Democracy: Did you mean...?

Operation Gomorrah (aka the Battle of Hamburg or Hamburg Air Offensive) was a sustained area bombing campaign of the German port of Hamburg in four night attacks by the Royal Air Force and two daytime attacks by the United States Air Force...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a Swiss philosopher whose work both praised and criticised the Enlightenment movement. Although a believer in the power of reason, science, and the arts, Rousseau was convinced that a flourishing culture...

The Alien and Sedition Acts were four laws passed by President John Adams and the Federalist-controlled Congress in 1798 that restricted immigration and free speech in the United States. Framed by the Federalist Party as a necessary measure...

Silphium (also known as laser) was an uncultivated plant that grew in Cyrene, North Africa (modern Shahhat, Libya) and became the cash crop of the region of Cyrenaica between c. 631 BCE and the 1st century CE when, according to Pliny the...

Alcibiades (or Alkibiades) was a gifted and flamboyant Athenian statesman and general whose shifting of sides during the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BCE earned him a reputation for cunning and treachery. Good-looking and rich, he...

Pisistratus (circa 600-527 BCE), or Peisistratus, was an ancient Greek tyrant who ruled the city-state of Athens. Initially a student of the lawgiver and political philosopher Solon, Pisistratus presented himself as the champion of the poor...

The Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 was a possible arson attack on the German parliament building. The fire was blamed on a communist anarchist Marinus van der Lubbe (1909-1934), but it may have been the work of the Nazi party's paramilitary...

The 4th century BCE Greek philosopher Aristotle once wrote in his essay Politics, “If liberty and equality…are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.” Regrettably...

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...

Artaphernes (active c. 513-492 BCE, also known as Artafarna) was the satrap of Lydia under the reign of his older brother Darius I (the Great, r. 522-486 BCE), monarch of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550-330 BCE) which was founded by Cyrus II...