Social Revolution

Reforming tribunes Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were killed by senators for proposing land redistribution, normalizing political mu...

The Black Death, English chevauchees during the Hundred Years War, and crushing taxes to fund the ransom of King John II pushed ru...

The Florentine wool industry depended on thousands of carders, spinners, and dyers who were excluded from the major guilds that mo...

The Black Death had made labor scarce, but the Statute of Labourers capped wages while landlords revived feudal dues. Three poll t...

Fiscal crisis, Enlightenment ideas, and bread shortages forced Louis XVI to summon the Estates-General in 1789. The Third Estate d...

Decades of Porfirian modernization had dispossessed peasant communities and concentrated land and wealth. Francisco Madero opposit...

Mineworkers and urban militias defeated the army in three days of fighting in La Paz, bringing Victor Paz Estenssoro to power. The...

Charles I attempts to rule without Parliament and to impose religious uniformity provoked war with Scotland and then a constitutio...

Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the hardship of the German siege, and distrust of the conservative National Assembly elected af...

Plans of the naval command for a suicidal final sortie against the Royal Navy triggered the sailors mutiny at Kiel at the end of O...

Hong, a failed examination candidate, taught from visions that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. His Taiping Heavenly Ki...

The shah white revolution had uprooted villages, enriched a narrow elite, and alienated the clergy, while the SAVAK secret police ...

Famine, land concentration, and court corruption had impoverished the Chinese peasantry. Zhang Jue led the Way of Supreme Peace, a...

Many non-Arab Muslims, known as mawali, resented their unequal status under the Umayyads, and many Muslims looked for leadership f...

Floods of the Yellow River, famine, and heavy labor demands for river works fueled discontent with Yuan rule. Members of millenari...

Jan Hus, a Prague preacher who criticized church corruption, was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415. His foll...

Rising burdens of serfdom, tithes, and restrictions on common land combined with the ideas of the Reformation, which many peasants...

When army officers launched a coup against the Second Spanish Republic in July 1936, workers militias defeated the rebels in Barce...

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, made up largely of Indigenous Maya peasants, seized several towns in Chiapas on the day...