The Carter Administration was characterized by four pivotal problems which the president could not solve: stagflation, energy crisis, the American hostage in Teheran, and Latin America. These predicaments cost him the 1980 election which he lost to Ronald Reagan. The Carter Administration was marked by double-digit inflation, very high interest rates, and oil shortages. Although the American economy grew an average of 2.5%, below the historical average, the 1979 energy crisis ended this period of growth as both inflation and interest rates rose with a sharp drop in economic activity. The sudden increase of crude oil prices, raised by OPEC, the world’s leading oil exporting cartel, forced inflation to double-digit levels, averaging 11.3% in 1979 and 13.5% in 1980. The sudden shortage of gasoline as the 1979 summer vacation season began exacerbated the problem, and would come to symbolize the crisis among the public in general. As a result, Carter appointed G. William Miller as Secretary of the Treasury and named Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Volcker followed a tight monetary policy to bring down inflation, which he considered his priority. Volcker succeeded, but only by first going through an unpleasant phase during which the economy got stagnant and unemployment rose even higher.

Secretary of States: Cyrus Vance (replaced by Edmund Muskie in 1980)
Secretary of Defense: Harold Brown
Attorney General: Griffin Bell
Secretary of Commerce: Juanita Kreps (replaced by Philips M Klutznick in 1979)
Secretary of the Treasury: Micheal Blumenthal (replaced by G William Miller in 1979)

The origin of the Celts in Spain is more certain than that of the Iberians. Unlike the Iberians the Celts were of Indo-European race. In the third century B.C. they occupied a territory embracing the greater part of the lands from the modern Balkan states through northern Italy and France, with extremities in Britain and Spain. They entered the peninsula possibly as early as the 7th century B.C., but certainly not later than the fourth, coming by way of the Pyrenees. They were good smiths and introduced iron into the Iberian peninsula. It is generally held that they dominated the northwest and west, the regions of modern Galicia and Portugal, leaving south and eastern Spain in full possession of the Iberians. In the center of the Iberian peninsula the two races mingled to form the Celtiberians, in which the Celtic elements were the more important. There were smaller sub divisions for these peoples, such as Galicians, Turdetanians, Austurians, and Lusitanians. The Galicians constituted a federation of forty tribes and the Lusitanians thirty.

The social and political organization of the Celts in Spain were similar to other Indo-European peoples. The unit was the gens, made up of a number of families, forming an independent whole and bound together by the religious practices as they worshipped the same gods. Various gens united to form a larger unit, the tribe, which was united by the same racial/cultural and religious ties. For military and defensive purposes, several tribes joined together into a confederation. Each of the tribe was ruled by a chief and an assembly of older men. In some tribes property was owned in common, and there is a reason to believe that this practice was quite extensive. In some respects the tribes varied considerably as regards the stage of culture they had attained. Speaking generally, ancient writers discribed the Spanish as peoples of physical endurance, heroic valor, and fidelity (even to the point of death). Like the Celtic tribes in the rest of Europe, the Celts in Spain were warlike people.

The Congress of Vienna was an international summit of European States representatives convened in Vienna from September 1814, to June 1815, and presided over by Austria’s representative Prince Klemens von Metternich. The purpose of the Congress of Vienna was to establish a balance of power that would keep the peace by redrawing Europe’s political map after the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of the Nations, at Leipzig, and the signing of the Treaty of Paris of 1814, which put an end to the Six Coaltion War against Napoleon. The United Kingdom was represented first by its Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh; then by the Duke of Wellington, after Castlereagh’s return to England in February 1815; and in the last weeks, by the Earl of Clancarty, after Wellington left to face Napoleon during the Hundred Days.

The result of the Congress of Vienna was to deprive France of all the territories which had been conquered by Napoleon; Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne of Spain; Norway and Sweden united under a single ruler; Louis XVIII was also restored to the throne of France, which concretized after the Battle of Waterloo; Austria recovered most of the territory it had lost during the Napoleonic Wars, also obtaining the Lombardy and Venice in Italy; Russia was given most of the Duchy of Warsaw (Poland) and was allowed to keep Finland, which it had annexed from Sweden in 1809; a German Confederation of 38 states was formed from the previous 360 of the Holy Roman Empire, under the presidency of the Austrian Emperor; the Dutch Republic was united with the Austrian Netherlands to form a single kingdom of the Netherlands under the House of Orange.

Romanticism was a literary and philosophical movement which began in Europe at the end of the 18th century, sparking nationalism. Whereas the thinkers of the enlightenment emphasized the primacy of reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism. This movement also elevated folk art, traditions, and ancient custom of people to something noble.

The French Revolution unleashed a new political idea in Europe, with the notion that States should constitute the whole of a people or "nation." Hence, France was the nation of the French and should include all of them. If the French Revolution introduced this new concept of nation, Napoleonic invasion of Germany and Prussia, with the chain of abuse committed by the foraging and marauding French troops in Teutonic territories, such as looting, pillaging, stealing cattle, raping and murdering of farmers, triggered a profound nationalism that had racial implications; thus, in Germany, Romanticism meant nationalism, which would lead to the German unification between 1866 and 1871, led by Prussia. This nationalistic Romanticism in Germany spread to every aspect of culture, including music and literature.

Thus, Multi-ethnic empires, such as the Ottoman Turks, were threatened with extinction as this idea found political and military expression. In 1848, a wave of nationalist revolts burst across Europe, sweeping a revolutionary government to power in Hungary and threatening to overturn the Prussian and French regimes. In 1861 nationalism contributed to the unification of Italy with Giuseppe Garibaldi playing an important role. Similarly, nationalist feelings contributed to the decay of the Ottoman Empire, from the Greek declaration of independence in 1821. All these movements appealed to a national ideal, inspiring a fervor that loyalty to a dynasty, or remote imperial power, had almost never been able to do.

The second half of the 19th century saw a new growth of European imperialism, which developed a momentum of its own far beyond the need to protect trading posts or suppress native opposition. Many of the wars fought in the last half of the century were imperial, in which Western technological superiority and organization normally proved decisive. At Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, Kitchener, the British commander, simply deployed his 25,000 men in tight formation, and when the opposing Mahdists charged, they were scythed down by his Maxim machine guns: the Sudanese lost up to 30,000 men for the loss of only 50 of the Anglo-Egyptian force.

Germany’s victories in 1866 and 1870 led German statesmen and generals to believe that rapid deployment and the exploitation of technology should override all other concerns. At the end of the 19th century, European countries became embroiled in an arms race that was ruinously expensive and contributed to a chilling climate of mistrust in international diplomacy. The rapid growth of the German economy, unaccompanied by a corresponding increase in political sophistication, led to a dangerous alliance of economic power, nationalist agitation, and technological prowess, which, when a spark set it alight, would lead to the appalling carnage of World War I.