) atop the highest peaks of its crest  50–75 miles (80–121 km) to the east. The east slope forms the steep Sierra Escarpment. Unlike its surroundings, the range receives a substantial amount of snowfall and precipitation due to orographic lift.


The range is drained on its western slope by the Central Valley watershed, which discharges into the Pacific Ocean at San Francisco. The northern third of the western Sierra is part of the Sacramento River watershed (including the Feather, Yuba, and American River tributaries), and the middle third is drained by the San Joaquin River (including the Mokelumne, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, and Merced River tributaries). The southern third of the range is drained by the Kings, Kaweah, Tule, and Kern rivers, which flow into the endorheic basin of Tulare Lake, which rarely overflows into the San Joaquin during wet years.
The eastern slope watershed of the Sierra is much narrower; its rivers flow out into the endorheic Great Basin of eastern California and western Nevada. From north to south, the Susan River flows into intermittent Honey Lake, the Truckee River flows from Lake Tahoe into Pyramid Lake, the Carson River runs into Carson Sink, the Walker River into Walker Lake; Rush, Lee Vining and Mill Creeks flow into Mono Lake; and the Owens River into dry Owens Lake. Although none of the eastern rivers reach the sea, many of the streams from Mono Lake southwards are diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct which provides water to Southern California.


2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2003rd year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 3rd  year of the 3rd millennium and the 21st century, and the  4th   year of the 2000s decade.

2003 was designated the International Year of the Fresh Water.
In 2003, a United States-led coalition launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq, beginning the Iraq War.


Soon afterwards, a small settlement was established in Flying Fish Cove by G. Clunies Ross, the owner of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands some 900 kilometres (560 mi) to the southwest, to collect timber and supplies for the growing industry on Cocos.
In 1897 the island was visited by Charles W. Andrews, who did extensive research on the natural history of the island, on behalf of the British Museum.
Phosphate mining began in 1899 using indentured workers from Singapore, British Malaya, and China. John Davis Murray, a mechanical engineer and recent graduate of Purdue University, was sent to supervise the operation on behalf of the Phosphate Mining and Shipping Company. Murray was known as the "King of Christmas Island" until 1910, when he married and settled in London.
The island was administered jointly by the British Phosphate commissioners and district officers from the United Kingdom Colonial Office through the Straits Settlements, and later the Crown Colony of Singapore. Hunt (2011) provides a detailed history of Chinese indentured labour on the island during those years. In 1922, scientists unsuccessfully attempted to view a solar eclipse in late September from the island to test Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.


From the late 1980s and early 1990s, boats carrying asylum seekers, mainly departing from Indonesia, began landing on the island. In 2001, Christmas Island was the site of the Tampa controversy, in which the Australian government stopped a Norwegian ship, MV Tampa, from disembarking 438 rescued asylum-seekers. The ensuing standoff and the associated political reactions in Australia were a major issue in the 2001 Australian federal election.
The Howard government operated the "Pacific Solution" from 2001 to 2007, excising Christmas Island from Australia's migration zone so that asylum seekers on the island could not apply for refugee status. Asylum seekers were relocated from Christmas Island to Manus Island and Nauru. In 2006, an immigration detention centre, containing approximately 800 beds, was constructed on the island for the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. Originally estimated to cost A$276 million, the final cost was over $400 million.
In 2007, the Rudd government decommissioned Manus Regional Processing Centre and Nauru detention centre; processing would then occur on Christmas Island itself.
In December 2010, 48 asylum-seekers died just off the coast of the island in what became known as the Christmas Island boat disaster when their boat hit the rocks near Flying Fish Cove, and then smashed against nearby cliffs.
In the case Plaintiff M61/2010E v Commonwealth of Australia, the High Court of Australia ruled, in a 7–0 joint judgment, that asylum seekers detained on Christmas Island were entitled to the protections of the Migration Act. Accordingly, the Commonwealth was obliged to afford asylum seekers a minimum of procedural fairness when assessing their claims.
As of 20 June 2013, after the interception of four boats in six days, carrying 350 people, the Immigration Department stated that there were 2,960 "irregular maritime arrivals" being held in the island's five detention facilities, which exceeded not only the "regular operating capacity" of 1,094 people, but also the "contingency capacity" of 2,724.
The Christmas Island Immigration Reception and Processing Centre closed on 30 September 2018.
On 13 February 2019, the Morrison government announced it would re-open the centre, after Australia's parliament passed legislation giving sick asylum seekers easier access to mainland hospitals.


At Australia's request, the United Kingdom transferred sovereignty to Australia, with a $20 million payment from the Australian government to Singapore as compensation for the loss of earnings from the phosphate revenue. The United Kingdom's Christmas Island Act was given royal assent on 14 May 1958, enabling Britain to transfer authority over Christmas Island from Singapore to Australia by an order-in-council. Australia's Christmas Island Act was passed in September 1958 and the island was officially placed under the authority of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 October 1958.
Under Commonwealth Cabinet Decision 1573 of 9 September 1958, D. E. Nickels was appointed the first official representative of the new territory. In a media statement on 5 August 1960, the minister for territories, Paul Hasluck, said, among other things, that, "His extensive knowledge of the Malay language and the customs of the Asian people ... has proved invaluable in the inauguration of Australian administration ... During his two years on the island he had faced unavoidable difficulties ... and constantly sought to advance the island's interests."
John William Stokes succeeded him and served from 1 October 1960, to 12 June 1966. On his departure, he was lauded by all sectors of the island community. In 1968, the official secretary was retitled an administrator and, since 1997, Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands together are called the Australian Indian Ocean Territories and share a single administrator resident on Christmas Island. Recollections of the island's history and lifestyle, and lists and timetables of the island's leaders and events since its settlement are at the World Statesmen site and in Neale (1988), Bosman (1993), Hunt (2011), and Stokes (2012).
The settlement of Silver City was built in the 1970s, with aluminium-clad houses that were supposed to be cyclone-proof. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami centred off the western shore of Sumatra in Indonesia, resulted in no reported casualties, but some swimmers were swept some 150 metres (490 ft) out to sea for a time before being swept back in.


