The Orbis Encyclopedia

• 

  Event · 1973–1974

  1973 Oil Embargo

  The 1973 OPEC production cuts and embargo that quadrupled oil prices, weaponized energy, and ended the cheap-oil postwar boom.

• 

  Event · 1995–1996

  1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis

  China fired missiles near Taiwan to sway its first presidential election in 1996; the US answered with two aircraft carrier groups.

• 

  Event · 1947-1987

  228 Incident and the White Terror

  The 1947 massacre and the 38 years of martial law that followed, in which the Nationalists destroyed Taiwan's elite and made an island of silence.

• 

  Place · 1945–present

  38th Parallel

  The line of latitude two American colonels picked off a map in half an hour in 1945, which split Korea in two and has kept it split ever since.

• 

  Treaty · 1972–2002

  ABM Treaty

  The 1972 agreement in which Washington and Moscow promised to stay defenseless against each other's missiles, and which the United States walked out of in 2002.

• 

  Person · 1809–1865

  Abraham Lincoln

  The self-taught frontier lawyer who became the 16th US president, held the Union together through the Civil War, and ended slavery.

• 

  Person · c. 573–634

  Abu Bakr

  Muhammad's closest companion and the first caliph, whose two-year rule held the Muslim community together and whose selection opened the Sunni-Shia split.

• 

  Doctrine · 1920s–present

  Active Measures

  The Soviet, and now Russian, craft of political warfare below the threshold of war: disinformation, forgeries, and front groups meant to deceive and divide.

• 

  Person · 1723-1790

  Adam Smith

  The Scottish philosopher who explained why some countries get rich, and who is quoted most confidently by people who have not read him.

• 

  Treaty · 1994-2002

  Agreed Framework

  The 1994 bargain that froze North Korea's plutonium program for eight years in exchange for oil and reactors, and whose collapse produced the bomb.

• 

  Person · 1542–1605

  Akbar

  The Mughal emperor who conquered most of India and then tried to govern it by treating Hindus as citizens rather than subjects.

• 

  Place · 711–1492

  Al-Andalus

  Muslim-ruled Iberia for nearly eight centuries, home to tenth-century Cordoba, one of the largest and most learned cities in medieval Europe.

• 

  Organization · 970–present

  Al-Azhar

  The Cairo mosque-university founded by Shia Fatimids in 970 that became the closest thing Sunni Islam has to a central authority.

• 

  Person · c. 780–850

  Al-Khwarizmi

  The Baghdad scholar whose book around 820 founded algebra and whose Latinized name became the word algorithm.

• 

  Person · 1879–1955

  Albert Einstein

  The physicist whose 1905 equation E=mc2 explained why splitting atoms releases such power, and who signed the letter that launched the US bomb program.

• 

  Person · 356-323 BC

  Alexander the Great

  The Macedonian king who destroyed the Persian Empire before he was 30 and left a Greek-speaking world stretching from Egypt to Afghanistan.

• 

  Person · 1840–1914

  Alfred Thayer Mahan

  The US naval officer whose 1890 book made 'sea power' the master key to national greatness and helped ignite the pre-1914 naval arms race.

• 

  War · 1954-1962

  Algerian War

  The 1954 to 1962 independence war that killed hundreds of thousands, destroyed the French Fourth Republic, and put de Gaulle in power.

• 

  Place · 1238–1492

  Alhambra and Granada

  The Emirate of Granada, last Muslim state in Iberia, and its hilltop palace, the supreme surviving monument of Islamic Spain.

• 

  Event · 1919

  Amritsar Massacre

  The 1919 killing of hundreds of unarmed Indians by British troops in a walled Amritsar garden, a turning point that broke faith in the Raj.

• 

  Person · 1767-1845

  Andrew Jackson

  The frontier general turned president who built the first mass political party, broke the national bank, and drove the southeastern Native nations off their land.

• 

  Organization · 1909–1954

  Anglo-Persian Oil Company

  The British oil company, ancestor of BP, whose lopsided grip on Iran's oil made it a symbol of Western exploitation and sparked the 1953 coup.

• 

  Event · 2014

  Annexation of Crimea

  Russia's swift, near-bloodless 2014 seizure of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, the first forcible annexation of European territory since 1945 and the opening move of the war.

• 

  Event · 165–180 AD

  Antonine Plague

  The pandemic that arrived with Rome's returning armies in 165 AD, killed millions at the empire's peak, and started the long unraveling.

• 

  Doctrine · 1948–1994

  Apartheid

  South Africa's legal system of white-minority rule and racial segregation from 1948 to 1994, dismantled by mass resistance and global isolation.

• 

  Doctrine · 1930s

  Appeasement

  The 1930s policy of conceding to Hitler's demands to avoid war, discredited at Munich in 1938 and now shorthand for weakness that invites aggression.

• 

  Event · 2010–2012

  Arab Spring

  The 2011 wave of uprisings that toppled four Arab rulers, produced one democracy, two failed states, and a decade of war.

• 

  Person · 1863–1914

  Archduke Franz Ferdinand

  The Austro-Hungarian heir whose assassination triggered World War I, and who, in bitter irony, was the empire's leading advocate for its Slavs.

• 

  Person · 384–322 BC

  Aristotle

  The Greek philosopher whose empirical, cataloging method founded much of Western science and political thought, and who anchored medieval Islamic and European learning.

• 

  Event · 1915-1917

  Armenian Genocide

  The Ottoman destruction of its Armenian population from 1915, in which up to 1.5 million people died, and which Turkey still refuses to call genocide.

• 

  Concept · 1949–2019

  Article 370

  The constitutional clause that gave Jammu and Kashmir special autonomy for seventy years, revoked by India in 2019.

• 

  Person · c. 304–232 BC

  Ashoka the Great

  The Mauryan emperor who conquered nearly all India, then renounced war for Buddhism and rule by moral law; his lion emblem crowns India today.

• 

  Event · 1941

  Attack on Pearl Harbor

  Japan's surprise carrier air raid on the US Pacific Fleet on December 7, 1941, a tactical triumph that pulled America into World War II.

• 

  Person · 63 BCE–14 CE

  Augustus

  Rome's first emperor, Julius Caesar's heir who ended a century of civil war and turned the Republic into a monarchy while pretending to restore it.

• 

  Person · 980–1037

  Avicenna (Ibn Sina)

  Persian physician and philosopher whose Canon of Medicine served as a standard textbook in Europe and the Islamic world for six centuries.

• 

  Concept · 20th century–present

  Ayatollah

  The senior rank of Shia clergy, an academic title that acquired political meaning only in the twentieth century.

• 

  Person · 1902–1989

  Ayatollah Khomeini

  The exiled cleric who led Iran's 1979 revolution and built the world's first modern theocracy, ruling as its Supreme Leader until his death.

• 

  Organization · 1947–present

  Baath Party

  The Arab nationalist movement founded to unify the Arab world that instead produced two rival police states which went to war with each other.

• 

  Concept · 1500s-present

  Balance of Power

  The oldest working idea in European statecraft: when one state gets strong enough to dominate, the others gang up to stop it.

• 

  Event · 1917

  Balfour Declaration

  Britain's 1917 promise to favor a Jewish national home in Palestine; a founding charter to Israelis and a dispossession to Palestinians.

• 

  War · 1912–1913

  Balkan Wars

  Two short wars in 1912 and 1913 that expelled the Ottomans from Europe, doubled Serbia, embittered Bulgaria, and left Europe primed for 1914.

• 

  Event · 1955

  Bandung Conference

  The 1955 meeting of twenty-nine Asian and African states that announced the arrival of the Third World as a bloc with its own agenda.

• 

  Organization · 1694–present

  Bank of England

  The 1694 institution that let a small island out-borrow France for two centuries and invented most of what a central bank does.

• 

  Event · 31 BC

  Battle of Actium

  The 31 BC naval battle where Octavian's admiral Agrippa crushed Antony and Cleopatra, turning Rome from Republic to Empire.

• 

  Event · 216 BC

  Battle of Cannae

  Hannibal's 216 BC masterpiece, where an outnumbered Carthaginian army encircled and annihilated a larger Roman force, the textbook double envelopment.

• 

  Event · 26–30 August 1914

  Battle of Tannenberg

  The annihilation of a Russian army in East Prussia in August 1914, which saved Germany's east, made Hindenburg, and set Russia on the road to 1917.

• 

  Event · 1905

  Battleship Potemkin Mutiny

  The 1905 mutiny aboard a Russian battleship over rotten meat that became the era's symbol of collapsing tsarist authority.

• 

  Event · 1961

  Bay of Pigs Invasion

  The failed 1961 CIA invasion of Cuba by exiles, meant to topple Castro, that humiliated Kennedy and drove Cuba into Soviet arms.

• 

  Concept · 2013-present

  Belt and Road Initiative

  China's global infrastructure program, launched in 2013, which lends money to build ports, railways, and power plants across 150 countries and buys influence with them.

• 

  Person · 1883–1945

  Benito Mussolini

  The Italian socialist turned nationalist who invented fascism, ruled for twenty-one years, and destroyed his country by joining Hitler's war.

• 

  Event · 1948–1949

  Berlin Airlift

  The eleven-month operation that supplied two million blockaded West Berliners entirely by air, and turned a defeated enemy city into an allied one.

• 

  Event · 1884-1885

  Berlin Conference

  The 1884 meeting where fourteen states agreed the rules for taking Africa, with no African present, and turned a scramble into a licensed procedure.

• 

  Concept · 1791

  Bill of Rights

  The first ten amendments to the US Constitution, ratified in 1791, listing the individual liberties the federal government cannot violate.

• 

  Event · 1347–1351

  Black Death

  The plague pandemic of 1347 to 1351 that killed perhaps a third of Europe, carried west along the Silk Roads, and reshaped the medieval world.

• 

  Organization · 1783–present

  Black Sea Fleet

  Russia's southern fleet, based in Crimea since 1783, the reason Moscow wanted the peninsula back, and the force a country with no navy has beaten out of it.

