Intellect Plus
Society
1,109 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 19.
- Canadian Confederation created a federation, not a confederationCanadians celebrate Confederation every 1 July, yet by modern definitions their country is a federation, and a notably decentralised one. In 1867 the word simply meant joining tog…
- Coups succeed when enough people believe they will succeedBetween 1950 and 2010 researchers counted 457 attempts to seize power by coup, and almost exactly half worked. What decides the outcome, once troops are moving, is less firepower …
- Karl Marx was the first to use 'personality cult' politically, as a complaintIn an 1877 letter, Karl Marx told a German activist how much he disliked what he called the personality cult, recalling that he had refused public honours during the International…
- The first person to call himself an anarchist meant it as praiseFor centuries anarchy in English meant chaos, and French revolutionaries hurled anarchist at enemies as an insult. Then in the nineteenth century Pierre-Joseph Proudhon adopted th…
- Autocrats fear their own inner circle far more than crowds in the streetA lone ruler with total power still needs generals, officials and regional bosses to carry out orders, and those same people are the likeliest to remove him. Most autocracies fall…
- China's ruling party finished its founding congress on a tourist boatIn July 1921 a handful of delegates began meeting in a house in Shanghai's French Concession. When French police interrupted them on 30 July, they moved to a pleasure boat on Sout…
- Christian democracy sits left on economics and right on moralsChristian democrats helped build Europe's postwar welfare states and the European Union, yet they are hard to place on a left–right line. Historically they distrusted free-market …
- Greek citizenship may have been born from fear of slaveryIn ancient Greece any farmer who fell into debt could be enslaved. The historian Geoffrey Hosking argues that this constant danger made Greeks prize freedom so intensely that they…
- Singapore may be the last fully working city-state on EarthAthens, Carthage, Venice and Tyre were all countries contained within a single city. Nearly all such places were eventually swallowed by empires or nations. Today only Singapore, …
- Sparta taught its children just enough reading to be obedientCivic education is usually pictured as lessons in voting and rights. Sparta's version, as Plutarch tells it, gave children only as much literacy as they needed, and spent the rest…
- In India, anyone can go to court to defend a stranger's rightsMost legal systems insist that only the injured party can sue. India's constitution lets any person bring a case to the High Courts or Supreme Court on behalf of someone whose fun…
- Britain's merit-based civil service was copied from imperial ChinaIn the eighteenth century British officials often got their jobs through patronage or by simply buying them. Reformers looked east to China's examination system, and the 1854 Nort…
- Denmark wrote absolute royal power into a constitution in 1665Constitutions are usually imagined as limits on rulers. Denmark–Norway's King's Law of 1665 did the opposite, declaring the monarch the most perfect person on Earth, answerable to…
- TikTok started life as the export version of a Chinese app built in seven monthsByteDance built Douyin in roughly seven months in 2016 and saw it pass 100 million users within a year. Its founder then argued that China held only a fifth of the world's interne…
- Time magazine was almost called Facts, pitched at busy men with an hourTwo Yale graduates in their mid-twenties wanted a news digest a busy reader could finish in about an hour. They first planned to call it Facts, then settled on Time with the sloga…
- Vogue started as a weekly society paper that also courted menThe first Vogue, out in New York in December 1892 for ten cents, chronicled the parties, pastimes and clothes of Manhattan's upper class, with sport and social news thrown in for …
- At its peak one manga magazine sold 6.53 million copies a weekWeekly Shōnen Jump began in 1968 as a fortnightly latecomer chasing two established rivals. By the 1995 New Year issue it was printing 6.53 million copies, reaching an estimated 1…
- The first Western story on film was made in Blackburn, EnglandThe Great Train Robbery of 1903 is often called the first Western, but that is wrong. Edison was filming Wild West performers as early as 1894, and the earliest known Western with…
- Wikipedia was a side project meant to feed a stricter expert encyclopediaIn January 2001 Larry Sanger suggested a wiki as a feeder for Nupedia, an online encyclopedia whose expert-written articles went through formal review. The feeder launched five da…
- France keeps a whole separate court system just for suing the stateWhen a French citizen challenges a ministry, a town hall or even a private firm running a public service, the case skips the ordinary courts entirely. It goes to administrative tr…