Christmas Island, officially known as the Territory of Christmas Island, is an Australian external territory comprising the island of the same name. It is located in the Indian Ocean, around 350 kilometres (220 mi) south of Java and Sumatra and around 1,550 km (960 mi) north-west of the closest point on the Australian mainland. It lies 2,600 km (1,600 mi) northwest of Perth and  1,327 km (825 mi) south of Singapore. It has an area of 135 square kilometres (52 sq mi).
Christmas Island had a population of 1,843 residents as of 2016, the majority living in settlements on the northern edge of the island. The main settlement is Flying Fish Cove. Historically, Asian Australians of Chinese, Malay, and Indian descent formed the majority of the population. Today, around two-thirds of the island's population is estimated to have Straits Chinese origin (though just 21.2% of the population declared a Chinese ancestry in 2016), with significant numbers of Malays and European Australians and smaller numbers of Straits Indians and Eurasians. Several languages are in use, including English, Malay, and various Chinese dialects. Islam and Buddhism are major religions on the island. The religion question in the Australian census is optional and 28% of the population do not declare their religious belief, if any.
The first European to sight Christmas Island was Richard Rowe of the Thomas in 1615.  Captain William Mynors named it on Christmas Day (25 December) 1643. It was first settled in the late 19th century. Christmas Island's geographic isolation and history of minimal human disturbance has led to a high level of endemism among its flora and fauna, which is of interest to scientists and naturalists. The majority (63 percent) of the island is included in the Christmas Island National Park, which features several areas of primary monsoonal forest. Phosphate, deposited originally as guano, has been mined on the island since 1899.


The first European to sight the island was Richard Rowe of the Thomas in 1615. Captain William Mynors of the Royal Mary, an English East India Company vessel, named the island when he sailed past it on Christmas Day, in 1643. The island was included on English and Dutch navigation charts early in the 17th century, but it was not until 1666 that a map published by Dutch cartographer Pieter Goos included the island. Goos labelled the island "Mony" or "Moni", the meaning of which is unclear.
English navigator William Dampier, aboard the privateer Charles Swan's ship, Cygnet, made the earliest recorded visit to the sea around the island in March 1688. He found it uninhabited. Dampier wrote an account of the visit. Dampier was trying to reach Cocos from New Holland. His ship was blown off course in an easterly direction, arriving at Christmas Island 28 days later. Dampier landed on the west coast, at "the Dales". Two of his crewmen became the first Europeans to set foot on Christmas Island.
Captain Daniel Beeckman of the Eagle passed the island on 5 April 1714, chronicled in his 1718 book, A Voyage to and from the Island of Borneo, in the East-Indies.


The first attempt at exploring the island was in 1857 by the crew of the Amethyst. They tried to reach the summit of the island but found the cliffs impassable.
During the 1872–1876 Challenger expedition to Indonesia, naturalist John Murray carried out extensive surveys.
In 1886, Captain John Maclear of HMS Flying Fish, having discovered an anchorage in a bay that he named "Flying Fish Cove", landed a party and made a small collection of the flora and fauna. In the next year, Pelham Aldrich, on board HMS Egeria, visited the island for 10 days, accompanied by J. J. Lister, who gathered a larger biological and mineralogical collection.
Among the rocks then obtained and submitted to Murray for examination were many of nearly pure phosphate of lime. This discovery led to annexation of the island by the British Crown on 6 June 1888.


Christmas Island is situated at the peak of a basalt volcanic seamount which arose from the ocean floor in the Eocene era about 60 million years ago, when the ocean eroded cliffs from uplifts, forming steep terraces and cliffs at the central plateau.


From the outbreak of the South-East Asian theatre of World War II in December 1941, Christmas Island was a target for Japanese occupation because of its rich phosphate deposits. A naval gun was installed under a British officer and four NCOs and 27 Indian soldiers. The first attack was carried out on 20 January 1942, by Japanese submarine I-59, which torpedoed a Norwegian freighter, the Eidsvold. The vessel drifted and eventually sank off West White Beach. Most of the European and Asian staff and their families were evacuated to Perth.
In late February and early March 1942, there were two aerial bombing raids. Shelling from a Japanese naval group on 7 March led the District Officer to hoist the white flag. But after the Japanese naval group sailed away, the British officer raised the Union Flag once more. During the night of 10–11 March, mutinous Indian troops, abetted by Sikh policemen, killed Captain Leonard Williams and the four British NCOs in their quarters as they were sleeping. "Afterwards all Europeans on the island, including the district officer, who governed it, were lined up by the Indians and told they were going to be shot. But after a long discussion between the district officer and the leaders of the mutineers the executions were postponed and the Europeans were confined under armed guard in the district officer's house".
At dawn on 31 March 1942, a dozen Japanese bombers launched the attack, destroying the radio station. The same day, a Japanese fleet of nine vessels arrived, and the island was surrounded. About 850 men of the Japanese 21st and 24th Special Base Forces and 102nd Construction Unit came ashore at Flying Fish Cove and occupied the island. They rounded up the workforce, most of whom had fled to the jungle. Sabotaged equipment was repaired and preparations were made to resume the mining and export of phosphate. Only 20 men from the 21st Special Base Force were left as a garrison.
Isolated acts of sabotage and the torpedoing of the Nissei Maru at the wharf on 17 November 1942 meant that only small amounts of phosphate were exported to Japan during the occupation. In November 1943, over 60% of the island's population was evacuated to Surabaya prison camps, leaving a total population of just under 500 Chinese and Malays and 15 Japanese to survive as best they could. In October 1945, HMS Rother re-occupied Christmas Island.
After the war, seven mutineers were traced and prosecuted by the Military Court in Singapore. In 1947, five of them were sentenced to death. However, following representations made by the newly independent government of India, their sentences were reduced to penal servitude for life.