• 

  Doctrine · 1939–1945

  Blitzkrieg

  Germany's method of fast, concentrated combined-arms warfare, massed tanks and dive-bombers linked by radio, that overran Poland and France before either could react.

• 

  Organization · 1903–1952

  Bolsheviks

  Lenin's faction of Russian Marxists, who took their name from a single lost vote in 1903 and the Russian state fourteen years later.

• 

  Event · 1899–1901

  Boxer Rebellion

  The anti-foreign uprising around 1900 that besieged Beijing's foreign legations and drew an eight-nation army to crush it, deepening China's humiliation.

• 

  Concept · 1944–1971

  Bretton Woods System

  The postwar monetary order that pegged world currencies to a gold-backed US dollar and created the IMF and World Bank.

• 

  Event · 2016–2020

  Brexit

  Britain's 2016 vote to leave the European Union and the four years of negotiation that followed, the first time a member state has reversed European integration.

• 

  Doctrine · 1968–1989

  Brezhnev Doctrine

  Moscow's declared right to invade any socialist country whose socialism it judged to be in danger, announced after Czechoslovakia in 1968 and abandoned in 1989.

• 

  Concept · 1858–1947

  British Raj

  Nearly a century of direct British Crown rule over India, 1858 to 1947, the empire's jewel and the template for modern colonial administration.

• 

  Treaty · 1994

  Budapest Memorandum

  The 1994 deal under which Ukraine surrendered the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal for security assurances from Russia, the US, and Britain that later collapsed.

• 

  Concept

  Buffer State

  A country whose main purpose, in the eyes of its powerful neighbors, is to keep them from touching, and whose sovereignty lasts exactly as long as that suits both.

• 

  Concept · feudal–1945

  Bushido

  The samurai code of honor and death before surrender, largely codified in the modern era and weaponized by militarist Japan for wartime sacrifice.

• 

  Place · 330–1453

  Byzantine Empire

  The Greek-speaking eastern half of Rome that outlived the west by a thousand years, from Constantinople's founding in 330 to its fall in 1453.

• 

  Treaty · 1978–1979

  Camp David Accords

  The 1978 deal that took Egypt out of the Arab-Israeli conflict, returned Sinai, won two Nobel Prizes, and cost Anwar Sadat his life.

• 

  Person · 1780–1831

  Carl von Clausewitz

  The Prussian soldier-theorist whose On War (1832) defined war as the continuation of politics by other means, still the most influential book on war.

• 

  Place · 814–146 BCE

  Carthage

  The Phoenician trading empire of North Africa that rivaled Rome for the western Mediterranean until Rome besieged, burned, and erased it in 146 BCE.

• 

  Concept · Ancient–present

  Casus Belli

  The stated justification a state offers for going to war, which is often assembled after the decision to fight has already been made.

• 

  Person · 1853–1902

  Cecil Rhodes

  The British mining magnate who built the De Beers diamond monopoly, ruled the Cape, and carved Rhodesia out of Africa for the empire.

• 

  Concept · 1839–1949

  Century of Humiliation

  China's official name for the era from the Opium Wars to 1949, and the historical frame through which the Communist Party still explains the world.

• 

  Organization · 1960s–present

  Chaebol

  The giant family-controlled conglomerates, Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and others, that were built by state credit and drove South Korea from poverty to riches.

• 

  Person · 747–814

  Charlemagne

  The Frankish king crowned Emperor of the Romans in 800, who united most of Western Europe and is remembered as the Father of Europe.

• 

  Person · 1890–1970

  Charles de Gaulle

  The general who refused to accept France's 1940 defeat and spent thirty years forcing the world, and his allies, to treat France as a great power.

• 

  War · 1994-2009

  Chechen Wars

  Two wars in the Caucasus, from 1994 to 1996 and 1999 to the 2000s, that humiliated the Russian army, flattened a European city, and made Vladimir Putin.

• 

  Person · 1887–1975

  Chiang Kai-shek

  The Nationalist generalissimo who fought Japan, lost China to Mao, and ruled Taiwan under martial law until his death in 1975.

• 

  Doctrine · c. 200 BC–1900s

  Chinese Tributary System

  Imperial China's model of foreign relations: a hierarchy centered on the emperor, not a club of equal states, whose logic still shapes debates about Beijing.

• 

  Organization · 1947–present

  CIA

  America's civilian foreign-intelligence service, famous for both brilliant analysis and Cold War coups, and still Washington's lead for espionage and covert action abroad.

• 

  Person · 106–43 BCE

  Cicero

  Rome's greatest orator and a doomed defender of the dying Republic, whose prose shaped Western political thought.

• 

  Person · 69–30 BC

  Cleopatra VII

  The last pharaoh of Egypt, a Greek-speaking Ptolemaic ruler who allied with Caesar and Antony to keep Rome from swallowing her kingdom.

• 

  Place · 80 AD

  Colosseum

  Rome's Flavian Amphitheatre, the largest ever built, a stone machine for staging gladiators, beast hunts, and executions before fifty thousand spectators.

• 

  Event · 1492–

  Columbian Exchange

  The world-remaking transfer of crops, animals, and diseases between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after 1492, from the potato to smallpox.

• 

  Concept · 1932–1945

  Comfort Women

  The euphemism for the women and girls, by many estimates up to 200,000, forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army.

• 

  Organization · 1919–1943

  Comintern

  Moscow's world revolutionary headquarters from 1919 to 1943, which built communist parties on every continent and subordinated all of them to Soviet foreign policy.

• 

  Concept · 1817-present

  Comparative Advantage

  David Ricardo's proof that two countries both gain from trade even when one of them is better at making everything.

• 

  Person · 551–479 BC

  Confucius

  The wandering teacher whose ethics of virtue and ritual became Han state doctrine and shaped Chinese governance and East Asian culture for two millennia.

• 

  Place · 1885–1908

  Congo Free State

  The African territory King Leopold II owned personally from 1885 to 1908 and ran as a rubber extraction machine that killed on an uncountable scale.

• 

  Event · 1878

  Congress of Berlin

  The 1878 great-power conference that redrew the Balkans over the heads of the people living there, and planted most of the grievances that detonated in 1914.

• 

  Event · 1814–1815

  Congress of Vienna

  The great-power conference that redrew Europe after Napoleon and built a balance-of-power order that kept the continent from general war for a century.

• 

  Concept · 1492-1572

  Conquistadors

  The private Spanish adventurers who toppled the Aztec and Inca empires in a single generation, financed by debt and licensed by a crown that paid them in plunder.

• 

  Concept · 1793–present

  Conscription

  Compulsory military service, the invention that let states field mass armies and made every citizen's body a strategic resource.

• 

  Person · 272–337 CE

  Constantine the Great

  The emperor who converted Rome to Christianity and refounded its capital at Constantinople, reshaping Europe and the Church.

• 

  Concept · 1947–1991

  Containment

  The US Cold War strategy, coined by George Kennan in 1947, of patiently holding the line against Soviet expansion until the system collapsed from within.

• 

  Event · 1815-1846

  Corn Laws

  The British grain tariffs that kept bread expensive until 1846, when repeal split the Conservative party and turned Britain into a free-trade economy.

• 

  Movement · 1400s–present

  Cossacks

  The armed frontier communities of the steppe who began as runaway free men and ended as the tsar's most reliable instrument of repression.

• 

  Concept · 1000s BC–1900s

  Court Eunuchs

  The castrated palace servants who became, in China and the Ottoman Empire alike, the men who actually controlled access to the throne.

• 

  War · 1853-1856

  Crimean War

  The 1853 to 1856 war that pitted Britain, France, and the Ottomans against Russia and broke the system that had kept Europe calm since 1815.

• 

  Technology · 1944-present

  Cruise Missile

  A small pilotless aircraft carrying a warhead, which turned precision bombing into something a government could order without risking a single crew.

• 

  War · 1095–1291

  Crusades

  Two centuries of religiously sanctioned wars to seize the Holy Land, mostly failed, whose memory still fuels rhetoric from Western leaders and jihadists alike.

• 

  Event · 1962

  Cuban Missile Crisis

  The thirteen days in October 1962 when a Soviet nuclear deployment to Cuba brought the superpowers closer to nuclear war than ever before or since.

• 

  Technology · c. 3400 BC–100 AD

  Cuneiform

  The world's first true writing system, developed by Sumerian accountants around 3400 BC to track grain and debts, and the foundation of recorded history.

• 

  Person · c. 600–530 BC

  Cyrus the Great

  The Persian king who founded the Achaemenid Empire, the largest yet seen, and pioneered ruling many peoples through tolerance rather than terror.

• 

  Event · 6 June 1944

  D-Day (Normandy Landings)

  The 6 June 1944 amphibious invasion of Normandy that opened the Western front against Germany and, in doing so, decided where the Iron Curtain would fall.

• 

  Person · 1813–1873

  David Livingstone

  The Scottish missionary-explorer whose celebrated African journeys fired British imagination and helped open the continent to the imperial scramble that followed.

• 

  Technology · 1985–present

  Dead Hand (Perimeter)

  The Soviet Perimeter system, a semi-automatic command network built to guarantee nuclear retaliation even if a first strike kills the leadership.

• 

  Event · 1825

  Decembrist Revolt

  The 1825 uprising by liberal Russian officers that failed in hours and became the founding myth of the Russian revolutionary tradition.

• 

  Place · 1206–1526

  Delhi Sultanate

  The Turkic and Afghan sultanate that ruled northern India for three centuries before the Mughals, and kept the Mongols out of it.

• 

  Person · 1904–1997

  Deng Xiaoping

  The pragmatic survivor who, after Mao, opened China to markets and lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, while ordering the tanks at Tiananmen.

• 

  Concept · 14th–17th century

  Devshirme

  The Ottoman child levy that took Christian boys from Balkan villages and turned enslavement into the surest ladder to imperial power.

• 

  Doctrine · antiquity–present

  Divide and Rule

  Keeping a subject population fragmented and turned against itself so it cannot unite against the ruler. Modern empires refined it; its fault lines still bleed.