- Roman law banned agents from signing for you; Islamic law allowed itHiring someone to sign a deal on your behalf feels utterly ordinary, yet Roman law refused to recognise it. Islamic law accepted agency, trade along the Silk Road spread the pract…
- NATO's mutual-defence clause has been triggered exactly once, and not by EuropeThe alliance was built to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe, yet the only time its members formally declared an attack on one to be an attack on all came in 2001, when the U…
- The first mass social movement rallied around a jailed London newspaper editorJohn Wilkes, editor of The North Briton, savaged Lord Bute's government and the peace terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Arrested for seditious libel under a general warrant, late…
- UNICEF was meant to be a temporary post-war fund; it never closedSet up in December 1946 to feed and clothe children uprooted by the Second World War, the emergency fund became a permanent United Nations body in 1953, kept its famous acronym af…
- The name 'United Nations' first meant the wartime Allies, coined by RooseveltBefore it was a building in New York, the United Nations was a military coalition. Franklin Roosevelt used the phrase for the countries fighting the Axis, Churchill liked it becau…
- It took seven international conferences and 41 years to agree on fighting choleraLong before the World Health Organization existed, European states met repeatedly to coordinate against cholera. Because nobody agreed on how diseases spread, the first binding de…
- The word racism only became common in the 1930s, to describe Nazi ideologyPrejudice by ancestry is old, but the word racism is surprisingly young. Its earlier cousin racialism appears in a 1902 quotation and racism in one from 1903, yet the term spread …
- Oberlin College has banned secret societies continuously since 1847While Yale's Skull and Bones became perhaps the most famous secret student society in America, some campuses refused to allow any. Oberlin College has prohibited them from 1847 to…
- The word sexism was probably coined at a college forum in November 1965According to legal scholar Fred Shapiro, Pauline Leet most likely invented the word sexism on 18 November 1965 at a student-faculty forum at Franklin and Marshall College. She bui…
- The last country to abolish slavery did so in 1981Mauritania formally outlawed slavery in 1981, the last country in the world to do so. Colonial France had nominally banned it across French West Africa back in 1905, but that ban …
- The word class began as a Roman census category for military serviceClass comes from the Latin classis, the label Roman census takers used to sort citizens by wealth so they could decide who owed what military service. Only in the late eighteenth …
- Social equality is about equal respect, not about relieving hardshipHelping the unfortunate and pursuing social equality sound alike but are different goals. Social equality is the ideal that any two people deserve equal respect and an equal right…
- Political scientists split social problems into valence issues and position issuesSome social problems unite almost everyone: child abuse is condemned across many societies, making it what scholars call a valence issue. Others, labelled position issues, divide …
- The Black Death gave Western Europe's surviving peasants unexpected bargaining powerWhen plague killed a large share of Europe's people in the mid-1300s, survivors found land plentiful and labour scarce. Many workers could now demand wages and other compensation,…
- Lord Acton judged a country's freedom by how safe its minorities feltThe Victorian historian John Dalberg-Acton proposed a blunt yardstick: the surest test of whether a country is truly free is the security its minorities enjoy. It is one of many c…
- Falling birth rates, more than longer lives, are what make populations grow oldAgeing societies are usually explained by people living longer, but that is the smaller half of the story. Across the world, declining fertility now drives most population ageing:…
- The dollar-a-day poverty line never literally meant one US dollarWhen the World Bank introduced its famous dollar-a-day poverty line in 1990, it did not mean converting a dollar at the exchange rate. The figure uses purchasing power parity, ask…
- Ancient Athens jailed people who could not pay fines, then had to add limitsIn classical Athens, imprisonment was a common fate for people unable to pay their fines. Because poor citizens often could never pay, they faced being locked up indefinitely, so …
- Nonviolent civil rights protests won sympathy while violent ones fed calls for orderOne study of the American civil rights era found a striking split. Nonviolent activism tended to earn favourable press and shift public opinion toward the issues organisers raised…
- John Dewey argued a public forms only when people face a shared problemIn 1927 philosopher John Dewey offered a surprising definition: a public is not simply the population but a group of people who face a similar problem, recognise it and organise t…
