The Emancipation of the Russian serfs took place in 1861 during the reign of Tsar Alexander II. 

The Reform Bill of 1832 was designed to extend voting privileges to the urban middle class by restructuring the representatives in the British Houses of Parliament. Prior to the Reform Bill, there were many so-called “rotten boroughs” where one wealthy aristocrat controlled the election of the official for a district that contained very few actual people. Many urban centers were excluded. The Reform Bill created new districts to match up with the population redistribution brought about by urbanization and the Industrial Revolution. The eligible electorate nearly doubled, and the people who benefitted the most were the urban middle class.

The English Civil War, which raged from 1642 to 1649, was fought between the royalists on one side (supporting the King) and the parliamentarians on the other side (supporting Parliament). The conflict arose primarily from two sources of disagreement. First, Charles I believed that Parliament was there to serve him, whereas Parliament believed it was there to serve the people and itself. Second, Parliament was overwhelmingly Protestant, and many believed that Charles planned to return the English Kingdom to the Catholic fold. When the Parliamentarians defeated Charles, he was tried in what we would probably call a “show trial” and promptly executed.

The Tudors, Stuarts, and Plantagenets are all historical British ruling families. The Bourbons were a very notable French ruling family. The Hapsburgs were the ruling family of Austria, Austro-Hungary, and the Holy Roman Empire. They are perhaps the most important ruling family in European history in terms of longevity, impact on European and global life, and territorial size.

"Hacienda” is a term for a large plantation that was run by Spanish colonists in the New World. The “hacienda” system was prevalent throughout much of the New World and was particularly prominent in Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, where raw resources and native labor were both abundant.

The system of Feudalism starts from the top. A king or liege lord, who has a large amount of land, gives off portions of his land to lesser lords and nobles. These lesser lords and nobles now have a land of their own, protection from the King, and the means to raise their own army; in exchange they become “vassals.” They owe their allegiance to the King and must come to his aid to protect him from would-be challengers.

For much of the Early Modern Period, Europe was governed by absolute monarchs who believed and contended that their rule was divinely ordained by God and that therefore to criticize their rule was to criticize God. This belief is referred to as the Divine Right of Kings. Louis XIV famously highlighted this belief with his four word summary “L'Etat, c'est moi.”

Under the French Ancien Regime and other European feudal systems, the administrators and officials of the Catholic church, the clergy, were endowed with incredible political power and many special rights and privileges. Church officials were given disproportionate representation in many political institutions. They were also often exempt from most taxes and for a long time had a monopoly on the education system of France and other Catholic countries.

At the same time that young Americans were actively protesting against their nation's military involvement in Vietnam, young French students were protesting the strict and outdated teaching practices of university professors. Both of these movements can be seen as part of a wider social trend taking place at the time in the Western world— the growing levels of empowerment and political radicalism among young people.

It was actually Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks and later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who mandated that schooling be carried out in whichever native language was familiar to the students in that part of the wide-ranging Soviet empire. During Putin’s reign the gap between the wealthy and the poor has widened dramatically. Putin has, infamously, enriched the oligarchs of Russia at the expense of the rest of society. In fairness though, we might note that the gap between the wealthy and the poor has also widened in the United States in recent years. Universal healthcare has been in place in the Russian Federation since 1996, three years before Putin took office.