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1,109 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 5 of 19.

241. CERN, the particle physics lab, grew out of a UNESCO meetingUNESCO is best known for World Heritage Sites, but its reach is stranger than that. A UNESCO gathering in Paris in December 1951 set in motion the European Council for Nuclear Res…
242. American 'ugly laws' once banned people deemed unsightly from public streetsUntil the 1970s, many American jurisdictions had so-called ugly laws that kept people with diseases or disfigurements judged unsightly out of public view. Such rules are an exampl…
243. Until 1969 'activism' simply meant doing things with decision and energyEnglish speakers began using activist in a political sense around 1915 and activism around 1920. Yet as late as 1969 a definition still described activism merely as doing things w…
244. Jain monks persuaded Indian rulers to ban animal slaughter centuries before Europe debated itIn the 16th century a Jain monk named Hiravijaya Suri visited the court of Akbar and talked the Mughal emperor into issuing farmans that halted animal slaughter for several months…
245. The word 'caste' began as a Gothic term for a group of animalsCaste is not an Indian word. It traces back through Spanish and Portuguese casta to Gothic kasts, a group of animals, and first meant a type of beast before shifting to races of p…
246. Why scholars still struggle to define India's caste systemWriting in 1932, the sociologist G. S. Ghurye admitted that despite endless study nobody had a real general definition of caste, and that any attempt seemed doomed by its complexi…
247. Grain doles, state pharmacies and common chests: welfare long before BismarckAugustus, Rome's first emperor, handed out a monthly grain ration called the Cura Annonae to citizens too poor to buy food, and Trajan later widened such help. Government aid for …
248. An archbishop gave English the phrase 'welfare state' during the Second World WarGermans had spoken of a sozialstaat, or social state, since 1870, but that literal label never caught on in English. During the Second World War the Anglican Archbishop William Te…
249. In 1883, social democrats were described as socialism's most extreme wingIn 1883 Richard Ely, in one of the first studies of European socialism written for Americans, portrayed social democrats as the radical fringe, so fixated on equal enjoyment regar…
250. Protestant England preferred 'socialist' because 'communist' sounded too CatholicIn nineteenth-century England, communism sounded uncomfortably close to the Catholic rite of communion, and across Christian Europe communists were assumed to be atheists. Sociali…
251. Does a country exist if nobody recognises it? International law has two answersUnder the constitutive theory, developed in the nineteenth century, a state becomes a person in international law only when at least one other state recognises it. The rival decla…
252. Jean Bodin built the theory of sovereignty out of France's religious warsReacting to the chaos of the French wars of religion in the late sixteenth century, Jean Bodin argued that every state needs a single supreme power, absolute and perpetual, able t…
253. 'I am the State' was probably never said by Louis XIVThe line L'État, c'est moi is pinned to Louis XIV, but it is probably apocryphal and is first attested only in the late eighteenth century. The quip still captures an old ambiguit…
254. Flavius Josephus coined 'theocracy' to describe a people ruled directly by GodIn the first century AD, Flavius Josephus observed that most governments fit into monarchy, oligarchy or democracy, but argued the Jewish polity fitted none of them. He coined the…
255. 'Totalitarian' was a word Italian Fascists proudly applied to themselvesThe term totalitarian first appeared in the early 1920s to describe Mussolini's government, and Fascists embraced it. In The Doctrine of Fascism, a 1932 essay co-written with Muss…
256. Coloured pencils, lettered slips and raised hands: how people actually cast votesVoters in 19th-century western Canada received a blank sheet and a set of coloured pencils, marking it in the colour belonging to their chosen candidate. That Oliver ballot is one…
257. Is politics about persuasion or about conflict? Thinkers have split for centuriesHannah Arendt read Aristotle as holding that political life meant settling matters by words and persuasion rather than violence. Carl Schmitt saw the essence of politics as tellin…
258. Before it was a political insult, 'populism' named a French literary prizeIn 1929 Léon Lemonnier published a manifesto for the populist novel, fiction that portrayed working-class lives with sympathy, and in 1931 Antonine Coullet-Tessier founded a prize…
259. A future US president helped turn running government into an academic fieldIn an 1887 article, The Study of Administration, Woodrow Wilson argued that scholars should work out what government can properly do and how to do it at the least cost in money an…
260. One famous definition says public policy includes whatever governments decide not to doIn 1972 Thomas Dye defined public policy as anything governments choose to do or not to do. Critics call the formula empty; Dye cheerfully admitted it was meant to cut short elabo…