- In 2023 America's national science academies formally dropped race from geneticsAmerica's national science, engineering and medical academies officially renounced using race in genetics research in 2023. It capped a long shift in which scientists came to rega…
- Liberty and freedom are not quite synonyms, and philosophers have argued whyOne common distinction treats freedom as the raw ability to do whatever you want and can, while liberty means the absence of arbitrary restraint, bounded by everyone else's rights…
- The phrase middle class first appeared in a 1745 pamphlet about Irish woolThe earliest known use of middle class turns up in James Bradshaw's 1745 pamphlet on stopping the smuggling of Irish wool to France. Before that, early modern Europeans spoke of t…
- Sociologists define a minority by power, not by headcountIn everyday speech a minority is simply the smaller group. Academics mean something else: a group at a disadvantage relative to a dominant one. Under apartheid, black South Africa…
- India once had more NGOs than primary schools, roughly one per 600 peopleAround 2009 India was estimated to host about 2 million non-governmental organisations, far more than its primary schools and health centres. The United States has roughly 1.5 mil…
- Nonprofits are allowed to make a surplus; they just cannot hand it outA common belief holds that nonprofit organisations may not turn a profit. In fact the rule is a non-distribution constraint: income beyond expenses must go back into the mission r…
- China's one-child rule covered only about a third of people by 1984China's one-child policy is remembered as near-universal, and a strict limit was imposed in 1980 and written into the constitution in 1982. Yet exceptions multiplied so quickly th…
- A committee only gets smarter with size if its members beat a coin tossCondorcet's jury theorem shows that if the average member of a group votes more accurately than chance, adding members raises the odds the majority is right. The catch cuts both w…
- London's Foundling Hospital asked parents no questions, only for a tokenWhen sea captain Thomas Coram opened London's Foundling Hospital in 1741 for deserted children, nobody asked who the child or parent was. Instead, each parent left a distinguishin…
- The word pacifism was coined in 1901, though opposition to war is ancientFrench peace campaigner Émile Arnaud invented the word pacifism, and fellow activists took it up when their tenth international peace congress met in Glasgow in 1901. The idea beh…
- Shalom means far more than peace, including hello, goodbye and good healthFrom around 1300, English speakers began using peace in greetings as a rendering of the Hebrew shalom. But shalom, related to Arabic salaam, carries a crowd of other meanings: jus…
- Medieval England punished homelessness with stocks, whipping and eventually brandingAfter the Peasants' Revolt, a 1383 English law let constables seize vagabonds and demand proof they could support themselves; failure meant gaol or three days in the stocks. Whipp…
- The word homophobia first reached print in a 1969 New York sex tabloidPsychologist George Weinberg coined homophobia in the 1960s and is credited with first saying it aloud. Its first printed appearance came on 23 May 1969 in Screw, an American porn…
- Most people who migrate never leave their own countryMigration conjures images of border crossings, but the dominant form worldwide is internal: people moving from village to city, or out to the suburbs, within a single nation. Glob…
- World population growth peaked in 1968 and has roughly halved sinceHumanity grew by 2.1 percent a year in 1968, the very year Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The annual rate has since fallen to about 1.1 percent, and forecasters keep …
- A thirteenth-century West African charter guaranteed the right to lifeCenturies before Enlightenment philosophers wrote about natural rights, the Mali Empire's constitution, the Kouroukan Fouga, set out a right to life and to bodily integrity along …
- Crowdmapping after the 2010 Haiti earthquake gave humanitarianism a digital branchWhen volunteers plotted reports on online maps after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Patrick Meier called it digital humanitarianism. The idea of helping strangers in distant emergenci…
- In the UN's accounting, you can be malnourished without being hungryThe Food and Agriculture Organization treats hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity as overlapping but distinct. Every hungry person is malnourished and food insecure, yet someo…
- Crossing the Atlantic shrank from five weeks to eight days, and immigration surgedIn the eighteenth century an Atlantic crossing could take up to five weeks. By the early twentieth it took about eight days. As the time and cost of moving fell, so did the opport…
- To social scientists, a handshake can be an institution just like a parliamentAsk a sociologist what an institution is and the answer may include a firm handshake. The broadest definitions cover any regular, shared practice that shapes behaviour, formal or …