Curated playlist
Authoritarianism
- AuthoritarianismAuthoritarianism is a political system built around a single, unyielding premise: that concentrated power is more important than the people it governs. Political scientist Juan Linz spent years trying to pin down what makes these regimes…
- DictatorshipA dictatorship is a form of government built around one person who holds absolute or near-absolute political power. That person, the dictator, does not rule alone. Around them sits an inner circle of advisers, generals, and high-ranking…
- Absolute monarchyAbsolute monarchy is a form of government in which a single ruler holds political power with no constitutions, legislatures, or other checks standing in the way. For most of recorded history, this was not the exception but the rule. Kings…
- Mohammad Reza PahlaviMohammad Reza Pahlavi was born on the 26th of October 1919 in Tehran, the eldest son of a Brigadier-General who had not yet become king. He died in Egyptian exile on the 27th of July 1980-18 months after the revolution that ended his…
- ImperialismImperialism is the maintaining and extending of power over foreign nations, and its name traces back to a single Latin word, imperium, meaning to command, to be sovereign, or to rule. The word was coined in the 19th century to describe…
- Ferdinand MarcosFerdinand Marcos arrived in Hawaii in February 1986 with 22 crates of cash valued at $717 million, 300 crates of jewelry, and a 12 by 4 foot box full of pearls. He had just fled the Philippines after two decades in power. He served as the…
- AutocracyAutocracy, in its simplest form, is rule by a single person wielding absolute power. The word traces back to Ancient Greek: autos, meaning self, and kratos, meaning power or might. Those two syllables have traveled through Hellenistic and…
- Joseph II, Holy Roman EmperorOn the night of the 19th to the 20th of February 1790, Joseph II slept for a few hours, helped along by painkillers. At five in the morning he woke and asked for his confessor. Five minutes later he was dead, just shy of forty-nine years…
- JacobinsThe Jacobins began not as architects of terror but as a small group of deputies from Brittany who gathered quietly during the Estates General of 1789 at the Palace of Versailles. Within a few years, that modest caucus would become the most…
- OligarchyOligarchy is a form of government in which power rests with a small number of people. That definition sounds simple. But across thousands of years of history, from the aristocratic councils of ancient Athens to the billionaire donors of…
- Vladimir PutinVladimir Putin was born on the 7th of October 1952 in Leningrad, a city shaped by some of the most catastrophic violence of the 20th century. His older brother Viktor died of diphtheria and starvation in 1942 during the Siege of Leningrad…
- Enlightened absolutismEnlightened absolutism sits at one of history's most uncomfortable intersections: absolute power dressed in the language of reason. In the 18th century, across courts from Berlin to St. Petersburg to Madrid, monarchs began citing the…
- Absolutism (European history)Absolutism names a form of monarchical power that answers to no outside check: no church, no legislature, no social elite. The term itself derives from the Latin absolutus, meaning 'absolved' - power that takes no heed of the law's…
- PutinismPutinism, wrote the Hoover Institution's Arnold Beichman in The Washington Times in February 2007, had become "as significant a watchword as Stalinism was in the 20th century." That comparison sets the terms for everything that follows.…
- NCERT textbook controversiesIn 1961, India established the National Council of Educational Research and Training to advise state and central governments on school education. The organisation published model textbooks for adoption by school systems across the country.…
- Russia under Vladimir PutinOn the 31st of December 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned as president of Russia and handed power to a former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. The moment was striking in its abruptness. Just hours before, Putin had published an essay called…