The tropics are the regions of Earth surrounding the Equator. They are defined in latitude by the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere at 23°26′10.9″ (or 23.43637°) N and the Tropic of Capricorn in
the Southern Hemisphere at 23°26′10.9″ (or 23.43637°) S; these latitudes correspond to the axial tilt of the Earth. The tropics are also referred to as the tropical zone and the torrid zone (see geographical zone). The tropics also includes everywhere on Earth which is a subsolar point (the Sun is directly overhead) at least once during the solar year. Thus the maximum latitudes of the tropics have the same value positive and negative.  Likewise, they approximate the angle of the Earth's axial tilt. The "angle" itself is not perfectly fixed due chiefly to the influence of the moon, but the limits of tropics are a geographic convention, being an averaged form, and the variance is very small.
In terms of climate, the tropics receive sunlight that is more direct than the rest of Earth and are generally hotter and wetter as they aren't affected as much by the solar seasons. The word "tropical" sometimes refers to this sort of climate in the zone rather than to the geographical zone itself. The tropical zone includes deserts and snow-capped mountains, which are not tropical in the climatic sense. The tropics are distinguished from the other climatic and biomatic regions of Earth, which are the middle latitudes and the polar regions on either side of the equatorial zone.
The tropics constitute 40% of Earth's surface area and contain 36% of Earth's landmass. As of 2014, the region was home also to 40% of the world's population, and this figure was then projected to reach 50% by 2050.


"Tropical" is sometimes used in a general sense and feeling for a tropical climate to mean warm to hot and moist year-round, often with the sense of lush vegetation.
Many tropical areas however have a dry and wet season. The wet season, rainy season or green season is the time of year, ranging from one or more months, when most of the average annual rainfall in a region falls.  Areas with wet seasons are disseminated across portions of the tropics and subtropics, some even in temperate regions.  Under the Köppen climate classification, for tropical climates, a wet-season month is defined as one or more months where average precipitation is 60 mm (2.4 in) or more.  Some areas with pronounced rainy seasons see a break in rainfall during mid-season when the intertropical convergence zone or monsoon trough moves poleward of their location during the middle of the warm season; typical vegetation in these areas ranges from moist seasonal tropical forests to savannahs.
When the wet season occurs during the warm season, or summer, precipitation falls mainly during the late afternoon and early evening hours. The wet season is a time when air quality improves, freshwater quality improves and vegetation grows significantly due to the wet season supplementing flora, leading to crop yields late in the season. Floods and rains cause rivers to overflow their banks, and some animals to retreat to higher ground. Soil nutrients are washed away and erosion increases. The incidence of malaria increases in areas where the rainy season coincides with high temperatures.  Animals have adaptation and survival strategies for the wetter regime. The previous dry season leads to food shortages into the wet season, as the crops have yet to mature.
However, regions within the tropics may well not have a tropical climate. Under the Köppen climate classification, much of the area within the geographical tropics is classed not as "tropical" but as "dry" (arid or semi-arid), including the Sahara Desert, the Atacama Desert and Australian Outback. Also, there are alpine tundra and snow-capped peaks, including Mauna Kea, Mount Kilimanjaro, Puncak Jaya and the Andes as far south as the northernmost parts of Chile and Perú.


Some well-known plants that are exclusively found or originate from the tropics or are often associated with the tropics include:
Stone fruits such as mangos, peaches, plums, avocado, etc
Citrus fruits such as oranges, lemons, mandarins, etc
Banana trees
Bird of paradise flower
Palm trees
Coconut trees
Ferns
Orchids
Papaya trees
Dragon fruit
Bamboo
Jackfruit
Giant Water Lily
Rubber Tree
Cacao
Coffee


The extreme soil poverty of most of Northern Australia has the effect of confining large herbivores such as the kangaroo to the better soil in the dry grasslands since they cannot digest the extreme poor fodder from the northern monsoonal regions. However, the frequency of fires during the desiccating dry season from May to September means that forests cannot establish themselves except in sheltered places. This has created a unique type of tropical savanna environment in which fires play a crucial role in elevating the extremely low nutrient levels and aiding growth during the wet season.
The many large rivers of the region such as the Mitchell, Gilbert-Einasleigh, South and East Alligator, Daly, Ord and Fitzroy support populations of the saltwater and freshwater crocodiles, which are by far the best-known animals of the region. There are also a number of species of python. Further south, where rivers are not adequate to support crocodiles, there exist a number of quite unique lizard species.
The Wet Tropics, like all tropical rainforests, is very rich in unique species, and importantly contains some of the most primitive flowering plants in the world.


Proponents for the development of Northern Australia have been found since before Federation and include:
Alfred Searcy
George Pearce
Gina Rinehart in Northern Australia and then some: changes we need to make our country rich (2013) and through  Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision (ANDEV).
The latest iteration of these proposals is found in the  Our North Our Future: White Paper On Developing Northern Australia published by the Abbott Government on 18 June 2015.


Almost all of Northern Australia is a huge ancient craton that has not experienced geological upheaval since the end of the Precambrian. The only exception to this generalisation is the Wet Tropics of northern Queensland, where active volcanoes have been present as recently as the Pleistocene.
The vast craton in the north and west contains a number of quite rugged mountain ranges, of which the highest are the MacDonnell and Musgrave Ranges on the southern border of the Northern Territory. These rise to over 1,500 metres (4,900 ft), but the most spectacular features are the deep gorges of rivers such as the Finke. Most of the craton, however, is distinctly flat and generally low-lying with an average elevation of around 400 metres (1,300 ft), whilst in the Lake Eyre Basin most of the land is not far above sea level.
The climate of the north of Australia ranges from arid (Köppen BWh) in the south to monsoonal (Köppen Aw) in the Top End and Kimberley. On the eastern coast, however, the climate is much more humid and ranges from humid sub-tropical (Köppen Cfa around Brisbane and Cwa further north) to humid tropical (Köppen Am and Af) in the Wet Tropics. Except in the western part of the Pilbara and Gascoyne where the heaviest rain often occurs from May to July under northwest cloudbands, rainfall is heavily concentrated in the "summer" months from November to March. For instance, in Burketown, the months May to September are rainless in over fifty percent of years, with over eighty percent of Augusts having no rain.
Temperatures in summer are generally unpleasantly hot apart from the eastern coastal belt. Maximum temperatures elsewhere between October and April range from 30 °C (86 °F) in the south in April to around 40 °C (104 °F) in the inland Pilbara and Kimberley before the wet season breaks. Further north, maxima are consistently around 32 °C (90 °F) but extreme humidity makes conditions very unpleasant. On the coast, maxima in January range from 29 °C (84 °F) in the south to 32 °C (90 °F), with minima generally around 21 °C (70 °F).
In July, temperatures show a wider range, from 31 °C (88 °F) in the north to around 19 °C (66 °F) in the south, where minima can be as low as 5 °C (41 °F) in Alice Springs in June and July.


