Enlightenment
This 17th-century intellectual movement emphasized the use of reason, logic, and natural laws to understand and improve human society.
What is the Enlightenment?
This 1789 uprising was caused by third-estate inequalities, heavy taxation, food shortages, and the absolute rule of King Louis XVI.
What is the French Revolution?
Great Britain was the birthplace of this era because of its abundant coal and iron resources, navigable rivers, stable government, and available capital.
What is the Industrial Revolution?
Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism (MAIN) are considered the primary underlying causes of this global conflict.
What is World War I?
This US foreign policy aimed to stop the global spread of communism during the Cold War.
What is containment?
He argued that all individuals are born with natural rights—life, liberty, and property—and that a government's job is to protect them.
Who is John Locke?
He was a formerly enslaved general who led a successful revolution in Saint-Domingue, establishing the first independent Black republic in the world.
Who is Toussaint L’Ouverture?
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels co-authored this 1848 pamphlet, arguing that history is a series of class struggles that would end in a worker-led revolution.
What is the Communist Manifesto?
This 1917 revolution overthrew the Russian Tsar and eventually brought Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power.
What is the Russian (or Bolshevik) Revolution?
He led a nonviolent independence movement against British rule in India using civil disobedience and boycotts.
Who is Mohandas Gandhi?
This French philosopher advocated for a system of checks and balances and the separation of government powers into three branches.
Who is Baron de Montesquieu?
Known as "The Liberator," this Venezuelan military leader fought against Spanish rule to independence for nations like Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
Who is Simón Bolívar?
European powers met at this 1884–1885 conference to divide up the African continent among themselves without any African leaders present.
What is the Berlin Conference?
This 1919 treaty officially ended World War I but severely punished Germany with massive reparations and war guilt, paving the way for WWII.
What is the Treaty of Versailles?
In 1949, this communist leader defeated the Nationalists and established the People's Republic of China.
Who is Mao Zedong?
This thinker wrote The Social Contract, arguing that government is an agreement between the rulers and the people, and that power comes from the "consent of the governed."
Who is Jean-Jacques Rousseau?
He utilized a policy of "Blood and Iron" (military force and industrial power) to successfully unify the German states in 1871.
Who is Otto von Bismarck?
This 1899–1901 anti-foreign, anti-colonial uprising in China sought to drive out Western imperialists and Christian missionaries.
What is the Boxer Rebellion?
Joseph Stalin's economic policies to rapidly industrialize the USSR and control agriculture were known by this collective term.
What are the Five-Year Plans?
This policy of racial segregation and white-minority rule was enforced by the government of South Africa until it was dismantled in the 1990s.
What is apartheid?
This French writer strongly defended freedom of speech and religious tolerance, famously using his wit to attack political censorship and religious fanaticism.
Who is Voltaire?
This political document, written by a French National Assembly in 1789, stated that "men are born and remain free and equal in rights."
What is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen?
This British economic philosophy, popularized by Adam Smith, argues that governments should not interfere in the free market.
What is laissez-faire capitalism?
This term describes a government that exerts total control over every aspect of public and private life, often using terror, censorship, and propaganda.
What is totalitarianism?
These two Russian terms refer to Mikhail Gorbachev’s late-1980s policies of "political openness" and "economic restructuring" that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What are Glasnost and Perestroika?