Curated category
Western culture
- Scramble for AfricaAs late as the 1870s, Europeans controlled roughly 10 percent of the African continent, clinging to the coasts. By 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained…
- Age of EnlightenmentDare to know. That short Latin command, sapere aude, sits at the heart of an essay Immanuel Kant published in 1784, titled Answering the Question: What Is…
- Western SchismThe Western Schism began on the 20th of September 1378, with a single, startling act: a group of French cardinals gathered at Fondi and elected a second pope.
- CapitalismCapitalism is a word that began as an insult. The term in its modern sense is first attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850, who defined it as the appropriation of…
- Western imperialism in AsiaWestern imperialism in Asia begins with a spice. In the 15th century, with the Ottoman Turks holding the Silk Road, Western European rulers wanted their own…
- Great DivergenceThe Great Divergence is the name historians give to one of the most consequential shifts in human history: the moment when the Western world broke free from…
- Media franchiseA media franchise is a collection of related works derived from a single original creative property, such as a film, a novel, a television program, or a…
- RenaissanceAround 1440, from a single print shop in Mainz, Germany, a machine began throwing off pages by the hundred. Within sixty years that movable-type press had…
- Colonisation of AfricaThe colonisation of Africa did not begin with European flags planted in the 19th century. It began far earlier, when Phoenician traders established the city…
- Western worldThe Western world has no fixed borders. That simple fact, buried in dictionaries and debated by historians for centuries, turns out to be one of the most…
- ChristianityChristianity counts more than 2.3 billion followers, roughly 28.8% of the world's population, making it the largest and most widespread religion on Earth.
- Human rightsHuman rights are universally recognized moral principles that set standards of behavior and are often protected by national and international law.
- Western cultureWestern culture has no fixed borders on any map. The term has shifted meaning across centuries, swallowed and expelled whole civilizations, and remains…
- Abrahamic religionsThe Abrahamic religions are a set of monotheistic faiths that trace a shared spiritual lineage to Abraham, a figure each tradition regards either as a…
- Neo-Latin studiesThe study of Latin and its literature from the Italian Renaissance to the present day defines a vast field known as Neo-Latin studies.
- Modern eraThe modern era is the name historians give to the current period of human history, the stretch of time we are still living inside right now.
- Greek East and Latin WestIn 330 AD, the Roman Empire shifted its administrative center to Constantinople. This move marked a turning point in how Greek and Latin functioned across…
- Western literatureWestern literature stretches across more than a thousand years of European history, encompassing works in dozens of languages from Albanian to Yiddish, from…
- Western philosophyWestern philosophy begins with a man who looked at the world and said, "all is water." His name was Thales of Miletus, born around 625 BC in Ionia, and he is…
- Country musicCountry music got its name in an unlikely way. For decades, the genre was called hillbilly music, and only in the 1940s did the term "country music" catch on.
- Greco-Roman worldThe Greco-Roman world was not a single empire or a single people, but a vast zone of shared language, law, myth, and architecture that stretched from the…
- Judeo-ChristianJudeo-Christian is a term that carries enormous political and cultural weight, yet it began its life with a surprisingly narrow meaning.
- Pop musicThe term "pop song" was first used in 1926, describing a piece of music "having popular appeal". Pop music as we know it today did not arrive until the…
- Roman EmpireThe Roman Empire was one of the most expansive and enduring political structures the ancient world produced, stretching from Hadrian's Wall in drizzle-soaked…
- Information AgeThe Information Age began in the mid-20th century, and one date sits at its root. In 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain built the first working…