Except in the Lake Eyre Basin and adjacent areas to the east, the soils of Northern Australia are quite remarkable in global terms for their low fertility and difficulty of working. Most of them consist chiefly of hard laterite developed during period of climate much more humid than even that of Darwin today. Since there has been no mountain building in the region since the Precambrian and no glaciation since the Carboniferous, the region's soils have generally been under continuous weathering without renewal for over 250 million years, as against less than ten thousand for most soils in Europe, Asia, North America and New Zealand which have been formed from recent mountain building or glacial scouring of the land.
This immensely long weathering time means that nutrient levels in Northern Australian soils are exceptionally low because practically all soluble minerals have long been weathered out. The major constituents of most soils in Northern Australia are iron and aluminium oxides, both of which are not only very insoluble but also serve to reduce the soil pH and remove phosphorus from the soil as insoluble iron and aluminium phosphates. The insolubility of these metal oxides also serves, under the extremely harsh conditions during the dry season in the north and generally in the south, to create massive sheets which are impossible to plough.
In the Lake Eyre Basin, deposition from volcanic regions to the east has produce cracking clay soils of quite high fertility which are still often fairly low in phosphorus but have very good levels of potassium, calcium and sulfur. These soils provide the best grassland for grazing in the region. The youthful, volcanic Wet Tropics has a number of areas of fertile alluvial soils that support intensive horticulture.


With a total area of 1,852,642 square kilometres (715,309 square miles), Queensland is an expansive state with a highly diverse range of climates and geographical features. If Queensland were an independent nation, it would be the world's 16th largest, being approximately the same size as Mexico, Indonesia and Mongolia.
Queensland's eastern coastline borders the Coral Sea, an arm of the Pacific Ocean. The state is bordered by the Torres Strait to the north, with Boigu Island off the coast of New Guinea representing the northern extreme of its territory. The triangular Cape York Peninsula, which points toward New Guinea, is the northernmost part of the state's mainland. West of the peninsula's tip, northern Queensland is bordered by the Gulf of Carpentaria. To the west, Queensland is bordered by the Northern Territory, at the 138th meridian east, and to the southwest by northeastern South Australia. The state's southern border with New South Wales is constituted in the east by the watershed from Point Danger to the Dumaresq River, and the Dumaresq, Macintyre and Barwon rivers. The west of the southern border is defined by the 29th parallel south (including some minor historical encroachments), until it reaches South Australia.
Like much of eastern Australia, the Great Dividing Range runs roughly parallel with, and inland from, the coast, and areas west of the range are more arid than the humid coastal regions. The Great Barrier Reef, which is the world's largest coral reef system, runs parallel to the state's Coral Sea coast between the Torres Strait and K'gari. Queensland's coastline includes the world's three largest sand islands: K'gari, Moreton and North Stradbroke.
The state contains six World Heritage-listed preservation areas: the Great Barrier Reef along the Coral Sea coast, K'gari on the Wide Bay–Burnett region's coastline, the wet tropics in Far North Queensland including the Daintree Rainforest, Lamington National Park in South East Queensland, the Riversleigh fossil sites in North West Queensland, and the Gondwana Rainforests in South East Queensland.
The state is divided into several unofficial regions which are commonly used to refer to large areas of the state's vast geography. These include:
South East Queensland in the state's coastal extreme south-eastern corner, an urban region which includes the state's three largest cities: capital city Brisbane and popular coastal tourist destinations the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast. In some definitions, it also includes the city of Toowoomba. South East Queensland accounts for more than 70% of the state's population.
The Darling Downs in the state's inland south-east, which consists of fertile agricultural (particularly cattle grazing) land and in some definitions includes the city of Toowoomba. The region also includes the mountainous Granite Belt, the state's coldest region which occasionally experiences snow.
Wide Bay–Burnett in the state's coastal south-east, to the north of the South East Queensland region. It is rich in sugar cane farms and includes the cities of Bundaberg, Hervey Bay as well as K'gari, the world's largest sand island.
Central Queensland on the state's central coastline, which is dominated by cattle farmland and coal mining. It contains the Capricorn Coast and Whitsunday Islands tourist regions, as well as the cities of Rockhampton and Mackay.
North Queensland on the state's northern coastline, which is dominated by cattle farmland and mining and which includes the city of Townsville.
Far North Queensland on the state's extreme northern coastline along the Cape York Peninsula, which includes tropical rainforest, the state's highest mountain, Mount Bartle Frere, the Atherton Tablelands pastoral region (dominated by sugar cane and tropical fruits), the most visited section of the Great Barrier Reef, as well as the city of Cairns.
South West Queensland in the state's inland south-west, which is a primarily agricultural region dominated by cattle farmland, and which includes the Channel Country region of intertwining rivulets.
Central West Queensland in the state's inland central-west, dominated by cattle farmland and which includes the city of Longreach.
The Gulf Country (also known as North West Queensland), in the state's inland north-west along the Gulf of Carpentaria, which is dominated by savanna and mining and includes the city of Mount Isa.


