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Period: 470 BCE to 399 BCE
Socrates
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431 BCE
Peloponessian War (431-405 BCE)
The Peloponnesian War was a war fought in ancient Greece between Athens and Sparta—the two most powerful city-states in ancient Greece at the time (431 to 405 B.C.E.). This war shifted power from Athens to Sparta, making Sparta the most powerful city-state in the region. -
Period: 428 BCE to 348 BCE
Plato
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Period: 384 BCE to 322 BCE
Aristotle
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Period: 872 to 950
Al Farabi
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Jun 15, 1215
Magna Carta
Magna Carta Libertatum (Medieval Latin for "Great Charter of Freedoms"), commonly called Magna Carta is a royal charter of rights agreed to by King John of England on 15 June 1215. Drafted to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. -
Period: 1332 to 1406
Ibn Khaldun
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Period: 1469 to 1527
Machiavelli
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Period: to
Thomas Hobbes
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Edict of Nantes
signed in April 1598 by King Henry IV of France, granted the Calvinist Protestants of France (also known as Huguenots) substantial rights in the nation, which was still considered essentially Catholic at the time. In the edict, Henry aimed primarily to promote civil unity. The edict separated civil from religious unity, treated some Protestants for the first time as more than mere schismatics and heretics, and opened a path for secularism and tolerance. -
Start of the Thirty Years' War
Protestants revolt against Catholic oppression; Denmark, Sweden, and France invade Germany in later phases of war. -
Slavery
The first African slaves are brought to Jamestown.
(Slavery is made legal in 1650.) -
Period: to
John Locke
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English Civil War (1642-1651)
The English Civil War (1642–1651) was a series of civil wars and political machinations between Parliamentarians ("Roundheads") and Royalists ("Cavaliers") principally over the manner of England's governance. In England, the monopoly of the Church of England on Christian worship was ended, while in Ireland the victors consolidated the established Protestant Ascendancy. Constitutionally, the wars established the precedent that an English monarch cannot govern without Parliament's consent. -
Treaty of Westphalia
The peace treaty that ended the Thirty Years War and included an agreement to respect the sovereignty of nation states. -
Le Roi Soleil (Sun King) in France
Louis XIV begins personal rule as absolute monarch; starts to build Versailles. His reign of 72 years and 110 days is the longest recorded of any monarch of a sovereign country in European history. In the age of absolutism in Europe, Louis XIV's France was a leader in the growing centralisation of power. -
English Glorious Revolution
The Glorious Revolution was when William of Orange took the English throne from James II in 1688. The event brought a permanent realignment of power within the English constitution. The new co-monarchy of King William III and Queen Mary II accepted more constraints from Parliament than previous monarchs had, and the new constitution created the expectation that future monarchs would also remain constrained by Parliament. -
The Bill of Rights
English legislation that restricted the powers of the monarchy and established the rights of a free Parliament. -
Period: to
Jean Jacques Rousseau
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Period: to
Immanuel Kant
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Period: to
Jeremy Bentham
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Encyclopedie
The Encyclopédie was the first large scale synthesis of all knowledge. It is most famous for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. According to Denis Diderot in the article "Encyclopédie", the Encyclopédie's aim was "to change the way people think" and for people to be able to inform themselves and to know things. -
Electricity
Benjamin Franklin invents the lightning rod. -
Seven Years' War
Seven Years' War (French and Indian Wars in America) (to 1763), in which Britain and Prussia defeat France, Spain, Austria, and Russia. France loses North American colonies; Spain cedes Florida to Britain in exchange for Cuba. -
Period: to
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution in England begins (1760 - 1851) -
Period: to
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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French Revolution
The French Revolution begins with the storming of the Bastille. The same year, the Declaration of the Rights of Man is approved by the French National Assembly. -
The United States Bill of Rights
The first ten amendments to the constitution, the first of which guarantees freedom of religion, speech, press, and peaceable assembly. -
Period: to
Alexis de Tocqueville
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Period: to
John Stuart Mill
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Period: to
Karl Marx
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Period: to
Friedrich Nietzsche
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The First International
The First International – A meeting of European Socialists. The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), often called the First International (1864–1876), was an international organisation which aimed at uniting a variety of different left-wing socialist, communist and anarchist groups and trade unions that were based on the working class and class struggle. -
Period: to
Max Weber
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Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a radical socialist and revolutionary government that ruled Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871. The Franco-Prussian War had led to the capture of Emperor Napoleon III in September 1870, the collapse of the Second French Empire, and the beginning of the Third Republic. -