• 

  Doctrine · 1954–1975

  Domino Theory

  The Cold War belief that one country falling to communism would topple its neighbors in sequence, which justified American wars in Korea and Vietnam.

• 

  Person · 1880–1964

  Douglas MacArthur

  The American general who rebuilt Japan as a democracy, saved South Korea with one brilliant landing, and was fired for refusing to accept that a president outranks a general.

• 

  Technology · 1906–1922

  Dreadnought

  The 1906 British battleship that made every other warship afloat obsolete, including Britain's own, and set off the naval race to 1914.

• 

  Organization · 1602–1799

  Dutch East India Company

  The 1602 Dutch trading company that invented the publicly traded corporation and used it to conquer the spice islands.

• 

  Concept · 1600–1874

  East India Company

  The private British trading corporation, chartered in 1600, that conquered and governed India with its own army until the Crown took over in 1858.

• 

  Concept · 1919-present

  Economic Sanctions

  Cutting off trade, money, or technology to force a government to change course: the most used tool in modern statecraft, and one that usually fails.

• 

  Technology · c. 3200 BC–400 AD

  Egyptian Hieroglyphs

  The writing system of ancient Egypt, part picture part alphabet, lost for 1,400 years until the Rosetta Stone let scholars read 3,000 years of history.

• 

  Place · 1892-1954

  Ellis Island

  The New York harbor station where 12 million immigrants were inspected, tagged, and admitted or turned back between 1892 and 1954.

• 

  Event · 1863

  Emancipation Proclamation

  Lincoln's 1863 war order that declared slaves in the rebel states free, turning the Civil War into a war to end slavery.

• 

  Person · 1901–1989

  Emperor Hirohito

  Japan's emperor from 1926 to 1989, the divine sovereign in whose name the Pacific War was fought and whom the US kept on the throne.

• 

  Person · 1835–1908

  Empress Dowager Cixi

  The teenage concubine who ruled China from behind the throne for nearly half a century, presiding over the Qing dynasty's terminal decline.

• 

  Technology · 1918-1945

  Enigma and Bletchley Park

  The German cipher machine considered unbreakable, and the Polish and British effort that broke it anyway and read the enemy's mail for most of the war.

• 

  Movement · 1685–1815

  Enlightenment

  The 17th and 18th century movement that made reason, not kings or scripture, the judge of truth and government, and helped topple thrones.

• 

  Person · 1901–1954

  Enrico Fermi

  The Italian-American physicist, a rare master of both theory and experiment, who built the first nuclear reactor and achieved the first controlled chain reaction.

• 

  Concept · 1950s–present

  Eurodollars

  US dollars held and lent outside the United States, an unregulated offshore money system that grew larger than the onshore one and that nobody planned.

• 

  Event · 2013–2014

  Euromaidan Revolution

  The winter 2013-14 uprising in Kyiv that toppled Ukraine's pro-Russian president and set the country on a collision course with Moscow.

• 

  Technology · 2019–present

  EUV Lithography

  The near-impossible machine, built only by ASML, that prints the world's most advanced chips with 13.5-nanometer light, now a geopolitical chokepoint.

• 

  Organization · 1957–present

  Fairchild Semiconductor

  The 1957 startup founded by eight defectors from Shockley's lab that invented the mass-produced chip and seeded Silicon Valley's entire family tree.

• 

  War · 1982

  Falklands War

  The ten-week war of 1982 in which Britain retook South Atlantic islands 8,000 miles away, destroying Argentina's junta and saving Margaret Thatcher's government.

• 

  Movement · 1919–1945

  Fascism

  The interwar movement that promised national rebirth through a single party, a leader, and violence, and defined itself by what it hated.

• 

  Concept · 1787–1788

  Federalist Papers

  The 85 newspaper essays written under a pseudonym to sell New York on the Constitution, now the closest thing America has to an owner's manual for it.

• 

  Person · 1469–1516

  Ferdinand and Isabella

  The Catholic Monarchs whose 1469 marriage joined Castile and Aragon and whose single year of 1492 remade Spain and the world.

• 

  Concept · 9th–15th century

  Feudalism

  The decentralized order of lords, vassals, and serfs that filled the vacuum when central government collapsed in post-Roman Europe.

• 

  Concept · 1000s-present

  Fiat Money

  Money that has value because a government says so and people accept it, not because it can be exchanged for gold.

• 

  Person · 1926–2016

  Fidel Castro

  The revolutionary who ruled Cuba for nearly fifty years, defied the United States, delivered literacy and health care, and built a repressive one-party state.

• 

  Technology · 1981–present

  FIM-92 Stinger

  A shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile that lets one soldier down a helicopter or jet, from the Afghan mujahideen in 1986 to Ukraine today.

• 

  Concept · 1948-2023

  Finlandization

  The bargain in which a small country keeps its independence and democracy by letting a large neighbor set the limits of its foreign policy.

• 

  Organization · 1946–present

  Five Eyes

  The intelligence alliance of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, who share signals intelligence so completely it arguably binds them tighter than NATO.

• 

  Concept · 1928-1991

  Five-Year Plan

  Stalin's instrument for turning a peasant country into an industrial power in a decade, which worked, and which cost millions of lives to do it.

• 

  Concept · 1987–present

  Foundry Model

  The split of the chip industry into companies that design and companies that manufacture, which made modern semiconductors possible and concentrated them in Taiwan.

• 

  Doctrine · 1918

  Fourteen Points

  Woodrow Wilson's January 1918 program for a just peace, whose call for self-determination and a League of Nations reshaped how the world talks about order.

• 

  War · 1870-1871

  Franco-Prussian War

  The ten-month war of 1870 that destroyed the French Second Empire, created Germany in the Hall of Mirrors, and planted the grievance that ran straight into 1914.

• 

  Person · 1882–1945

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  The president who remade the American state during the Depression, led it through the Second World War, and died four months before victory.

• 

  Person · 1918–1970

  Gamal Abdel Nasser

  The Egyptian colonel who nationalized the Suez Canal, made pan-Arabism a mass movement, and lost it all in six days in 1967.

• 

  Organization · 1966–1976

  Gang of Four

  The four radical leaders, led by Mao's last wife Jiang Qing, who drove the Cultural Revolution's fanatical phase and were scapegoated for it.

• 

  Organization · 1947–1994

  GATT

  The 1947 treaty that cut tariffs through negotiating rounds and became the free-trade backbone of the postwar order, evolving into the WTO.

• 

  Person · 1894–1918

  Gavrilo Princip

  The nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist whose two pistol shots in Sarajevo killed an archduke and helped trigger the First World War.

• 

  Person · c. 1162–1227

  Genghis Khan

  The outcast Temujin who united the steppe tribes and founded the largest contiguous land empire in history.

• 

  Person · 1732–1799

  George Washington

  The Continental Army commander and first US president whose genius was patience, and who twice gave up power in an age of would-be kings.

• 

  Event · 1863

  Gettysburg Address

  The 272-word, two-minute speech in which Lincoln recast the Civil War as a test of whether democracy could survive.

• 

  Concept · 3rd century BC–5th century AD

  Gladiators

  Rome's arena fighters, mostly enslaved captives and criminals trained as specialized professionals, whose staged combat became a tool of mass politics.

• 

  Concept · 1870s–1971

  Gold Standard

  A monetary system that fixed each currency to a set weight of gold, so paper money was redeemable for metal on demand.

• 

  Place · 1240s–1502

  Golden Horde

  The Mongol khanate that ruled the Russian principalities for roughly 240 years, and in doing so built the state that became Muscovy.

• 

  Concept · 1320s–1922

  Grand Vizier

  The Ottoman sultan's all-powerful deputy, who ran the empire day to day and was executed for its failures often enough to make the job lethal.

• 

  Event · 1929–1939

  Great Depression

  The decade-long global collapse that destroyed a quarter of American employment, killed free trade, and put fascism within reach of power.

• 

  Place · c. 2560 BC

  Great Pyramid of Giza

  The largest Giza pyramid, a 2560 BC tomb for pharaoh Khufu and the only surviving ancient wonder, built as pure state power in stone.

• 

  Place · 7th century BC–1600s AD

  Great Wall of China

  Not one wall but two thousand years of frontier fortifications across northern China, built to slow steppe raiders, not to seal the country off.

• 

  Place · c. 1100–1450

  Great Zimbabwe

  A medieval Shona stone city in southern Africa, grown rich on gold and cattle, whose name and stone bird became a nation's symbol.

• 

  War · 499–449 BC

  Greco-Persian Wars

  The wars in which small Greek city-states twice repelled invasion by the vast Persian Empire, later mythologized as the West's founding stand for freedom.

• 

  Event · 1940s–1970s

  Green Revolution

  The mid-century spread of high-yield wheat and rice that multiplied harvests, is credited with saving a billion from famine, and reframed food security.

• 

  Person · 1869–1916

  Grigori Rasputin

  A Siberian peasant mystic whose sway over Russia's last empress, through her hemophiliac son, helped discredit the monarchy on the eve of revolution.

• 

  Concept · 1808–present

  Guerrilla Warfare

  War fought by the weak against the strong through ambush, dispersal, and refusal to hold ground, named for Spanish irregulars fighting Napoleon.

• 

  Technology · 1792–1977

  Guillotine

  The beheading machine designed as a humane, egalitarian reform that became the industrial symbol of the Reign of Terror, and served France until 1977.

• 

  Organization · 1930-1960

  Gulag

  The Soviet forced-labor camp system through which roughly eighteen million people passed, built to punish, to terrify, and to supply unpaid workers.

• 

  Technology · 9th century–

  Gunpowder

  The Chinese-invented explosive that let cannon shatter castle and city walls, ending the fortified feudal lord and centralizing power in gunpowder-armed states.

• 

  Technology · 1909-present

  Haber-Bosch Process

  The reaction that pulls fertilizer out of thin air, feeds about half the people alive, and kept German artillery firing through the First World War.