Following Federation in 1901, the White Australia policy came into effect, which saw all foreign workers in Australia deported under the Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1901, which saw the Pacific Islander population of the state decrease rapidly.
In 1905, women voted in state elections for the first time. The state's first university, the University of Queensland, was established in Brisbane in 1909. In 1911, the first alternative treatments for polio were pioneered in Queensland and remain in use across the world today.
World War I had a major impact on Queensland. Over 58,000 Queenslanders fought in World War I and over 10,000 of them died.
Australia's first major airline, Qantas (originally standing for "Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services"), was founded in Winton in 1920 to serve outback Queensland.
In 1922, Queensland abolished the Queensland Legislative Council, becoming the only Australian state with a unicameral parliament.
In 1935, cane toads were deliberately introduced to Queensland from Hawaii in an unsuccessful attempt to reduce the number of French's cane and greyback cane beetles that were destroying the roots of sugar cane plants, which are integral to Queensland's economy. The toads have remained an environmental pest since that time. In 1962, the first commercial production of oil in Queensland and Australia began at Moonie.
During World War II, Brisbane became central to the Allied campaign when the AMP Building (now called MacArthur Central) was used as the South West Pacific headquarters for General Douglas MacArthur, chief of the Allied Pacific forces, until his headquarters were moved to Hollandia in August 1944. In 1942, during the war, Brisbane was the site of a violent clash between visiting US military personnel and Australian servicemen and civilians, which resulted in one death and hundreds of injuries. This incident became known colloquially as the Battle of Brisbane.
The end of World War II saw a wave of immigration from across Europe, with many more immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe than in previous decades.
In the latter decades of the 20th century, the humid subtropical climate—regulated by the availability of air conditioning—saw Queensland become a popular destination for migrants from interstate. Since that time, Queensland has continuously seen high levels of migration from the other states and territories of Australia.
The final end of the White Australia policy in 1973 saw the beginning of a wave of immigration from around the world, and most prominently from Asia, which continues to the present.
In 1981, the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland's northeast coast, one of the world's largest coral reef systems, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.


After three decades of record population growth, Queensland was impacted by major floods between late 2010 and early 2011, causing extensive damage and disruption across the state.
In 2020, Queensland was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite a low number and abrupt decline in cases from April 2020 onward, social distancing requirements were implemented from March 2020 including the closure of the state borders.


The Aboriginal occupation of Queensland is thought to predate 50,000 BC, likely via boat or land bridge across Torres Strait, and became divided into over 90 different language groups.
During the last ice age Queensland's landscape became arider and largely desolate, making food and other supplies scarce. This led to the world's first seed-grinding technology. Warming again made the land hospitable, as it brought high rainfall along the eastern coast, stimulating the growth of the state's tropical rainforests.


Because of its size, there is significant variation in climate across the state. There is ample rainfall along the coastline, with a monsoonal wet season in the tropical north, and humid sub-tropical conditions along the southern coastline. Low rainfall and hot humid summers are typical for the inland and west. Elevated areas in the south-eastern inland can experience temperatures well below freezing in mid-winter providing frost and, rarely, snowfall. The climate of the coastal regions is influenced by warm ocean waters, keeping the region free from extremes of temperature and providing moisture for rainfall.
There are six predominant climatic zones in Queensland, based on temperature and humidity:
Hot humid summer, warm humid winter (far north and coastal): Cairns, Innisfail
Hot humid summer, warm dry winter (north and coastal): Townsville, Mackay
Hot humid summer, mild dry winter (coastal elevated areas and coastal south-east): Brisbane, Bundaberg, Rockhampton
Hot dry summer, mild dry winter (central inland and north-west): Mt Isa, Emerald, Longreach
Hot dry summer, cool dry winter (southern inland): Roma, Charleville, Goondiwindi
Warm humid summer, cold dry winter (elevated south-eastern areas): Toowoomba, Warwick, Stanthorpe
The annual mean climatic statistics for selected Queensland cities are shown below:
The coastal far north of the state is the wettest region in Australia, with Mount Bellenden Ker, south of Cairns, holding many Australian rainfall records with its annual average rainfall of over 8 metres (26 ft). Snow is rare in Queensland, although it does fall with some regularity along the far southern border with New South Wales, predominantly in the Stanthorpe district although on rare occasions further north and west. The most northerly snow ever recorded in Australia occurred near Mackay; however, this was exceptional.
Natural disasters are often a threat in Queensland: severe tropical cyclones can impact the central and northern coastlines and cause severe damage, with recent examples including Larry, Yasi, Ita and Debbie. Flooding from rain-bearing systems can also be severe and can occur anywhere in Queensland. One of the deadliest and most damaging floods in the history of the state occurred in early 2011. Severe springtime thunderstorms generally affect the south-east and inland of the state and can bring damaging winds, torrential rain, large hail and even tornadoes. The strongest tornado ever recorded in Australia occurred in Queensland near Bundaberg in November 1992. Droughts and bushfires can also occur; however, the latter are generally less severe than those that occur in southern states.
The highest official maximum temperature recorded in the state was 49.5 °C (121.1 °F) at Birdsville Police Station on 24 December 1972, although the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite measured a ground surface temperature of 69.3 °C (156.7 °F). Queensland has the highest average maximums of any Australian state, and Stanthorpe, Hervey Bay, Mackay, Atherton, Weipa and Thursday Island are the only large population centres not to have recorded a temperature above 40 °C (104 °F). The lowest recorded minimum temperature is −10.6 °C (12.9 °F) at Stanthorpe on 23 June 1961 and at The Hermitage (near Warwick) on 12 July 1965. Temperatures below 0 °C (32 °F) are, however, generally uncommon over the majority of populated Queensland.