261. Why 'referendums' is arguably more correct than 'referenda' as a pluralReferendum is a Latin gerundive from referre, to carry back, as in a proposal that must be carried back to the people. Grammatically, the Latin plural referenda would mean several…
262. 159 countries call themselves republics, but the label promises less than it soundsIn 2017, republic appeared in the official names of 159 out of 206 sovereign states. Not all of them have elected governments, and some states with elected governments do not use …
263. 'Revolution' first described planets circling the sky, not governments fallingWhen English borrowed revolution in the late fourteenth century, it meant the turning of celestial bodies. The sense of an abrupt upheaval in society appeared only in the mid-fift…
264. In the United States, sports cause more riots than anything elseMore than half of all American championship games or series are accompanied by a riot, making sport the country's most common trigger. Almost all of them break out in the city of …
265. Montesquieu never used the phrase 'tripartite system' so often credited to himThe French philosopher Montesquieu is routinely credited with the three-branch model of government, yet in The Spirit of Law, published in 1748, he spoke of a distribution of powe…
266. 'Nazi' began as a Bavarian put-down meaning a clumsy country bumpkinBefore Hitler's party existed, Nazi was a pet form of Ignatz, a common man's name in Bavaria, and by extension a mocking word for a backward peasant or yokel. In the 1920s the par…
267. A magazine that polled 2.3 million Americans still picked the wrong presidentThe Literary Digest mailed millions of postcards and correctly called five presidential elections in a row, from Woodrow Wilson in 1916 to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. In 1936 its …
268. England's Parliament grew from the council that replaced a Saxon meeting of wise menAnglo-Saxon kings took advice from the Witenagemot, Old English for a meeting of wise men, whose first recorded act was King Æthelberht of Kent's law code around 600. After the No…
269. Samuel Johnson's famous jab at patriotism may have targeted fakes, not the feelingOn the evening of 7 April 1774 Samuel Johnson declared patriotism the final hiding place of scoundrels. James Boswell recorded the line without context. Some argue Johnson meant t…
270. Campaign professionals barely beat chance at guessing which messages persuade votersA 2024 study asked American political practitioners to predict which campaign messages would actually change minds. They did scarcely better than chance, and no better than ordina…
271. The first modern political party may have proved itself by losing powerScholars have singled out the Rockingham Whigs of eighteenth-century Britain as the first modern political party for an unglamorous reason: they kept a coherent name and set of pr…
272. Political science spent a century arguing over how scientific it should beIn 2000 a group of political scientists launched what they called the Perestroika Movement, a revolt against the mathematicisation of their own field. They wanted room for many me…
273. Left and right began as seats in a French revolutionary assemblyDuring the French Revolution, the aristocracy sat to the right of the speaker, the traditional place of honour, and commoners sat to the left. Right came to mean support for the o…
274. Parliament means talking, and a majlis is literally a sitting roomNames for lawmaking bodies reveal what people thought they were for. Parliament comes from the Old French for talking, the Arabic majlis means a sitting room, and congress is Lati…
275. Libertarian started as a word for anarchist communists, not free-market enthusiastsIn 1857 the French anarchist communist Joseph Déjacque wrote a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon using a new word, libertaire. He soon printed a paper of that name in New York City…
276. Karl Marx reportedly denied being a Marxist, and Engels disliked the wordAccording to Engels, writing in 1882, Marx once reacted to the ideas of the self-described Marxist Paul Lafargue by saying that if those views counted as Marxism, then he himself …
277. Marxism-Leninism was assembled by Stalin after Lenin was already deadThe doctrine carrying Lenin's name became a distinct movement only after his death in 1924, when Joseph Stalin and his allies took over the Soviet Communist Party and fused Classi…
278. A 2020 study argues kings thrived because communication was slowWhy did so many societies end up with a single hereditary ruler? A 2020 study proposed a practical answer: monarchy was an efficient way to govern big populations and territories …
279. Societies are not more diverse than ever, one migration researcher arguesAt the start of the twentieth century, 14.7 percent of the United States population were immigrants, roughly the same share as at the start of the twenty-first. The migration rese…
280. Historians still argue whether nations are modern inventions or medieval survivorsMost scholars treat nations as a modern creation; nationalism became a major ideology only at the end of the eighteenth century. A dissenting camp points to Alfred the Great, whos…
