The establishment of the Supreme Caracas Junta following the forced deposition of Vicente Emparan as Captain General of the Captaincy General of Venezuela on 19 April 1810, marked the beginnings of the war. On 5 July 1811, seven of the ten provinces of the Captaincy General of Venezuela declared their independence in the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence. The First Republic of Venezuela was lost in 1812 following the 1812 Caracas earthquake and the Battle of La Victoria (1812). Simón Bolívar led an "Admirable Campaign" to retake Venezuela, establishing the Second Republic of Venezuela in 1813; but this too did not last, falling to a combination of a local uprising and Spanish royalist reconquest. Only as part of Bolívar's campaign to liberate New Granada in 1819-20 did Venezuela achieve a lasting independence from Spain (initially as part of Gran Colombia).

On 17 December 1819, the Congress of Angostura declared Gran Colombia an independent country. After two more years of war, the country achieved independence from Spain in 1821 under the leadership of its most famous son, Simón Bolívar. Venezuela, along with the present-day countries of Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador, formed part of the Republic of Gran Colombia until 1830, when Venezuela separated and became a sovereign state.

The conflict was preceded by the outbreak of the Sicilian revolution of 1848 against the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. It was precipitated by riots in the cities of Milan (Five Days) and Venice, which rebelled against Austria and established their own governments.

The part of the conflict which was fought by King Charles Albert against Austria in northern Italy was a Royal war and consisted of two campaigns. In both campaigns, the Kingdom of Sardinia attacked the Austrian Empire and after initial victories was decisively defeated, losing the war as a result. The decisive events of the first and second campaigns were the battles at Custoza and Novara, respectively.

At the beginning of the royal war, the Kingdom of Sardinia was supported by the Papal States and the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, which then withdrew, having barely participated in the fighting at all. However, volunteers from the Papal and Neapolitan armies joined the other Italian volunteers and fought against Austria.

Alongside the royal war, revolutionary movements took place in various Italian states (Papal States, Tuscany, etc.), part of the Revolutions of 1848 in the Italian states, which could not be reconciled with the Liberal ideals of Piedmont. Historiography treats these revolutions, as well as the Sicilian revolution of 23 March 1848, as a popular war, which also failed, ending in the restoration of traditional institutions and many rebels forced into exile.^[3][4]

In the popular war with the internal revolutionaries, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies and the Papal States found themselves on the side opposite to the one they were on in the royal war, in which they initially supported Piedmont.

The popular war first gave prominence to the military commander, Giuseppe Garibaldi, but he was defeated, as was King Charles Albert, who abdicated at the end of the war in favour of his eldest son, Victor Emmanuel.

In the period after World War II, Germany was divided into four occupation zones, with the British, French, Americans, and Soviets each controlling one zone. The city of Berlin was also divided in a like fashion. This arrangement was supposed to be temporary, but as Cold War animosities began to harden, it became increasingly evident that the division between the communist and non-communist controlled sections of Germany and Berlin would become permanent. In May 1946, the United States halted reparation payments from West Germany to the Soviet Union. In December, the United States and Great Britain combined their occupation zones into what came to be known as Bizonia. France agreed to become part of this arrangement, and in May 1949, the three zones became one.

On May 23, the West German Parliamentary Council met and formally declared the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany. Although Konrad Adenauer, the president of the council and future president of West Germany, proudly proclaimed, “Today a new Germany arises,” the occasion was not a festive one. Many of the German representatives at the meeting were subdued, for they had harbored the faint hope that Germany might be reunified. Two communist members of the council refused to sign the proclamation establishing the new state.

The Soviets reacted quickly to the action in West Germany. In October 1949, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was officially announced. These actions in 1949 marked the end of any talk of a reunified Germany. For the next 41 years, East and West Germany served as symbols of the divided world, and of the Cold War animosities between the Soviet Union and the United States. In 1990, with Soviet strength ebbing and the Communist Party in East Germany steadily losing its grip on power, East and West Germany were finally reunited as one nation.