Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen: Did you

The social contract is an idea in philosophy that at some real or hypothetical point in the past, humans left the state of nature to join together and form societies by mutually agreeing which rights they would enjoy and how they would be...

The Poor Man of Nippur (c. 701 BCE) is a Babylonian poem on the themes of the obligations of hospitality and revenge for an undeserved injury. A poor man of the city of Nippur feels mistreated when he visits the mayor and then goes to great...

The Lindow Man (officially Lindow III) is the top half of a male body, found preserved in a peat bog in Cheshire, England. The peat bogs at Lindow Moss date back to the last ice age and were formed by holes of melting ice; they are now a...

The Wise Man of Chief Mountain is an origin story of the Blackfeet nation explaining how they came to wear brightly colored clothing. Although Native American nations generally wore clothing dyed different colors, the Blackfeet were famous...

The French Revolution (1789-1799) sought to dismantle the oppressive society of the old regime and build a new world based on the principles of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". This push for societal change led to a burgeoning feminist movement...

A painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris showing Thomas Jefferson (right), Benjamin Franklin (left), and John Adams drafting the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776. (Virginia Historical Society, Library of Congress)

A Roman coin depicting a citizen voting, silver denarius of L. Cassius Longinus, 63 BCE. Archaeological Museum, Tarragona, Spain.

This is an idealized image of a female citizen from Magnesia. This honorific statue for a benefactress of the city stood in the town hall of Magnesia on the Maeandar (in modern-day Turkey). The missing inscription on the base of the statue...

On 20 April 1792, King Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-1792) stood before the Legislative Assembly and, with a faltering voice, read a declaration of war against Austria, to the ecstatic delight of the gathered deputies. This declaration sealed...

The Potsdam Conference, held from 17 July to 2 August 1945 in Potsdam in eastern Germany, decided how the Allies would deal with a defeated Germany and how they could best conduct the ongoing campaign against Japan as the Second World War...