• 

  Organization · 1273–1918

  Habsburg Dynasty

  The European dynasty that used marriage instead of war to assemble an empire from Madrid to Vienna, and ruled parts of it for six centuries.

• 

  Concept · 600s–present

  Hadith

  The reported sayings and actions of Muhammad, the second source of Islamic law, and the most contested body of text in the Muslim world.

• 

  Place · 537–present

  Hagia Sophia

  The sixth-century Byzantine cathedral in Istanbul that became a mosque, then a museum, then a mosque again, each change announcing who owned the city.

• 

  Event · 1791–1804

  Haitian Revolution

  The only slave revolt in history to found a state, which destroyed Napoleon's American empire and was punished for it for 140 years.

• 

  Person · 1861–1947

  Halford Mackinder

  The British geographer whose 1904 'Heartland' thesis argued that whoever controls the Eurasian interior controls the world, founding modern geopolitics.

• 

  Person · 247–183 BCE

  Hannibal

  The Carthaginian general who marched elephants over the Alps and shattered Rome's armies at Cannae, yet could never take the city and lost the war.

• 

  Person · 1904–1980

  Hans Morgenthau

  The German-Jewish emigre who founded modern American realism; his 1948 Politics Among Nations argued that world politics is a permanent struggle for power.

• 

  Person · 1884–1972

  Harry Truman

  The unprepared vice president who inherited the presidency in 1945 and, in under eight years, built the institutions that fought the Cold War for forty.

• 

  Treaty · 1975

  Helsinki Accords

  The 1975 agreement in which the West recognized Europe's postwar borders and the Soviet bloc signed a human rights clause its own citizens then used against it.

• 

  Person · 1923–2023

  Henry Kissinger

  The refugee academic who ran American foreign policy from 1969 to 1977 and made realism, and its costs, the house style of US statecraft.

• 

  Concept · 874–present

  Hidden Imam

  The twelfth Shia imam, believed to have gone into hiding in 874 and to be alive still, whose absence left a question about who may legitimately rule.

• 

  Person · 1884–1948

  Hideki Tojo

  The general who led Japan as prime minister through most of the Pacific War and was hanged as a war criminal in 1948.

• 

  Technology · 2005-present

  HIMARS

  The truck-mounted rocket launcher that let Ukraine hit Russian depots and headquarters with precision from 50 miles away, and shoot before anyone could shoot back.

• 

  Place · c. 1650–1180 BC

  Hittites

  The Bronze Age superpower of Anatolia that rivaled Egypt, produced history's first surviving peace treaty, then collapsed around 1180 BC and was forgotten for millennia.

• 

  Person · 1890–1969

  Ho Chi Minh

  The Vietnamese revolutionary who spent fifty years pursuing independence, quoted Jefferson to declare it, and was read by Washington as a communist domino instead.

• 

  Event · 1941–1945

  Holocaust

  Nazi Germany's systematic, state-organized murder of six million Jews, two-thirds of European Jewry, between 1941 and 1945, alongside millions of other victims.

• 

  Event · 1932–1933

  Holodomor

  Stalin's man-made famine of 1932-33 that starved millions of Ukrainians during forced collectivization; whether it was genocide is still fiercely debated.

• 

  Organization · 800–1806

  Holy Roman Empire

  The thousand-year elective confederation over central Europe that was neither a state nor a nation, and whose fragmentation shaped Germany and Europe.

• 

  War · 1337-1453

  Hundred Years' War

  The 116-year English attempt to take the French throne, which England lost, and which turned two feudal kingdoms into rival nation-states.

• 

  Concept

  Hyperinflation

  The point at which a currency stops being money, conventionally when prices rise more than fifty percent a month. It signals a state that cannot fund itself.

• 

  Technology · 1957-present

  ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile)

  The rocket that put any point on earth thirty minutes from any other, abolishing the distance that had protected great powers for all of previous history.

• 

  Concept · 1983

  Imagined Communities

  Benedict Anderson's idea that a nation is a community imagined by strangers, built by mass print media, not an ancient inheritance, reframing all nationalism.

• 

  Concept · 605–1905

  Imperial Examination (Keju)

  The Chinese exam system that selected officials by written test for thirteen centuries, creating a ruling class of scholars rather than nobles.

• 

  Event · 1857–1858

  Indian Rebellion of 1857

  The vast 1857 uprising against East India Company rule that was crushed but ended the Company and brought India under direct British Crown rule.

• 

  Place · c. 3300–1300 BC

  Indus Valley Civilization

  One of the world's three earliest urban civilizations: grid cities and advanced plumbing along the Indus, with no kings, no armies, and an unread script.

• 

  Treaty · 1987-2019

  INF Treaty

  The 1987 agreement that abolished an entire class of nuclear weapons, verified by inspectors living at each other's factories, and that the United States quit in 2019.

• 

  Treaty · 1947

  Instrument of Accession

  The 1947 document by which Kashmir's Hindu maharaja joined Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir to India, the contested paper at the root of the dispute.

• 

  Event · 1985–1987

  Iran-Contra Affair

  The Reagan administration's secret sale of missiles to Iran, whose proceeds were diverted to fund Nicaraguan rebels Congress had explicitly refused to pay for.

• 

  War · 1980–1988

  Iran-Iraq War

  The eight-year war Saddam Hussein's Iraq launched against revolutionary Iran in 1980, one of the century's longest and bloodiest, ending in stalemate.

• 

  Person · 1904–1967

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  The brilliant, complicated theoretical physicist who directed Los Alamos and built the first atomic bomb, then was ruined in a 1954 security hearing.

• 

  Technology · 1958–1959

  Jack Kilby

  The 1958-59 invention that put a whole electronic circuit on one sliver of semiconductor, launching the microchip and the entire digital age.

• 

  Organization · 14th–19th century

  Janissaries

  The Ottoman sultan's elite slave-soldier infantry, raised from Christian boys through the devshirme, and one of Europe's first standing professional armies.

• 

  Person · 1889–1964

  Jawaharlal Nehru

  India's first prime minister, who built its democracy and its planned economy and invented non-alignment as a foreign policy.

• 

  Treaty · 2015–2025

  JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal)

  The 2015 deal in which Iran capped its nuclear program for sanctions relief, undone by the US withdrawal in 2018 and formally dead by 2025.

• 

  Concept · 7th century–present

  Jihad

  An Arabic word meaning struggle, running from private moral effort to sanctioned warfare, and fought over hardest by Muslims themselves.

• 

  Concept · 1877–1965

  Jim Crow

  The system of laws and customs that enforced racial segregation and Black disenfranchisement across the American South from 1877 to the 1960s.

• 

  Concept · 630s–1800s

  Jizya

  The tax non-Muslims paid for protected status in Islamic states, which funded the conquests and made mass conversion a fiscal problem.

• 

  Person · 1632–1704

  John Locke

  The English physician and philosopher who argued that government exists only by consent and may be overthrown when it fails, supplying the vocabulary of every liberal revolution since.

• 

  Person · 1883–1946

  John Maynard Keynes

  The British economist who argued governments should spend to fight slumps, founding modern macroeconomics and shaping the postwar financial order.

• 

  Person · 1878–1953

  Joseph Stalin

  The Soviet dictator who forced industrialization, engineered mass famine and terror, beat Hitler at staggering cost, and built the Cold War order.

• 

  Person · 1892-1980

  Josip Broz Tito

  The partisan leader who built a communist state outside Moscow's control, held six nations together for thirty-five years, and left a country that could not survive him.

• 

  Person · 100–44 BC

  Julius Caesar

  The general who conquered Gaul and crossed the Rubicon, making himself dictator for life and breaking the 500-year Roman Republic.

• 

  Person · 1859–1941

  Kaiser Wilhelm II

  Germany's last emperor, whose vanity and reckless bluster helped wreck Bismarck's diplomacy, provoke Britain, and steer Europe into the First World War.

• 

  War · 1999

  Kargil War

  The 1999 high-altitude clash in Kashmir, the first shooting war between two declared nuclear powers, fought over peaks above 16,000 feet.

• 

  Person · 1818-1883

  Karl Marx

  The exiled German journalist whose theory of history became the official doctrine of a third of humanity within seventy years of his death.

• 

  Person · 1924–2013

  Kenneth Waltz

  The founder of neorealism, who argued that the anarchic structure of the international system, not human nature, drives states, and that bipolarity is stable.

• 

  Organization · 1954–1991

  KGB

  The Soviet Union's foreign spy service and domestic secret police from 1954 to 1991, whose veterans, including Vladimir Putin, still shape Russia.

• 

  Movement · 657–present

  Kharijites

  The seventh-century faction that declared judgment belongs to God alone, killed the caliph Ali, and invented the logic every modern jihadist group uses.

• 

  Movement · 1968–1999

  Khmer Rouge

  The Cambodian communist movement that emptied the cities in 1975, declared Year Zero, and killed roughly a quarter of the population in under four years.

• 

  Place · c. 880–1240

  Kievan Rus

  The medieval river-state ruled from Kyiv that Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all claim as their common ancestor, a claim now weaponized.

• 

  Organization · 1948–present

  Kim Dynasty

  The world's only Communist hereditary dynasty, three generations of the Kim family who have ruled North Korea since 1948.

• 

  Place · c. 100–940 AD

  Kingdom of Aksum

  The Christian trading empire of the Ethiopian highlands that a Persian prophet ranked beside Rome, Persia, and China, and minted sub-Saharan Africa's first coins.

• 

  Person · 1911–1988

  Klaus Fuchs

  German-born Manhattan Project physicist and committed communist who handed the Soviet Union the plutonium bomb design, ending the American nuclear monopoly early.

• 

  Movement · 1997–present

  Korean Wave (Hallyu)

  South Korea's state-nurtured export of pop culture, from BTS to Squid Game, turning a mid-sized country into a soft-power heavyweight.

• 

  Organization · 1912–present

  Kuomintang (KMT)

  China's Nationalist Party: it founded the Republic, lost a civil war to Mao, fled to Taiwan in 1949, and became a democratic party there.

