During the Cultural revolution, Mao instituted a new social group known as the "Red Guards." Comprised of young people, especially high schoolers, these Red Guards were given free reign to attack representatives of bourgeois order. Those who were older were automatically considered counterrevolutionary enemies because they had been tainted by their experience with landlords and aristocrats.

Mao's was a totalitarian regime; every aspect of life, including family and kinship, was under the auspices of the government.

Mao Tse-Tung was against the traditional Chinese concept of filial piety; respect for ones elders simply because they are elders.

Mao Tse-Tung taught children to be wary of elder generations, especially those who conflicted with the Communist party.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Tse-Tung's cult of personality grew immense, but his family, and especially his children, were largely kept out of the spotlight. In no way was Mao's family a public example of kinship.

The beginning of the Great Depression took place during the presidency of Herbert Hoover who, like many Presidents when the economy is in a bad state, was widely blamed for the disaster. Many Americans were forced from their homes and unable to find work and set up slums and shantytowns throughout American cities. In the early 1930s hundreds of thousands of Americans lived in these “Hoovervilles.”

In the 7th and 8th centuries the Arabic language became very widespread in North Africa.

Arabic is the clerical language of Islam, but it never ceased to be a spoken language as well.

The Arabic speaking empire never extended to China.

Modern scholars have codified the Arabic language in new ways, but the language never went extinct.

Arabic has never been spoken by more than a small minority or Europeans.

Antisemitism first began to emerge in Europe during the High Middle Ages. The primary reason for this, other than the growing power of local church authorities, was the simple fact that Christians were forbidden from moneylending. Moneylending is an important part of a functional economy and someone had to step in to fill the void left behind by the Christian prohibition. Jews, in many European societies, grew wealthy as a result of moneylending practices, which in turn made them unpopular and created an antisemitic discourse that persists until this day.

Janissaries were soldiers in the Ottoman Empire who had once been Christians, prior to their enslavement and forced service in the Ottoman army. Janissaries were an important component of the Ottoman armed forces and a significant component of Ottoman society.

In the fifteenth century, Spain was not a unified country and was instead divided into a few different kingdoms. With the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the unification of Spain was effectively complete. Their marriage marked the emergence of Spain as a colonial and global power.

Herbert Spencer is often remembered for his passionate belief in Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is the belief that the biological theory of natural selection can be used to explain geopolitics and the differences between western nations and the rest of the world. It was used to reinforce the legitimacy of European imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Almost all of the ruling dynasties of Persia (Iran) over the last 1000 years have been of Turkic origin. The Pahlavi dynasty, which took power in 1925, ended this long pattern.

Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim in a country (Iraq) where the population distribution of Shia and Sunni Muslims is roughly even. Sectarian differences between Sunni and Shia have been the cause of much conflict in the Middle East for hundreds of years and are especially relevant today.

After the Napoleonic Wars at the start of the nineteenth century, many states were redrawn and reorganized. Additionally, the romantic and revolutionary movements of Europe in the early nineteenth century highlighted the shared histories of certain peoples. The desire for shared cultural, language, and religious heritages to be united in one state would both create modern Italy and Germany, while also spelling the destruction of multi-ethnic and multi-lingual nations like the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the end of World War I in 1918.