Period: to
Hannah Arendt
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World War I (1914-1918)
The First World War (or simply WWI), termed "The Great War" by contemporaries, started in 1914 and ended in 1918. It was ignited by the Assassination in Sarajevo of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's heir to the throne, Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand, by Gavrilo Princip of the organization "Young Bosnia," Bosnian Serbs' liberation movement. -
Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution of 1917 (ending in the overthrow of the Tsarist regime and the brutal execution of His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II and his family) sparked a wave of communist revolutions across Europe, prompting many to believe that a socialist world revolution could be realized in the near future. However, the European revolutions were defeated, Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, and within a few years, Joseph Stalin displaced Leon Trotsky as the de facto leader of the Soviet Union. -
The Covenant of the League of Nations
The Covenant of the League of Nations in 1920 attempted to restrict, but not to prohibit, recourse to war. It provided that states should seek to settle their disputes peacefully by referring them to arbitration, judicial settlement, or to the Council of the League. -
Period: to
John Rawls
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Mussolini's March on Rome
Fascism first appeared in Italy with the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in 1922. The ideology was supported by a large proportion of the upper classes as a strong challenge to the threat of communism. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, a new variant of fascism called Nazism took over Germany and ended the German experiment with democracy. Spain also became a dictatorship under the leadership of General Francisco Franco after the Spanish Civil War. -
The Permanent Court of International Justice
The Permanent Court of International Justice, often called the World Court, existed from 1922 to 1946. It was an international court attached to the League of Nations. It provided arbitration of disputes between member countries of the League of Nations -
Period: to
Michel Foucault
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Great Depression
After World War I, the global economy remained strong through the 1920s. The war had provided a stimulus for industry and for economic activity in general. There were many warning signs foretelling the collapse of the global economic system in 1929 that were generally not understood by the political leadership of the time.[ -
Period: to
Jurgen Habermas
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World War II (1939–1945)
World War II, also called Second World War, conflict that involved virtually every part of the world during the years 1939–45. The principal belligerents were the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and the Allies—France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, China. The 40,000,000–50,000,000 deaths incurred in World War II make it the bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war, in history. -
The Holocaust
The Holocaust (which roughly means "great fire") was the deliberate, systematic murder of millions of Jews and other minorities during World War II by the Nazi regime in Germany. The Nazis took a sadistic pleasure in the death camps; the entrance to the most notorious camp, Auschwitz, stated "Arbeit Macht Frei"—"Work Sets You Free". In the end, six million Jews and up to 5 million homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and political prisoners killed by various means, mainly in the death camps. -
Bretton Woods Conference
Formally known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, it was the gathering of 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations to regulate the international monetary and financial order after the conclusion of World War II. Agreements were signed that, after legislative ratification by member governments, established the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Monetary Fund. -
The Nuclear Age begins
When World War II broke out, scientists and advisors among the Allies feared that Nazi Germany may have been trying to develop its own atomic weapons. At the secret Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, scientist Robert Oppenheimer led a team of the world's top scientists to develop the first nuclear weapons, the first of which was tested at the Trinity site in July 1945. Two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 each. -
The Charter of the United Nations
The Charter of the United Nations was signed on 26 June 1945, in San Francisco, at the conclusion of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, and came into force on 24 October 1945. The Statute of the International Court of Justice is an integral part of the Charter. -
Indian independence and decolonization
In India, Mahatma Gandhi became a global icon for his non-violent struggle to achieve Indian independence. This was achieved in 1947 with the end of British rule in India and the partition of the territory into modern day India and Pakistan, which would later also further divide, leading to the creation of the People's Republic of Bangladesh in 1971. -
Cold War (1947-1991)
During the Yalta Conference, where the Western, capitalist powers, and the communist Soviet Union agreed on separate spheres of influence in Europe, they set up the stage for a geopolitical rivalry that would dominate international relations for the next five decades. -
Period: to
Nancy Fraser
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Period: to
Seyla Benhabib
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The fall of the Berlin Wall
In 1989, a series of revolutions in nearby Eastern Bloc countries—in Poland and Hungary in particular—caused a chain reaction in East Germany that ultimately resulted in the demise of the Wall.