• 

  Person · 1909–1972

  Kwame Nkrumah

  Ghana's founding leader, the prophet of Pan-African unity who won Africa's first independence and then dismantled his own democracy.

• 

  Organization · 1919–1945

  Kwantung Army

  The elite, fiercely independent Japanese army in Manchuria that repeatedly dragged Japan into wider war by acting on its own.

• 

  Event · c. 1200-1150 BC

  Late Bronze Age Collapse

  The rapid fall around 1200 BC of the connected Bronze Age civilizations, history's classic warning about how an interdependent world can unravel all at once.

• 

  Person · 1888–1935

  Lawrence of Arabia

  The British officer and archaeologist who helped lead the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans and became the legend called Lawrence of Arabia.

• 

  Organization · 1920–1946

  League of Nations

  The first permanent organization built to prevent war through collective security; it failed the 1930s and became the model and warning for the United Nations.

• 

  Person · 1923–2020

  Lee Teng-hui

  The Cornell-educated economist who turned Taiwan from a one-party dictatorship into a democracy and became its first directly elected president in 1996.

• 

  Doctrine · 4th–3rd century BC

  Legalism

  The hard-nosed Chinese philosophy of strict law and centralized power that built the Qin empire and became the hidden skeleton of Chinese statecraft.

• 

  Concept · 1941–1945

  Lend-Lease

  The 1941 program that let America arm the Allies without joining the war, and quietly bought the dismantling of the British Empire.

• 

  Person · 1879–1940

  Leon Trotsky

  Lenin's right hand and the Red Army's founder, the brilliant revolutionary Stalin out-maneuvered, erased from history, and finally had killed in exile.

• 

  Person · 1785–1850

  Lin Zexu

  The upright Qing commissioner whose 1839 destruction of British opium triggered the First Opium War, later rehabilitated as a hero of Chinese resistance.

• 

  Place · 1949–present

  Line of Control

  The militarized de facto line dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan, a ceasefire front that neither side accepts as a real border.

• 

  Technology · 1945

  Little Boy and Fat Man

  The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945: a simple uranium gun bomb and a complex plutonium implosion device.

• 

  Event · c. 1300-1850

  Little Ice Age

  A centuries-long cold spell (c. 1300-1850) whose crop failures helped topple governments from Ming China to Europe.

• 

  Event · 1934–1935

  Long March

  The Chinese Red Army's ~6,000-mile fighting retreat from Nationalist encirclement; a military catastrophe the Party rebuilt into its founding legend.

• 

  Place · 1943–present

  Los Alamos

  The secret New Mexico mesa where Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project designed and built the first atomic bombs, a city that officially did not exist.

• 

  Person · 1869–1948

  Mahatma Gandhi

  The lawyer-turned-ascetic who led India out of the British Empire and made nonviolent civil disobedience a weapon that outlived him worldwide.

• 

  Place · 1932–1945

  Manchukuo

  The puppet state Japan carved out of Manchuria in 1932, ruled in name by the last Qing emperor but controlled by the Kwantung Army.

• 

  Doctrine · c. 1046 BC–1912

  Mandate of Heaven

  The ancient Chinese doctrine that Heaven grants rule to the just and strips it from the corrupt, making legitimacy conditional on good government.

• 

  Doctrine · 1840s

  Manifest Destiny

  The mid-1800s belief that the United States was providentially destined to expand across North America, used to justify conquest from Texas to California.

• 

  Person · 1254–1324

  Marco Polo

  The Venetian merchant whose account of seventeen years in Mongol China gave Europe its first detailed picture of Asia, and Columbus his motive.

• 

  Person · 121–180 CE

  Marcus Aurelius

  The Stoic philosopher-king who ruled at Rome's height, fought endless frontier wars, and left a timeless private journal.

• 

  Person · c. 83–30 BC

  Mark Antony

  Caesar's best general and worst-remembered heir, who lost the Roman world to a sickly twenty-something and got written out of history by the winner.

• 

  Event · 1948–1952

  Marshall Plan

  The roughly $13 billion American aid program that rebuilt Western Europe after 1945 and walled it off from Soviet communism.

• 

  Person · 1929–1968

  Martin Luther King Jr.

  The Baptist minister who made nonviolent mass protest work against American segregation, and whose victory Washington then spent decades advertising abroad.

• 

  Person · 1794–1858

  Matthew Perry and the Black Ships

  The American commodore who sailed four warships into Edo Bay in 1853 and forced Japan open, setting off the fastest national transformation in modern history.

• 

  War · 1952–1960

  Mau Mau Uprising

  The Kikuyu revolt against white settler rule in Kenya, and the brutal counterinsurgency Britain spent fifty years hiding the records of.

• 

  Person · 1758–1794

  Maximilien Robespierre

  The incorruptible lawyer who led the Committee of Public Safety and the Reign of Terror, then was guillotined without trial by the revolution he purified.

• 

  Person · 1432–1481

  Mehmed II the Conqueror

  The Ottoman sultan who took Constantinople in 1453 at age 21, ending the thousand-year Byzantine Empire and recasting himself as heir to Rome.

• 

  Doctrine · c. 1500–1800

  Mercantilism

  The doctrine that national wealth is a fixed hoard to be captured from rivals, which built Europe's empires and justified their trade monopolies.

• 

  Organization · 1909–present

  MI6 (SIS)

  Britain's foreign intelligence service, the world's oldest, which denied its own existence until 1994 and inspired James Bond while quietly running real spies.

• 

  Person · 1931–2022

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  The last Soviet leader, whose glasnost and perestroika reforms meant to save communism instead dissolved it and ended the Cold War peacefully.

• 

  Concept · 15th–20th century

  Millet System

  The Ottoman method of ruling a multi-religious empire by organizing subjects into self-governing faith communities, tolerant by its age yet fatally divisive.

• 

  Person · 1882–1967

  Mohammad Mosaddegh

  Iran's elected prime minister who nationalized British-controlled oil in 1951 and was toppled by a CIA- and MI6-backed coup in 1953.

• 

  Person · 1919–1980

  Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi

  Iran's last shah, the US-backed monarch whose modernizing but repressive rule collapsed in the 1979 revolution, leaving him to die in exile.

• 

  Treaty · 1939

  Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

  The August 1939 non-aggression treaty between sworn enemies Nazi Germany and the USSR that secretly divided Eastern Europe and unleashed World War II.

• 

  Concept · 1823

  Monroe Doctrine

  America's 1823 warning that Europe must stay out of the Western Hemisphere, later inverted into a claimed US right to intervene across Latin America.

• 

  Treaty · 1936

  Montreux Convention

  The 1936 treaty that gave Turkey sovereign control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, including the power to close the straits to warships in wartime.

• 

  Concept · 1965–present

  Moore's Law

  The industry's self-fulfilling prophecy that chips double their transistor count roughly every two years, the metronome that drove fifty years of exponential computing.

• 

  Person · 1931-present

  Morris Chang

  The Texas Instruments executive who, passed over for the top job, moved to Taiwan and invented the foundry business that now makes the world's advanced chips.

• 

  Organization · 1949–present

  Mossad

  Israel's foreign intelligence and covert-action service, among the world's most aggressive, famed for operations like the Eichmann capture and the shadow war on Iran.

• 

  Place · 1526–1857

  Mughal Empire

  The Turco-Mongol dynasty that ruled most of India from 1526 to 1857, and whose slow collapse handed the subcontinent to Britain.

• 

  Person · 1876–1948

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah

  The secular Bombay barrister who spent his career on Hindu-Muslim unity and then created Pakistan, the largest state ever founded on religious identity.

• 

  Person · 1881-1938

  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

  The Ottoman general who saved a Turkish state from the wreck of the empire and then rebuilt its alphabet, law, dress, and religion by decree.

• 

  Doctrine · 1960s-present

  Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)

  The nuclear standoff in which each side can destroy the other even after absorbing a surprise attack, so striking first buys nothing.

• 

  Person · 1769-1821

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  The artillery officer who made himself emperor of France, conquered most of Europe, and lost it all in Russia.

• 

  Concept · 1804

  Napoleonic Code

  Napoleon's 1804 civil code that replaced feudal law with legal equality and secure property, and became the template for civil-law systems worldwide.

• 

  Place · 2000s–present

  Natanz

  Iran's largest, heavily fortified uranium-enrichment site, sabotaged for two decades and then bombed by the United States and Israel in 2025 and 2026.

• 

  Doctrine · 1789-present

  Nationalism

  The claim that humanity divides naturally into nations and that each nation deserves its own state, an idea barely two centuries old that redrew every map on earth.

• 

  Person · 1918-2013

  Nelson Mandela

  The ANC leader who spent 27 years in prison and then negotiated the end of apartheid instead of the civil war everyone expected.

• 

  Person · 1469-1527

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  The Florentine official who wrote down how rulers actually take and keep power, and whose name became an insult for saying it out loud.

• 

  Person · 1868–1918

  Nicholas II

  The last Russian emperor, whose refusal to share power with anyone destroyed a three-hundred-year dynasty and his family with it.

• 

  Person · 1893–1943

  Nicholas Spykman

  The Yale realist who argued the coastal 'Rimland,' not the Heartland, was the key to Eurasia, prefiguring America's Cold War containment perimeter.

• 

  Person · 1894–1971

  Nikita Khrushchev

  The coal miner's son who ran the USSR from 1953 to 1964, denounced Stalin, thawed and nearly detonated the Cold War, then was quietly ousted.

• 

  Event · 1971

  Nixon Shock

  Nixon's surprise 1971 decision to stop converting dollars into gold, which ended the Bretton Woods system and created today's floating-currency world.

• 

  Concept · 1914–1918

  No Man's Land

  The cratered, wire-strewn strip between opposing trenches on the Western Front, and the defining image of the First World War's futility.

• 

  Event · 1945–1946

  Nuremberg Trials

  The 1945 tribunal that tried Nazi leaders for aggression and atrocity, inventing the idea that losing a war can be a crime.