In February 1606, Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon landed near the site of what is now Weipa, on the western shore of Cape York. This was the first recorded landing of a European in Australia, and it also marked the first reported contact between European and Aboriginal Australian people. The region was also explored by French and Spanish explorers (commanded by Louis Antoine de Bougainville and Luís Vaez de Torres, respectively) prior to the arrival of Lieutenant James Cook in 1770. Cook claimed the east coast under instruction from King George III of the Kingdom of Great Britain on 22 August 1770 at Possession Island, naming Eastern Australia, including Queensland, 'New South Wales'.
The Aboriginal population declined significantly after a smallpox epidemic during the late 18th century. There has been controversy regarding the origins of smallpox in Australia; while many sources have claimed that it originated with European colonisation, this theory has been contradicted by scientific evidence. There is circumstantial evidence that Macassan mariners visiting Arnhem Land introduced smallpox to Australia.
In 1823, John Oxley, a British explorer, sailed north from what is now Sydney to scout possible penal colony sites in Gladstone (then Port Curtis) and Moreton Bay. At Moreton Bay, he found the Brisbane River. He returned in 1824 and established a penal settlement at what is now Redcliffe. The settlement, initially known as Edenglassie, was then transferred to the current location of the Brisbane city centre. Edmund Lockyer discovered outcrops of coal along the banks of the upper Brisbane River in 1825. In 1839 transportation of convicts was ceased, culminating in the closure of the Brisbane penal settlement. In 1842 free settlement, which had already commenced, was officially permitted. In 1847, the Port of Maryborough was opened as a wool port. While most early immigrants came from New South Wales, the first free immigrant ship to arrive in Moreton Bay from Europe was the Artemisia, in 1848. In 1857, Queensland's first lighthouse was built at Cape Moreton.
Earlier than this immigrant ship, was the arrival of the Irish famine orphan girls to Queensland. Devised by the then British Secretary of State for the Colonies, The Earl Grey Scheme established a special emigration scheme which was designed to resettle destitute girls from the workhouses of Ireland during the Great Famine. The very first ship, the “Earl Grey”, departed Ireland for a 124-day sail to Sydney. After controversy developed upon their arrival in Australia, a small group of 37 young orphans, sometimes referred to as The Belfast Girls or the Feisty Colleens, never set foot on Sydney soil, and instead sailed up to Brisbane (then Moreton Bay) on 21 October 1848 on board the Ann Mary. This scheme continued until 1852.
A war, which contemporaries called a "war of extermination", erupted between settlers and Aboriginal people in colonial Queensland. The Frontier War was notable for being the most bloody in Australia, perhaps due to Queensland's larger pre-contact indigenous population when compared to the other Australian colonies. The "Native Police Force", employed by the Queensland government, was key in the oppression of the indigenous people.
The largest reported massacre of colonists by Aboriginals was in 1861 on the Nogoa River where 19 people were killed. One author estimates 24,000 Aboriginal men, women and children died at the hands of the Native Police in colonial Queensland between 1859 and 1897 alone.


2012 (MMXII) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2012th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 12th  year of the 3rd millennium and the 21st century, and the  3rd   year of the 2010s decade.

2012 was designated as:
International Year of Cooperatives
International Year of Sustainable Energy for All


June 2
Richard Dawson, British-American actor, comedian, game show host and panelist (b. 1932)
Kathryn Joosten, American actress (b. 1939)
Oliver, American chimpanzee performer, promoted as a "humanzee" (b. c.1957)
June 3 – Roy Salvadori, British racing driver (b. 1922)
June 4 – Eduard Khil, Soviet and Russian baritone singer (b. 1934)
June 5 – Ray Bradbury, American author (b. 1920)
June 6 – Manuel Preciado, Spanish footballer and coach (b. 1957)
June 7 – Bob Welch, American musician (b. 1945)
June 8 – Frank Cady, American actor (b. 1915)
June 11
Ann Rutherford, Canadian-born American actress (b. 1917)
Teófilo Stevenson, Cuban Olympic boxer (b. 1952)
June 12 – Elinor Ostrom, American Nobel economist (b. 1933)
June 13 – William Standish Knowles, American Nobel chemist (b. 1917)
June 14 – Yvette Wilson, American actress and comedian (b. 1964)
June 16
Nayef bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia (b. 1934)
Susan Tyrrell, American actress (b. 1945)
June 17 – Rodney King, American criminal and victim of police brutality (b. 1965)
June 19 – Richard Lynch, American actor (b. 1940)
June 26 – Nora Ephron, American film director and screenwriter (b. 1941)
June 30 – Yitzhak Shamir, 7th Prime Minister of Israel (b. 1915)


Bolivia is named after Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan leader in the Spanish American wars of independence. The leader of Venezuela, Antonio José de Sucre, had been given the option by Bolívar to either unite Charcas (present-day Bolivia) with the newly formed Republic of Peru, to unite with the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, or to formally declare its independence from Spain as a wholly independent state. Sucre opted to create a brand new state and on 6 August 1825, with local support, named it in honor of Simón Bolívar.
The original name was Republic of Bolívar. Some days later, congressman Manuel Martín Cruz proposed: "If from Romulus, Rome, then from Bolívar, Bolivia" (Spanish: Si de Rómulo, Roma; de Bolívar, Bolivia). The name was approved by the Republic on 3 October 1825. In 2009, a new constitution changed the country's official name to "Plurinational State of Bolivia" to reflect the multi-ethnic nature of the country and the strengthened rights of Bolivia's indigenous peoples under the new constitution.


During the early 20th century, tin replaced silver as the country's most important source of wealth. A succession of governments controlled by the economic and social elite followed laissez-faire capitalist policies through the first 30 years of the 20th century.
Living conditions of the native people, who constitute most of the population, remained deplorable. With work opportunities limited to primitive conditions in the mines and in large estates having nearly feudal status, they had no access to education, economic opportunity, and political participation. Bolivia's defeat by Paraguay in the Chaco War (1932–1935), where Bolivia lost a great part of the Gran Chaco region in dispute, marked a turning-point.
On 7 April 1943, Bolivia entered World War II, joining part of the Allies, which caused president Enrique Peñaranda to declare war on the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
The Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), the most historic political party, emerged as a broad-based party. Denied its victory in the 1951 presidential elections, the MNR led a successful revolution in 1952. Under President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the MNR, having strong popular pressure, introduced universal suffrage into his political platform and carried out a sweeping land-reform promoting rural education and nationalization of the country's largest tin mines.


