Curated playlist
Authoritarianism
- AuthoritarianismAuthoritarian rulers guard against coups by building armed forces that run parallel to the regular military.
- Nation of IslamThe Nation of Islam began with a stranger preaching to African Americans in Detroit in July 1930. He gave his meetings three days a week, and they drew crowds of 7,000 to 8,000 people, most of them migrants from the American South. The man…
- DictatorshipIn early Rome, dictator was a legal office, not an insult. It gave one person temporary absolute power in an emergency.
- Absolute monarchyRussia was the last European country to abolish absolute monarchy. Its rule by one king or tsar ended only in 1905.
- Mohammad Reza PahlaviOn his first day at a Swiss boarding school, Iran's crown prince got beaten up.
- ImperialismImperialism began as a word for Napoleon III's invasions. By the 1880s it sounded positive in the West.
- Ferdinand MarcosFerdinand Marcos was convicted of murder as a law student, then rose to president.
- AutocracyMost autocrats are toppled by a coup, not by a popular revolt. Elites are the ruler's greatest asset and threat.
- Joseph II, Holy Roman EmperorEmperor Joseph II issued over 6,000 edicts and 11,000 new laws, yet many subjects came to loathe him.
- JacobinsThe Jacobins began as a small group of deputies from Brittany meeting quietly at Versailles in 1789.
- OligarchyIn 510 BC, Sparta helped topple Athens's tyrant, then installed an oligarch. Cleisthenes rallied the middle class.
- Cesar ChavezCesar Chavez was born Cesario Estrada Chavez on the 31st of March 1927 and died on the 23rd of April 1993. Many Mexican Americans came to speak of him as a "folk saint." California farm owners saw something else entirely, a communist…
- Nicolás MaduroNicolás Maduro was at the center of an announcement made in the pre-dawn hours of the 3rd of January 2026. At around 04:20 Eastern time, which was 05:20 in Venezuela, United States president Donald Trump said Maduro and his wife had been…
- Vladimir PutinVladimir Putin's grandfather cooked personal meals for both Lenin and Stalin. Putin later joined the KGB in 1975.
- Enlightened absolutismEmperor Joseph II summed up his rule in nine words: "Everything for the people, nothing by the people."
- Absolutism (European history)Louis XIV made nobles live at Versailles to weaken them. Away from home, they depended on the king for status.
- PutinismA 2004 study found siloviki, men from enforcement agencies, held 58 percent of Putin's inner circle.
- NCERT textbook controversiesIndia's NCERT removed Darwin's theory of evolution from its Class 10 Science textbook.
- Russia under Vladimir PutinBoris Yeltsin resigned on the 31st of December 1999 and handed Russia to Vladimir Putin.
- Abdel Fattah el-SisiAbdel Fattah el-Sisi, the 6th president of Egypt, was born on the 19th of November 1954 in Gamaleya, a quarter of Historic Cairo beside the al-Azhar Mosque. In later life he liked to recall that neighbourhood. Muslims, Jews and Christians…