• 

  Person · 1599-1658

  Oliver Cromwell

  The obscure country gentleman who beat a king in battle, signed his death warrant, and then ruled England himself as a military dictator in all but name.

• 

  Doctrine · 1949–present

  One China Policy

  The formula that there is only one China, meaning subtly different things to Beijing and Washington, that frames the entire Taiwan dispute.

• 

  Doctrine · 1984-present

  One Country, Two Systems

  Deng Xiaoping's formula for absorbing Hong Kong, Macau, and eventually Taiwan while leaving their systems intact, until Beijing broke it in Hong Kong by 2020.

• 

  Doctrine · 1979–2015

  One-Child Policy

  China's 1979–2015 limit of one child per couple, the largest state control of reproduction ever, now blamed for its looming demographic cliff.

• 

  War · 1839–1860

  Opium Wars

  Two mid-1800s wars in which Britain forced China to keep its markets open to opium, the opening blow of the century of humiliation.

• 

  Concept · 1565–1572

  Oprichnina

  Ivan the Terrible's seven-year reign of terror against his own realm, widely seen as Russia's first experiment in state terror.

• 

  Event · 2004–2005

  Orange Revolution

  The peaceful 2004-05 mass protests that overturned a rigged Ukrainian election, made Viktor Yushchenko president, and alarmed a Kremlin fearful of color revolutions.

• 

  Organization · 1090–1256

  Order of Assassins

  The Nizari Ismaili sect that ran a network of mountain fortresses and used targeted killing as a substitute for an army, giving the world the word assassin.

• 

  Person · 1815–1898

  Otto von Bismarck

  The Prussian who unified Germany through three engineered wars, then kept Europe peaceful for two decades with an alliance system that collapsed after his dismissal.

• 

  Place · 1953–present

  Panmunjom

  The truce village in the Korean DMZ where the 1953 armistice was signed and North and South still meet among blue huts.

• 

  Organization · 1st century–present

  Papacy

  The office of the bishop of Rome, for a thousand years the only universal authority in Europe and still a sovereign state with global reach.

• 

  Event · 1947

  Partition of India

  The 1947 British division of colonial India into India and Pakistan, whose rushed borders triggered mass migration and communal killing on a historic scale.

• 

  Concept · 27 BC–180 AD

  Pax Romana

  Rome's two centuries of internal peace and prosperity, 27 BC to AD 180, enforced by the legions and undone by its lack of orderly succession.

• 

  Treaty · 1713

  Peace of Utrecht

  The 1713 treaties ending the War of the Spanish Succession, the first European settlement to make the balance of power an explicit goal.

• 

  Treaty · 1648

  Peace of Westphalia

  The web of 1648 treaties that ended the Thirty Years' War and enshrined territorial sovereignty as the operating principle of the modern state system.

• 

  Event · 431–404 BC

  Peloponnesian War

  The 27-year war between Athens and Sparta, turned by Thucydides into realism's founding text and the archetype of a rising power alarming an established rival.

• 

  Concept · 1985–1991

  Perestroika and Glasnost

  Gorbachev's twin reforms, openness (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika), meant to save Soviet communism but instead hastened its 1991 collapse.

• 

  Concept · 1795–present

  Perpetual Peace

  Kant's 1795 essay arguing that republics would not fight each other; the intellectual root of liberal internationalism and modern democratic peace theory.

• 

  Place · c. 518–330 BC

  Persepolis

  The Achaemenid Persian Empire's ceremonial capital: a stone stage for imperial ritual, burned by Alexander in 330 BC, now Iran's proudest ruin.

• 

  Concept · 1974–present

  Petrodollar

  The arrangement, dating from the 1970s, by which the world prices and pays for oil in US dollars, anchoring the dollar's global dominance.

• 

  Person · c. 428–348 BC

  Plato

  Socrates' student and the West's most influential philosopher, who founded the Academy and designed rule by philosopher-kings in The Republic.

• 

  Organization · 1964-present

  PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization)

  The umbrella body that invented a Palestinian address in world politics, won recognition as the Palestinians' sole representative, and never converted it into a state.

• 

  Technology · 1915–1918

  Poison Gas in WWI

  The chemical weapon that made the First World War a byword for industrial cruelty, from chlorine clouds at Ypres to blistering mustard gas.

• 

  Organization · 1917–present

  Politburo

  The small committee at the top of a communist party where real power sat, above governments that existed mainly to execute its decisions.

• 

  Place · 79 AD

  Pompeii

  The Roman town buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD, whose burial preserved it, giving us our most vivid window into everyday Roman life.

• 

  Event · 17 July – 2 August 1945

  Potsdam Conference

  The last wartime summit, held in a defeated Germany in July 1945, where the alliance divided Europe and the Cold War became visible.

• 

  Organization · 27 BC–312 AD

  Praetorian Guard

  The emperor's elite bodyguard and the most powerful armed force in Rome, who over three centuries went from protecting rulers to assassinating them and auctioning the empire.

• 

  Event · 1968

  Prague Spring

  The 1968 attempt to build socialism with a human face in Czechoslovakia, crushed by a Warsaw Pact invasion of half a million troops.

• 

  Technology · 1440s–

  Printing Press

  Gutenberg's movable-type press (c. 1440) that made text cheap for the first time, triggering the Reformation, modern science, and mass politics.

• 

  Concept · 1945-present

  Proxy War

  A conflict in which two powers fight through somebody else's army, the standard form of great power confrontation since 1945.

• 

  War · 264–146 BCE

  Punic Wars

  Three wars between Rome and Carthage from 264 to 146 BCE that decided the western Mediterranean and made Rome an imperial power.

• 

  Person · 1906–1967

  Puyi

  China's last emperor, enthroned as a toddler and forced to abdicate at six, who ended his life as a gardener under Mao.

• 

  Person · 1957–2020

  Qassem Soleimani

  The shadowy Quds Force commander who ran Iran's proxy wars for two decades, until a US drone killed him in Baghdad in January 2020.

• 

  Person · 259–210 BC

  Qin Shi Huang

  The king of Qin who unified China in 221 BC as its First Emperor, forging the centralized state that has reassembled itself ever since.

• 

  Person · 1819–1901

  Queen Victoria

  The queen whose 63-year reign named an age and who reigned, largely as symbol, over the British Empire near the height of its global power.

• 

  Concept · 400s–1200s

  Quraysh

  Muhammad's own tribe, who ran Mecca, fought him for two decades, then converted and supplied nearly every caliph for six centuries.

• 

  Organization · 1949–present

  Radio Free Europe

  US-funded Cold War radio that beamed uncensored home-country news into the Soviet bloc, giving people behind the Iron Curtain the truth their regimes hid.

• 

  Event · 1517–1648

  Reformation

  The 16th-century split that shattered Western Christianity, spread by the printing press, and set off a century of religious war that reshaped Europe.

• 

  Movement · c. 1330-1600

  Renaissance

  The three-century European argument that the ancients had known things the Middle Ages forgot, which produced modern art, modern scholarship, and modern statecraft.

• 

  Concept · 1944-present

  Reserve Currency

  The currency central banks hold as savings and the rest of the world uses to price and settle trade, which today means the dollar.

• 

  Concept · 1977-present

  Resource Curse

  The pattern in which countries rich in oil or minerals grow slower, govern worse, and fight more than countries with nothing valuable under the ground.

• 

  Organization · 1979–present

  Revolutionary Guards (IRGC)

  Iran's ideological military, founded in 1979 to guard the revolution, now a state within the state controlling missiles, proxies, and much of the economy.

• 

  Concept · 1870s–1900s

  Robber Barons

  The industrialists and financiers who built colossal monopolies and fortunes during America's Gilded Age, and the fierce debate over their legacy.

• 

  Person · 1725–1774

  Robert Clive

  The East India Company clerk whose bribed victory at Plassey in 1757 made a trading firm the ruler of Bengal and launched British India.

• 

  Person · 1807-1870

  Robert E. Lee

  The US officer who turned down command of the Union army, kept the Confederacy alive for three years, and was rebuilt after death as a saint of the Lost Cause.

• 

  Technology · 312 BC–3rd century AD

  Roman Aqueducts

  Gravity-fed channels that carried clean water tens of miles into Roman cities on a whisper of downhill slope, feeding fountains, baths, and latrines.

• 

  Technology · c. 400 BC–400 AD

  Roman Legion

  Rome's professional heavy-infantry machine: standardized, disciplined, and loyal to its general, it conquered the Mediterranean and built the empire's roads and forts.

• 

  Organization · 509 BCE–476 CE

  Roman Senate

  The council of ex-magistrates whose authority steered the Roman Republic for centuries, then survived as a dignified rubber stamp under the emperors.

• 

  Organization · 1546-present

  Royal Navy

  The fleet that turned a rainy island into the center of the world, holding command of the sea for a century and underwriting the largest empire in history.

• 

  Person · 1207–1273

  Rumi

  The 13th-century Sufi poet of Konya whose verses of divine love made him, improbably, a modern American bestseller.

• 

  Concept · 1600s–1861

  Russian Serfdom

  The system of bonded labor that tied a third of Russians to the land as property, freed only in 1861 with a catch.

• 

  War · 1904-1905

  Russo-Japanese War

  The war in which Japan destroyed two Russian fleets and beat a European great power, shocking the colonized world and triggering revolution in Russia.

• 

  Event · April–July 1994

  Rwandan Genocide

  The 1994 slaughter of around 800,000 Rwandans in 100 days, carried out largely by hand while the world watched and refused to use the word genocide.

• 

  Person · 1937–2006

  Saddam Hussein

  The Iraqi dictator whose two wars of choice and brutal hold on a state built by outsiders made him the defining test case of strongman rule.

• 

  Place · 1501–1736

  Safavid Empire

  The dynasty that seized Iran in 1501 and forcibly converted it to Twelver Shia Islam, creating the sectarian map of the modern Middle East.

• 

  Person · c. 1137-1193

  Saladin

  The Kurdish sultan who united Egypt and Syria, took Jerusalem back from the crusaders in 1187, and became medieval Europe's favorite enemy.