The region now known as Bolivia had been occupied for over 2,500 years when the Aymara arrived. However, present-day Aymara associate themselves with the ancient civilization of the Tiwanaku Empire which had its capital at Tiwanaku, in Western Bolivia. The capital city of Tiwanaku dates from as early as 1500 BC when it was a small, agriculturally-based village.
The Aymara community grew to urban proportions between AD 600 and AD 800, becoming an important regional power in the southern Andes. According to early estimates, the city covered approximately 6.5 square kilometers (2.5 square miles) at its maximum extent and had between 15,000 and 30,000 inhabitants. In 1996 satellite imaging was used to map the extent of fossilized suka kollus (flooded raised fields) across the three primary valleys of Tiwanaku, arriving at population-carrying capacity estimates of anywhere between 285,000 and 1,482,000 people.
Around AD 400, Tiwanaku went from being a locally dominant force to a predatory state. Tiwanaku expanded its reaches into the Yungas and brought its culture and way of life to many other cultures in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. Tiwanaku was not a violent culture in many respects. In order to expand its reach, Tiwanaku exercised great political astuteness, creating colonies, fostering trade agreements (which made the other cultures rather dependent), and instituting state cults.
The empire continued to grow with no end in sight. William H. Isbell states "Tiahuanaco underwent a dramatic transformation between AD 600 and 700 that established new monumental standards for civic architecture and greatly increased the resident population." Tiwanaku continued to absorb cultures rather than eradicate them. Archaeologists note a dramatic adoption of Tiwanaku ceramics into the cultures which became part of the Tiwanaku empire. Tiwanaku's power was further solidified through the trade it implemented among the cities within its empire.
Tiwanaku's elites gained their status through the surplus food they controlled, collected from outlying regions, and then redistributed to the general populace. Further, this elite's control of llama herds became a powerful control mechanism, as llamas were essential for carrying goods between the civic center and the periphery. These herds also came to symbolize class distinctions between the commoners and the elites. Through this control and manipulation of surplus resources, the elite's power continued to grow until about AD 950. At this time, a dramatic shift in climate occurred, causing a significant drop in precipitation in the Titicaca Basin, believed by archaeologists to have been on the scale of a major drought.
As the rainfall decreased, many of the cities farther away from Lake Titicaca began to tender fewer foodstuffs to the elites. As the surplus of food decreased, and thus the amount available to underpin their power, the control of the elites began to falter. The capital city became the last place viable for food production due to the resiliency of the raised field method of agriculture. Tiwanaku disappeared around AD 1000 because food production, the main source of the elites' power, dried up. The area remained uninhabited for centuries thereafter.
Between 1438 and 1527, the Inca empire expanded from its capital at Cusco, Peru. It gained control over much of what is now Andean Bolivia and extended its control into the fringes of the Amazon basin.


The struggle for independence started in the city of Sucre on 25 May 1809 and the Chuquisaca Revolution (Chuquisaca was then the name of the city) is known as the first cry of Freedom in Latin America. That revolution was followed by the La Paz revolution on 16 July 1809. The La Paz revolution marked a complete split with the Spanish government, while the Chuquisaca Revolution established a local independent junta in the name of the Spanish King deposed by Napoleon Bonaparte. Both revolutions were short-lived and defeated by the Spanish authorities in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de La Plata, but the following year the Spanish American wars of independence raged across the continent.
Bolivia was captured and recaptured many times during the war by the royalists and patriots. Buenos Aires sent three military campaigns, all of which were defeated, and eventually limited itself to protecting the national borders at Salta. Bolivia was finally freed of Royalist dominion by Marshal Antonio José de Sucre, with a military campaign coming from the North in support of the campaign of Simón Bolívar. After 16 years of war the Republic was proclaimed on 6 August 1825.
In 1836, Bolivia, under the rule of Marshal Andrés de Santa Cruz, invaded Peru to reinstall the deposed president, General Luis José de Orbegoso. Peru and Bolivia formed the Peru-Bolivian Confederation, with de Santa Cruz as the Supreme Protector. Following tension between the Confederation and Chile, Chile declared war on 28 December 1836. Argentina separately declared war on the Confederation on 9 May 1837. The Peruvian-Bolivian forces achieved several major victories during the War of the Confederation: the defeat of the Argentine expedition and the defeat of the first Chilean expedition on the fields of Paucarpata near the city of Arequipa. The Chilean army and its Peruvian rebel allies surrendered unconditionally and signed the Paucarpata Treaty. The treaty stipulated that Chile would withdraw from Peru-Bolivia, Chile would return captured Confederate ships, economic relations would be normalized, and the Confederation would pay Peruvian debt to Chile. However, the Chilean government and public rejected the peace treaty. Chile organized a second attack on the Confederation and defeated it in the Battle of Yungay. After this defeat, Santa Cruz resigned and went to exile in Ecuador and then Paris, and the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation was dissolved.
Following the renewed independence of Peru, Peruvian president General Agustín Gamarra invaded Bolivia. On 18 November 1841, the battle de Ingavi took place, in which the Bolivian Army defeated the Peruvian troops of Gamarra (killed in the battle). After the victory, Bolivia invaded Perú on several fronts. The eviction of the Bolivian troops from the south of Peru would be achieved by the greater availability of material and human resources of Peru; the Bolivian Army did not have enough troops to maintain an occupation. In the district of Locumba – Tacna, a column of Peruvian soldiers and peasants defeated a Bolivian regiment in the so-called Battle of Los Altos de Chipe (Locumba). In the district of Sama and in Arica, the Peruvian colonel José María Lavayén organized a troop that managed to defeat the Bolivian forces of Colonel Rodríguez Magariños and threaten the port of Arica. In the battle of Tarapacá on 7 January 1842, Peruvian militias formed by the commander Juan Buendía defeated a detachment led by Bolivian colonel José María García, who died in the confrontation. Bolivian troops left Tacna, Arica and Tarapacá in February 1842, retreating towards Moquegua and Puno. The battles of Motoni and Orurillo forced the withdrawal of Bolivian forces occupying Peruvian territory and exposed Bolivia to the threat of counter-invasion. The Treaty of Puno was signed on 7 June 1842, ending the war. However, the climate of tension between Lima and La Paz would continue until 1847, when the signing of a Peace and Trade Treaty became effective.
The estimated population of the main three cities in 1843 was La Paz 300,000, Cochabamba 250,000 and Potosi 200,000.
A period of political and economic instability in the early-to-mid-19th century weakened Bolivia. In addition, during the War of the Pacific (1879–83), Chile occupied vast territories rich in natural resources south west of Bolivia, including the Bolivian coast. Chile took control of today's Chuquicamata area, the adjoining rich salitre (saltpeter) fields, and the port of Antofagasta among other Bolivian territories.
Since independence, Bolivia has lost over half of its territory to neighboring countries. Through diplomatic channels in 1909, it lost the basin of the Madre de Dios River and the territory of the Purus in the Amazon, yielding 250,000 km² to Peru. It also lost the state of Acre, in the Acre War, important because this region was known for its production of rubber. Peasants and the Bolivian army fought briefly but after a few victories, and facing the prospect of a total war against Brazil, it was forced to sign the Treaty of Petrópolis in 1903, in which Bolivia lost this rich territory. Popular myth has it that Bolivian president Mariano Melgarejo (1864–71) traded the land for what he called "a magnificent white horse" and Acre was subsequently flooded by Brazilians, which ultimately led to confrontation and fear of war with Brazil.
In the late 19th century, an increase in the world price of silver brought Bolivia relative prosperity and political stability.


