Political History: Did you mean...?

The Arthashastra (or Arthaśāstra) is one of the oldest surviving treatises on statecraft. There is considerable debate about the dating and authorship of the text; it underwent compilation, recension, and redaction several times over the...

Augustus is well known for being the first Emperor of Rome, but even more than that, for being a self-proclaimed “Restorer of the Republic.” He believed in ancestral values such as monogamy, chastity, and piety (virtue). Thus, he introduced...

Only this fragment of a large stele has survived. On the surface, the Assyrian and Babylonian kings were carved in relief. The cuneiform inscription narrates a political treaty between them. The faces of the kings were deliberately vandalized...

We all live in states today, and Thomas Hobbes has a good claim to have been the first person to articulate this concept in its modern sense. The intention of Hobbes’s civil science was to lower the temperature of politics, and his concept...

A Proper Family Reunion, American political cartoon showing Satan and Benedict Arnold welcoming Jefferson Davis to Hell. Arnold and Davis were considered two of the most notorious traitors in US history; Arnold, a Patriot general in the American...

British political cartoon depicting the XYZ Affair; America, represented as Lady Liberty, is being accosted by five Frenchmen, while figures representing other European countries look on in the background. Published by S.W. Fores, London...

Political map of Italy near the arrival of the Normans, who eventually conquered Southern Italy and Sicily, including the principalities of Salerno, Capua, and Benevento.

A map indicating the approximate location of the ancient kingdom of Macedon and the modern political entities that area now covers.

Screenshot from the game Aggressors: Ancient Rome showing the political map.

The city of Tiwanaku in present-day Bolivia, capital of a powerful pre-Hispanic empire that dominated a large area of the southern Andes and beyond, reached its apogee between 500 and 900 AD. Its monumental remains testify to the cultural...