• 

  Concept · 12th–19th century

  Samurai

  Japan's hereditary warrior caste, which ruled the country for seven centuries, spent its last two hundred years as bureaucrats, and then abolished itself.

• 

  Event · 19–26 April 1920

  San Remo Conference

  The 1920 Italian seaside meeting where Britain and France turned the pencil lines of Sykes-Picot into legally binding mandates over the Arab world.

• 

  Concept · 550 BC–300s AD

  Satrapy

  The Persian provincial governorship that let one king rule from the Aegean to the Indus, and became the template for every empire that followed.

• 

  War · 1877

  Satsuma Rebellion

  The 1877 revolt in which Japan's finest traditional warriors were annihilated by an army of peasant conscripts, ending the samurai era for good.

• 

  Organization · 1957–1979

  SAVAK

  The Shah's feared secret police, whose surveillance and torture became shorthand for Pahlavi repression and helped ignite the revolution that destroyed it.

• 

  Person · 1906–1966

  Sayyid Qutb

  The Egyptian writer executed in 1966 whose prison books gave modern jihadism its central argument: that Muslim rulers themselves are the enemy.

• 

  Doctrine · 1905–1914

  Schlieffen Plan

  Germany's plan to knock France out in six weeks by sweeping through neutral Belgium, which instead pulled Britain into World War I.

• 

  Event · 1884–1914

  Scramble for Africa

  The 1884 to 1914 partition in which European powers seized nearly all of Africa, drawing borders that still shape the continent's conflicts.

• 

  War · 1899–1902

  Second Boer War

  The bitter 1899-1902 war in which Britain seized the gold of southern Africa from two Afrikaner republics, staining its name with concentration camps.

• 

  Concept · 1950-present

  Security Dilemma

  The trap in which one country's defensive precautions look like preparations for attack, so both sides arm and both end up less safe.

• 

  Doctrine · 1918–present

  Self-Determination

  The principle that peoples should choose their own sovereignty, proclaimed in 1918 and never once applied consistently since.

• 

  Organization · 1987-2015

  Sematech

  The 1987 government-industry consortium credited with helping America win back the chip industry from Japan, and the template every chip subsidy since has invoked.

• 

  Organization · 1940s–1970s

  Seven Sisters

  Seven Western oil companies that ran most of the world's oil from the 1940s to the 1970s, setting prices without consulting the producing countries.

• 

  War · 1756-1763

  Seven Years' War

  The first war fought on five continents, which handed Britain an empire and left behind the debts that produced the American and French revolutions.

• 

  Concept · 7th century–present

  Sharia

  Not a fixed law code but the divine ideal path for Muslim life, endlessly interpreted by scholars and argued over ever since.

• 

  Concept · 10th century–1925

  Sharif of Mecca

  The hereditary Hashemite guardianship of Mecca and Medina, whose last holder traded an Arab revolt for promises Britain did not keep.

• 

  Technology · 1956-present

  Shipping Container

  The standard steel box, introduced in 1956, that made ocean freight so cheap that companies could build things on the other side of the world.

• 

  Place · 1984-present

  Siachen Glacier

  The Himalayan glacier where India and Pakistan have garrisoned troops above 20,000 feet since 1984, losing far more men to the cold than to each other.

• 

  Concept · 19th century

  Sick Man of Europe

  The 19th-century label for the declining Ottoman Empire, and the 'Eastern Question' of who would inherit its lands as it fell apart.

• 

  Event · 1258

  Siege of Baghdad (1258)

  The Mongol sack that destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate and is remembered as the symbolic end of the Islamic Golden Age.

• 

  Event · 1683

  Siege of Vienna (1683)

  The Ottomans' failed 1683 siege of Vienna, broken by Jan Sobieski's cavalry charge, marked the high-water mark of Ottoman expansion into Europe.

• 

  Concept · c. 130 BC–1500s

  Silk Road

  The relay network of overland routes that moved goods, religions, technologies, and plagues between China and the Mediterranean for over a thousand years.

• 

  Person · 1783–1830

  Simon Bolivar

  The Venezuelan general who freed six South American nations from Spain, then despaired as his dream of a united continent shattered.

• 

  Event · 1915

  Sinking of the Lusitania

  A German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania off Ireland in 1915, killing 1,197 civilians and hardening American opinion against Germany.

• 

  Concept · 1930–1934

  Smoot-Hawley Tariff

  The 1930 American tariff that raised duties on more than twenty thousand goods, drew retaliation from every major trading partner, and became the cautionary tale of protectionism.

• 

  Person · c. 470–399 BC

  Socrates

  The Athenian philosopher who wrote nothing, questioned everything, and was executed by his own democracy for impiety and corrupting the young.

• 

  Concept · 1990-present

  Soft Power

  Joseph Nye's term for getting what you want because other countries want it too, through attraction rather than payment or force.

• 

  Movement · 1980–1989

  Solidarity

  The Polish trade union that grew to ten million members, survived martial law, and won the 1989 elections that began the Eastern bloc's collapse.

• 

  Concept · 1957-present

  Songbun

  North Korea's hereditary caste system, which sorts every citizen by what their ancestors did before 1950 and decides what their life is allowed to become.

• 

  Concept · 1300s-present

  Sovereign Default

  What happens when a government stops paying its debts: no bankruptcy court, no bailiff, and consequences that are mostly political.

• 

  Concept · 1953-present

  Sovereign Wealth Funds

  State-owned investment funds, mostly built on oil money, that manage around $15 trillion and buy governments a shareholder seat in other economies.

• 

  War · 1979–1989

  Soviet-Afghan War

  The USSR's failed decade-long war (1979-1989) to hold a client regime in Kabul; a defeat that helped end the Soviet Union and spawned al-Qaeda.

• 

  War · 1936-1939

  Spanish Civil War

  The failed 1936 coup that became a three-year war, a testing ground for German and Italian weapons, and proof that Britain and France would not fight.

• 

  War · 1898

  Spanish-American War

  The ten-week war of 1898 that destroyed the Spanish empire, handed the United States a colonial empire, and started a far longer war in the Philippines.

• 

  Place · c. 900–192 BC

  Sparta

  The Greek city-state that turned its whole society into an army, sustained by mass slavery, feared for Thermopylae and broken at Leuctra.

• 

  Person · d. 71 BC

  Spartacus

  The Thracian gladiator whose 73 BC breakout became Rome's largest slave revolt, and whose defeat made him history's enduring symbol of resistance.

• 

  Concept · 1980–present

  Special Economic Zones

  Fenced-off patches of territory where a country suspends its own economic rules, and the device China used to try capitalism without admitting to it.

• 

  Concept · 1880s-present

  Sphere of Influence

  A region where one big power expects its wishes to prevail without ruling it, the idea underneath arguments over Ukraine, Taiwan, and the Caribbean.

• 

  Concept · Antiquity-1800s

  Spice Trade

  The commerce in nutmeg, cloves, and pepper that was worth more than gold by weight, grew on a handful of islands, and drove Europeans to cross the world for it.

• 

  Technology · 1957

  Sputnik

  The beach-ball-sized Soviet sphere that became the first artificial satellite in 1957, opening the Space Age and terrifying the West.

• 

  Technology · 1960–present

  SSBN (Ballistic-Missile Submarine)

  Nuclear-powered submarines that hide ballistic missiles in the deep ocean, making a disarming first strike impossible and deterrence credible.

• 

  Organization · 1870-1911

  Standard Oil

  John D. Rockefeller's oil monopoly, which controlled 90 percent of American refining and was broken up in 1911 into the ancestors of today's oil majors.

• 

  Person · 1939–2017

  Stanislav Petrov

  The Soviet officer who in 1983 judged a satellite warning of an incoming US missile strike a false alarm, likely preventing nuclear war.

• 

  Organization · 1950–1990

  Stasi

  East Germany's secret police, which ran one informer for every ninety citizens and still could not save the state it watched.

• 

  Doctrine · 1979–present

  Strategic Ambiguity

  America's deliberate refusal to say whether it would defend Taiwan, designed to deter an invasion from Beijing and a declaration of independence from Taipei at once.

• 

  Technology · 2007-2010

  Stuxnet

  The computer worm discovered in 2010 that physically destroyed Iranian centrifuges, the first cyberattack to break real machinery and the moment code became a weapon.

• 

  Organization · 16th century–1922

  Sublime Porte

  The gate, then the building, then the entire Ottoman government: the address European diplomats meant when they said they were negotiating with Istanbul.

• 

  Place · 1869–present

  Suez Canal

  The artificial waterway across Egypt, opened in 1869, that linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and became the strategic lifeline of the British Empire.

• 

  Event · 1956

  Suez Crisis

  The 1956 debacle in which Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt, then were forced to retreat, exposing the end of European empire.

• 

  Person · 1494–1566

  Suleiman the Magnificent

  The sultan under whom the Ottoman Empire reached its golden age: to Europe the Magnificent conqueror, to his own people Kanuni, the Lawgiver.

• 

  Person · c. 500 BC

  Sun Tzu

  The Chinese general credited with The Art of War, the 2,500-year-old argument that the best victory is the one won without fighting.

• 

  Person · 1866–1925

  Sun Yat-sen

  The revolutionary revered as China's Father of the Nation by rival regimes; his 1911 revolution helped end 2,000 years of imperial rule.

• 

  Event · 632 AD–

  Sunni-Shia Split

  The 7th-century schism over who should lead Islam after Muhammad; a 1,400-year theological divide now weaponized as the Saudi-Iran regional cold war.

• 

  Concept · Ancient–present

  Suzerainty

  Control of a weaker state's foreign relations while leaving it internally self-governing, the standard imperial arrangement before formal sovereignty.

• 

  Organization · 1973–present

  SWIFT

  The Belgian cooperative whose messaging network moves the instructions behind global banking, and whose exit door is the West's sharpest financial weapon.

• 

  Treaty · 1916

  Sykes-Picot Agreement

  The secret 1916 deal in which Britain and France divided up the Ottoman Arab provinces, years before they had conquered any of them.

