Curated category
Political terminology
- MonarchyThe word monarch first appeared in the mid-15th century as monark, meaning a supreme governor for life. It comes from the Old French monarche of the 14th…
- IdeologyAntoine Destutt de Tracy coined the word ideology in 1796 while imprisoned during the Reign of Terror. He conceived it as a science of ideas to develop a…
- Class discriminationIn the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan, merchants were explicitly ranked below peasants. This historical detail contradicts modern assumptions about economic…
- GovernmentThe word government derives from the Greek verb meaning to steer with a gubernaculum or rudder. This metaphorical sense appears in classical literature…
- Third WorldAlfred Sauvy published an article in the French magazine L'Observateur on the 14th of August 1952. He used the phrase third world to describe countries…
- AppeasementIn the early 1930s, a deep psychological scar from World War I shaped British foreign policy. The trauma of the Great War between 1914 and 1918 left a…
- Father of the NationThe Roman Senate bestowed the title Pater Patriae upon heroes and later emperors to honor their service to the fatherland.
- White émigréThe Imperial Russian tricolor, adopted by White Russian émigrés after the Red Russian Revolution, later became the flag of the Russian Federation.
- LysenkoismIn 1923, Ivan Pavlov announced that conditioned reflexes could be inherited in mice. Soviet ideologists ignored his later withdrawal of this claim and used…