The Spanish conquest of the Inca empire began in 1524 and was mostly completed by 1533. The territory now called Bolivia was known as Charcas, and was under the authority of the Viceroy of Peru in Lima. Local government came from the Audiencia de Charcas located in Chuquisaca (La Plata—modern Sucre). Founded in 1545 as a mining town, Potosí soon produced fabulous wealth, becoming the largest city in the New World with a population exceeding 150,000 people.
By the late 16th century, Bolivian silver was an important source of revenue for the Spanish Empire. A steady stream of natives served as labor force under the brutal, slave conditions of the Spanish version of the pre-Columbian draft system called the mita. Charcas was transferred to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776 and the people from Buenos Aires, the capital of the Viceroyalty, coined the term "Upper Peru" (Spanish: Alto Perú) as a popular reference to the Royal Audiencia of Charcas. Túpac Katari led the indigenous rebellion that laid siege to La Paz in March 1781, during which 20,000 people died. As Spanish royal authority weakened during the Napoleonic wars, sentiment against colonial rule grew.


Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in western-central South America. The seat of government and executive capital is La Paz, while the constitutional capital is Sucre. The largest city and principal industrial center is Santa Cruz de la Sierra, located on the Llanos Orientales (tropical lowlands), a mostly flat region in the east of the country.
The sovereign state of Bolivia is a constitutionally unitary state, divided into nine departments. Its geography varies from the peaks of the Andes in the West, to the Eastern Lowlands, situated within the Amazon basin. It is bordered to the north and east by Brazil, to the southeast by Paraguay, to the south by Argentina, to the southwest by Chile, and to the northwest by Peru. One-third of the country is within the Andean mountain range. With 1,098,581 km² (424,164 sq mi) of area, Bolivia is the fifth largest country in South America, after Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Colombia (and alongside Paraguay, one of the only two landlocked countries in the Americas), the 27th largest in the world, the largest landlocked country in the Southern Hemisphere, and the world's seventh largest landlocked country, after Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Chad, Niger, Mali, and Ethiopia.
The country's population, estimated at 11 million, is multiethnic, including Amerindians, Mestizos, Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Spanish is the official and predominant language, although 36 indigenous languages also have official status, of which the most commonly spoken are Guarani, Aymara, and Quechua languages.
Before Spanish colonization, the Andean region of Bolivia was part of the Inca Empire, while the northern and eastern lowlands were inhabited by independent tribes. Spanish conquistadors arriving from Cusco and Asunción took control of the region in the 16th century. During the Spanish colonial period Bolivia was administered by the Real Audiencia of Charcas. Spain built its empire in large part upon the silver that was extracted from Bolivia's mines.
After the first call for independence in 1809, 16 years of war followed before the establishment of the Republic, named for Simón Bolívar. Over the course of the 19th and early 20th century Bolivia lost control of several peripheral territories to neighboring countries including the seizure of its coastline by Chile in 1879. Bolivia remained relatively politically stable until 1971, when Hugo Banzer led a CIA-supported coup d'état which replaced the socialist government of Juan José Torres with a military dictatorship headed by Banzer. Banzer's regime cracked down on left-wing and socialist opposition and other forms of dissent, resulting in the torture and deaths of a number of Bolivian citizens. Banzer was ousted in 1978 and later returned as the democratically elected president of Bolivia from 1997 to 2001. Under the 2006–2019 presidency of Evo Morales the country saw significant economic growth and political stability.
Modern Bolivia is a charter member of the UN, IMF, NAM, OAS, ACTO, Bank of the South, ALBA, and USAN. Bolivia remains the second poorest country in South America, though it has slashed poverty rates and has the fastest growing economy in South America (in terms of GDP). It is a developing country, with a high ranking in the Human Development Index. Its main economic activities include agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, and manufacturing goods such as textiles, clothing, refined metals, and refined petroleum. Bolivia is very rich in minerals, including tin, silver, lithium, and copper.


In 1811, José Gervasio Artigas, who became Uruguay's national hero, launched a successful revolt against the Spanish authorities, defeating them on 18 May at the Battle of Las Piedras.
In 1813, the new government in Buenos Aires convened a constituent assembly where Artigas emerged as a champion of federalism, demanding political and economic autonomy for each area, and for the Banda Oriental in particular. The assembly refused to seat the delegates from the Banda Oriental, however, and Buenos Aires pursued a system based on unitary centralism.
As a result, Artigas broke with Buenos Aires and besieged Montevideo, taking the city in early 1815. Once the troops from Buenos Aires had withdrawn, the Banda Oriental appointed its first autonomous government. Artigas organized the Federal League under his protection, consisting of six provinces, four of which later became part of Argentina.
In 1816, a force of 10,000 Portuguese troops invaded the Banda Oriental from Brazil; they took Montevideo in January 1817. After nearly four more years of struggle, the Portuguese Kingdom of Brazil annexed the Banda Oriental as a province under the name of "Cisplatina". The Brazilian Empire became independent of Portugal in 1822. In response to the annexation, the Thirty-Three Orientals, led by Juan Antonio Lavalleja, declared independence on 25 August 1825 supported by the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (present-day Argentina). This led to the 500-day-long Cisplatine War. Neither side gained the upper hand and in 1828 the Treaty of Montevideo, fostered by the United Kingdom through the diplomatic efforts of Viscount John Ponsonby, gave birth to Uruguay as an independent state. 25 August is celebrated as Independence Day, a national holiday. The nation's first constitution was adopted on 18 July 1830.