281. National security once meant armies; now it covers food, power grids and ecosystemsIn 1943 Walter Lippmann defined a secure nation as one that need not give up its legitimate interests to avoid war, and could defend them by war if challenged. Later definitions k…
282. Federal and confederal were once synonyms meaning a simple treaty leagueBoth words grow from the Latin foedus, a treaty or covenant, and until the late eighteenth century both described a league of sovereign states. James Madison called the new Americ…
283. The world's oldest federation dates from 1789; the newest, from 2015The United States constitution took effect on 4 March 1789, making America the oldest federation still standing. The newest is Nepal, whose constitution came into force on 20 Sept…
284. 'Globalization' first appeared in English describing education, not tradeThe word turned up in the 1930s, but only in discussions of education, and it went nowhere. It took French economist François Perroux's writing on mondialisation in the early 1960…
285. The world's first green party was born fighting a dam in TasmaniaIn March 1972 campaigners in Australia founded the United Tasmania Group to stop logging and a dam that would damage Lake Pedder. It won only about three percent in state election…
286. Why every Olympic Games is opened by one scripted sentence from a head of stateRule 55.3 of the Olympic Charter says the host nation's head of state opens the summer or winter Games by speaking a single set phrase. It is a neat illustration of the job at its…
287. Ideology was invented in a Terror-era prison as a science of ideasAntoine Destutt de Tracy spent November 1793 to October 1794 locked up awaiting trial during the Reign of Terror, reading Locke and Condillac. Out of that confinement came a new w…
288. 'Imperialism' began as an insult, then became a boast within a decadeIn the late 1870s critics of Benjamin Disraeli brought imperialism into English to attack his showy, aggressive empire-building. Supporters such as Joseph Chamberlain promptly cla…
289. International relations became a university subject only in 1919, and in WalesPeople have analysed rivalries between states since Thucydides, yet the academic discipline dates only to 1919. That year Aberystwyth, then part of the University of Wales, create…
290. 'Islamism' once simply meant Islam, then vanished from English for decadesEnglish borrowed the word as Islamismus in 1696 and settled on Islamism by 1712, using it plainly as the name of the religion. The US Supreme Court still wrote it in 1891. By 1938…
291. A 1957 book blaming sheer bigness for society's ills helped launch a movementLeopold Kohr's 1957 book The Breakdown of Nations argued that whenever something goes wrong, excessive size is the likely culprit. His ideas shaped E. F. Schumacher's 1973 bestsel…
292. Spartans once chose leaders by how loudly the crowd shoutedAs early as 700 BC, Sparta's monthly citizens' assembly settled elections by shouting, with the loudest roar winning. Aristotle mocked the method as childish next to the stone bal…
293. In ancient Rome, 'dictator' was a legal emergency job with an expiry dateThe early Roman Republic created the dictator as a lawful office: one leader handed absolute power for a limited time to deal with a crisis. The modern meaning, a ruler with near-…
294. The word 'diplomacy' comes from a Greek term for a folded documentBefore envelopes existed, rulers granting a privilege folded the document in two to keep its contents private. The ancient Greek diplōma, something doubled over, gave eighteenth-c…
295. Embassies are usually not foreign soil, whatever popular belief holdsIt is widely believed that stepping into an embassy means entering another country. In most cases it does not: the building stays under the host state's jurisdiction. What protect…
296. Why governments deliberately tie their own hands on economic policyFlexibility sounds like an advantage, yet many governments bind themselves with balanced-budget laws, inflation targets or fixed exchange rates. The reason is credibility: if offi…
297. Ancient Athenians considered elections undemocratic and picked officials by lotVoting for representatives feels like the essence of democracy, but in classical Athens it was seen as an oligarchic device that favoured the prominent. Most offices there were fi…
298. Some 'empires' gained the name without conquering a single acreWhen Korea proclaimed itself an empire in 1897, it was not expanding; Japan was about to swallow it. The Central African Empire and the Mexican Empire likewise owed the label main…
299. The fascist emblem once decorated republican France and the Lincoln MemorialBefore 1914 the fasces, a bundle of rods bound around an axe, was a favourite symbol of liberals and republicans. France's Marianne was often shown holding one, and it appears on …
300. The word 'communist' first surfaced in a French letter around 1785Around 1785 a Frenchman named Victor d'Hupay signed himself a communist author in a letter to the writer Restif de la Bretonne. Restif took up the word, using communisme in 1793 f…

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