• 

  Person · 1875–1965

  Syngman Rhee

  The US-educated, fiercely anti-Communist first president of South Korea, whose authoritarian twelve-year rule ended in the student-led April Revolution of 1960.

• 

  War · 1850–1864

  Taiping Rebellion

  The apocalyptic mid-nineteenth-century civil war that nearly toppled Qing China and killed 20 to 30 million, among the deadliest conflicts in history.

• 

  Treaty · 1979–present

  Taiwan Relations Act

  The 1979 US law that kept arms, trade, and a shadow embassy flowing to Taiwan after Washington recognized Beijing, without promising to defend it.

• 

  Person · 1754–1838

  Talleyrand

  The French diplomat who served six regimes and talked a defeated France back into the ranks of the great powers at Vienna.

• 

  Concept · 1839–1876

  Tanzimat Reforms

  The Ottoman Empire's sweeping 1839 to 1876 reforms, borrowing European models to modernize the state and hold its fraying territories together.

• 

  Concept · 1920s-present

  Tax Havens and Offshore Finance

  Jurisdictions that sell foreigners low tax, easy incorporation, and secrecy, and the main reason sanctions and asset freezes are so hard to enforce.

• 

  Technology · 1840s-present

  Telegraph

  The electric telegraph (1840s) made information travel faster than any messenger for the first time, collapsing the lag between distant event and decision.

• 

  Event · 1968

  Tet Offensive

  The nationwide North Vietnamese attack of January 1968 that was crushed militarily and won the war politically by destroying American belief in it.

• 

  Concept · 1830–1907

  The Great Game

  The nineteenth-century strategic rivalry between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia, Persia, and Afghanistan, the buffer lands guarding British India.

• 

  Person · 1858–1919

  Theodore Roosevelt

  The president who turned a continental republic into a naval power with a global reach, and invented the American habit of policing other countries' affairs.

• 

  Event · 1618–1648

  Thirty Years' War

  The 1618–1648 catastrophe that began as a religious quarrel, killed perhaps a third of Germans, and ended in the Peace of Westphalia.

• 

  Person · c. 460-c. 400 BC

  Thucydides

  The failed Athenian general whose account of the Peloponnesian War invented the idea that politics between states can be explained rather than moralized.

• 

  Place · 1415–present

  Tiananmen Square

  The vast Beijing plaza where modern China stages its power and where, repeatedly, Chinese citizens have gone to contest it.

• 

  Organization · 1603–1868

  Tokugawa Shogunate

  The military government that ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868, sealing the country off from the world and falling behind it.

• 

  Technology · 1891-1916

  Trans-Siberian Railway

  The 9,289-kilometer line that turned Siberia from an empty penal colony into Russian territory and made Russia a power on the Pacific.

• 

  Event · 1500s–1800s

  Transatlantic Slave Trade

  The forced shipment of roughly 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas, history's largest forced migration and an engine of the Atlantic economy.

• 

  Technology · 1947–present

  Transistor

  The tiny solid-state switch invented at Bell Labs in 1947 that replaced the vacuum tube and became the building block of all electronics.

• 

  Treaty · 24 July 1923

  Treaty of Lausanne

  The 1923 settlement that tore up the plan to partition Turkey, fixed its borders, legalized mass population transfer, and erased Kurdistan.

• 

  Treaty · 1494

  Treaty of Tordesillas

  The 1494 pact in which Spain and Portugal, blessed by the pope, split the entire non-Christian world along an Atlantic meridian.

• 

  Treaty · 1919

  Treaty of Versailles

  The 1919 peace that ended the First World War, stripped Germany of territory and weapons, and convinced Germans they had been robbed rather than beaten.

• 

  Concept · 1960–present

  Triffin Dilemma

  The built-in trap that a country issuing the world's reserve currency must run deficits to supply it, deficits that eventually undermine confidence in it.

• 

  Concept · 1947

  Truman Doctrine

  The 1947 pledge to support any free people resisting subjugation, which turned American aid to Greece into an open-ended commitment to contain communism worldwide.

• 

  Concept · 451–450 BC

  Twelve Tables

  Rome's first written law code, posted on bronze in the Forum in 450 BC, making law public and knowable rather than the aristocracy's private secret.

• 

  Event · 1960

  U-2 Incident

  In May 1960 the USSR shot down an American U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, wrecking a superpower summit and exposing years of overflights.

• 

  Technology · 1914–1918

  U-boat

  Germany's submarine, which nearly starved Britain into surrender in 1917 and, by sinking ships without warning, dragged America into World War I.

• 

  Concept · 700s–present

  Ulama

  Islam's scholarly class, who hold religious authority without a priesthood or a church, and whose independence from rulers has been the central question of Muslim politics.

• 

  Person · 1822-1885

  Ulysses S. Grant

  The failed businessman who won the Civil War by refusing to stop, then spent his presidency fighting the Klan and his last year writing to save his family.

• 

  Technology · 1858-present

  Undersea Cables

  The fiber-optic lines on the seabed that carry nearly all intercontinental data, concentrated on a handful of routes and now a sabotage target.

• 

  Concept · 1842–1915

  Unequal Treaties

  The one-sided agreements that turned military defeat into permanent foreign privilege on Chinese soil, the legal machinery of the century of humiliation.

• 

  Organization · 1936–1945

  Unit 731

  A secret Japanese army unit in occupied Manchuria that ran lethal biological-warfare experiments on prisoners, then escaped justice through a US immunity deal.

• 

  Person · c. 1460-1524

  Vasco da Gama

  The Portuguese captain who reached India by sea in 1498 and then returned with cannon, attaching Europe to Asian trade by force rather than by competing in it.

• 

  Person · 1926–1998

  Vasili Arkhipov

  Soviet submarine officer whose lone refusal to fire a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis likely stopped the Cold War from turning hot.

• 

  Event · 1989

  Velvet Revolution

  The six weeks in late 1989 in which Czechoslovakia removed a communist government without a shot, and made a dissident playwright president.

• 

  Movement · 793-1066

  Vikings

  The Scandinavian raiders, traders, and settlers who for three centuries reached from Newfoundland to Baghdad and founded states from Normandy to Kyiv.

• 

  Person · 1870–1924

  Vladimir Lenin

  The Bolshevik leader who seized power in 1917 and built the world's first Marxist state, along with the one-party dictatorship Stalin inherited.

• 

  Movement · 1744–present

  Wahhabism

  The austere 18th-century reform movement within Sunni Islam that, fused to the House of Saud, became Saudi Arabia's creed and a global export.

• 

  Concept · 1871–present

  War Reparations

  Payments a defeated state is made to hand the victors, and the clearest test of whether a peace settlement can survive its own terms.

• 

  War · 1455-1487

  Wars of the Roses

  The thirty-year civil war between two branches of the English royal family that destroyed the old nobility and put the Tudors on the throne.

• 

  Treaty · 1955–1991

  Warsaw Pact

  The Soviet-led military alliance of Eastern Europe from 1955 to 1991, used less to fight NATO than to keep its own members in line.

• 

  Concept · 1989–2008

  Washington Consensus

  A 1989 list of ten economic reforms that became the global default prescription for developing countries, and then became a term of abuse.

• 

  Event · 1972-1974

  Watergate

  The 1972 burglary and the two-year cover-up that followed, which ended with an American president resigning rather than face certain impeachment.

• 

  Place · 1919–1933

  Weimar Republic

  Germany's first democracy, born in defeat in 1919 and dead in 1933, and the standing case study in how republics fail.

• 

  Person · 1874–1965

  Winston Churchill

  The British statesman who led the defiance against Nazi Germany in 1940, an imperial die-hard whose finest hour outlived the empire he loved.

• 

  War · 1939-1940

  Winter War

  The 105-day war in which Finland held off a Soviet invasion in 1939, lost a tenth of its territory, and kept its independence.

• 

  Movement · 1848–1971

  Women's Suffrage

  The campaign that took the vote for women from unthinkable to universal in roughly one lifetime, and rewrote what a democracy is understood to mean.

• 

  Person · 1856-1924

  Woodrow Wilson

  The professor-president who took America into the First World War to make the world safe for democracy, lost the peace at home, and segregated his own government.

• 

  Event · 1945

  Yalta Conference

  The February 1945 Big Three summit that shaped the postwar world and became shorthand for great powers dividing the map into spheres of influence.

• 

  Person · 1859–1916

  Yuan Shikai

  The general who ended the Chinese empire, hijacked the republic that replaced it, tried to make himself emperor, and left China to the warlords.

• 

  War · 1991–2001

  Yugoslav Wars

  The decade of wars that tore Yugoslavia apart, brought genocide back to Europe, and defined what the post-Cold War West would and would not stop.

• 

  Person · 1934–1968

  Yuri Gagarin

  The Soviet cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first human in space, orbiting Earth once and turning into an instant global icon.

• 

  Organization · 1868–1945

  Zaibatsu

  The family-controlled industrial empires, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, Yasuda, that powered Japan's rise and war machine before America broke them up in 1945.

• 

  Person · 1371–1433

  Zheng He

  The Ming admiral whose vast treasure fleets crossed the Indian Ocean from 1405, decades before Columbus, until China abandoned the sea.

• 

  Person · 1898–1976

  Zhou Enlai

  Communist China's durable premier for its entire first quarter-century, Mao's chief diplomat and administrator, remembered as the pragmatist who kept the state running.

• 

  Event · 1917

  Zimmermann Telegram

  A secret 1917 German offer to help Mexico reconquer Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, intercepted by British codebreakers, that pushed America into World War I.

• 

  Movement · 1897–present

  Zionism

  The Jewish nationalist movement, born in 1890s Europe, to re-establish a Jewish homeland in the ancestral land of Israel and Palestine.

• 

  Place · c. 1816–1887

  Zulu Kingdom

  The southern African state Shaka built in a decade, which in 1879 dealt a British army the worst defeat any European power suffered in colonial Africa.

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