This historical research guide provides students and their teachers with 600 term paper ideas and cites more than a thousand print and nonprint sources on the 100 most important events that have shaped 20th-century world history. Organized in chronological order, the guide features entries on key events in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America that are covered in the world history curriculum in secondary schools and colleges. From the 1905 revolution in Russia to the Chinese economy at the end of the 20th century, a wide range of political, economic, social, and cultural events are included. Each entry consists of a capsule description of the event, followed by six specific suggestions for research papers about the event, and a wide-ranging annotated bibliography of books, articles, videos, and web sites appropriate for student research.

In every case the emphasis is on recent and up-to-date material, as well as landmark works and primary sources. Dozens of recommended web sites and videos are included. This work has been designed to fulfill the assignments in the world history curriculum. Term paper ideas offer students thought-provoking suggestions that are challenging and develop critical thinking skills. The annotated bibliography is organized into primary and secondary sources. This unique guide is valuable not only to students but to teachers and librarians who guide students in research and is an excellent purchasing guide for librarians who serve student needs.

Midway through his reign, in the critical decade of the 1680s, the lusty image of Louis XIV paled and was replaced by that of a straitlaced monarch committed to locking up blasphemers, debtors, gamblers, and prostitutes in wretched, foul-smelling prisons that dispensed ample doses of Catholic-Reformation virtue. The author demonstrates how this attack on sin expressed the punitive social policy of the French Catholic Reformation and how Louis's actions clarified the legal and moral distinctions between crime and sin.

As a hot-blooded young prince, Louis XIV paid little attention to virtue or to sin and, despite his cherished title of God's Most Christian King, violations of God's Sixth and Ninth Commandments never troubled him. Indeed, for the first two decades of his reign, he paraded a stream of royal mistresses before all of Europe and fathered sixteen illegitimate children. Yet, midway through his reign, in the critical decade of the 1680s, the lusty image of Louis XIV paled and was replaced by that of a straitlaced monarch committed to locking up blasphemers, debtors, gamblers, and prostitutes in wretched, foul-smelling prisons that dispensed ample doses of Catholic-Reformation virtue.

Using police and prison archives, administrative correspondence, memoirs, and letters, Riley describes the formation of Louis's narrow conscience and his efforts to safeguard his subjects' souls by attacking sin and infusing his kingdom with virtue, especially in Paris and at Versailles. Throughout his attack on sin, women--so-called Soldiers of Satan--were the special targets of the police. By the seventeenth century, fornication and adultery had become exclusively female crimes; men guilty of these sins were rarely punished as severely. Although unsuccessful, Louis's attack on sin clarified the legal and moral distinctions between crime and sin as well as the futility of enforcing a religiously inspired social policy on an irreverent, secular-minded France.