Ancient Roots & Ideas
This spiritual leader, originally named Siddhartha Gautama, founded Buddhism to help people find an end to suffering.
The Buddha
The French Revolution symbolically began on July 14, 1789, when an angry mob attacked and tore down this royal fortress and prison.
The Bastille
This island nation is where the Industrial Revolution first began in the mid-1700s, thanks to its vast reserves of coal and iron.
Great Britain
The assassination of this Austro-Hungarian royal figure in June 1914 served as the immediate spark that ignited World War I.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
He used peaceful marches, boycotts, and hunger strikes to lead India's successful nonviolent independence movement against the British Empire.
Mahatma Gandhi
This is the term for a belief in only one God, a fundamental concept shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Monotheism
This English Enlightenment thinker argued that all people are born with "natural rights" to life, liberty, and property.
John Locke
This term describes the rapid, massive movement of human populations away from rural farms and into crowded industrial cities.
Urbanization
A surprise Japanese aerial bombardment of this US naval base on December 7, 1941, instantly dragged the United States into World War II.
The Battle of Pearl Harbor
This vocabulary term describes a nation's absolute right to govern itself completely free from outside imperial control or interference.
Sovereignty
This ancient Greek philosopher was famously sentenced to death for "corrupting the youth" with his constant question-and-answer style of teaching.
Socrates
He was a brilliant, self-educated military general and former slave who successfully led the Haitian Revolution against French rule.
Toussaint Louverture
At this 1884–1885 meeting, European powers drew lines on a map to divide the African continent among themselves without inviting any African leaders.
The Berlin Conference (The Scramble for Africa)
This specific, harsh clause in the Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to accept 100% of the responsibility for starting World War I.
The War Guilt Clause
In 1947, British India was split into two separate, independent countries based on religious majorities: India and this new nation.
Pakistan
He was Socrates' most famous student, known for writing The Republic to describe a perfect society ruled by philosopher-kings.
Plato
To prevent a government from turning into a tyranny, Baron de Montesquieu argued that a state should implement this political concept.
The separation of powers
James Watt dramatically improved this vital machine, which went on to power early factories, steamships, and train locomotives.
The steam engine
Formed right after World War II, this international peacekeeping organization was built to replace the failed League of Nations.
The United Nations (U.N.)
This oil-rich South American country has suffered a devastating crisis of hyperinflation and severe food shortages under the rule of Nicolás Maduro.
Venezuela
In ancient Greece, this type of leader seized total power by force, often gaining the support of ordinary citizens by promising to protect them from wealthy nobles.
A tyrant
This radical leader headed the Committee of Public Safety and orchestrated the bloody "Reign of Terror" during the French Revolution.
Maximilien Robespierre
This European monarch claimed the Congo Free State as his personal estate, brutally forcing the local population to harvest rubber.
King Leopold II of Belgium
This major Allied nation abruptly dropped out of World War I in 1917 because it was dealing with an internal communist revolution at home.
Russia
In 1947, the United Nations voted to divide this territory into separate Jewish and Arab states, which triggered an immediate war and a massive refugee crisis.
Palestine