Nation-State

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theocracy

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is a form of government in which the official policy is to be governed by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided, or simply pursuant to the doctrine of a particular religious group or religion. Islamic states and the Byzantine Empire

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dynastic cycle

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1. A new ruler unites China, founds a new dynasty, and gains the Mandate of Heaven.
2. China, under the new dynasty, achieves prosperity.
3. The population increases.
4. Corruption becomes rampant in the imperial court, and the empire begins to enter decline and instability.
5. A natural disaster wipes out farm land. The disaster normally would not have been a problem; however, together with the corruption and overpopulation it causes famine.
6. The famine causes the population to rebel and a civil war ensues.
7. The ruler loses the Mandate of Heaven.
8. The population decreases because of the violence.
9. China goes through a warring states period.
10. One state emerges victorious.
11. The state starts a new empire.
12. The empire gains the Mandate of Heaven.

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collectivization

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Horizontal collectivism stresses collective decision-making among relatively equal individuals, and is thus usually based on decentralization. Vertical collectivism is based on hierarchical structures of power and moral and cultural conformity, and is therefore based on centralization. Often part of communism, the opposite of individualism.

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globalization

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refers to the increasing global relationships of culture, people, and economic activity. It is generally used to refer to economic globalization: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import quotas and the reduction of restrictions on the movement of capital and on investment.

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modernization

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refers to a model of an evolutionary transition from a 'pre-modern' or 'traditional' to a 'modern' society. The teleology of modernization is described in social evolutionism theories, existing as a template that has been generally followed by societies that have achieved modernity. Historians link modernization to the processes of urbanization and industrialization, as well as to the spread of education.

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chronology

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is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time, such as the use of a timeline or sequence of events.

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periodization

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Most disciplines that attempt to talk fruitfully about the past find it helpful to break up what has happened in various ways, and to give these smaller units names. The names are valuable to the extent that they aid analysis and description. Periodization from the sciences includes the geologic Cretaceous or Jurassic periods, while examples from human history include the Zhou Dynasty, the Baroque Period, and the Harlem Renaissance.
To the extent that history is continuous and ungeneralizable, all systems of periodization are more or less arbitrary. Yet without named periods, however clumsy or imprecise, past time would be nothing more than scattered events without a framework to help us understand them. Nations, cultures, families, and even individuals, each with their different remembered histories, are constantly engaged in imposing overlapping, often unsystematized, schemes of temporal periodization; periodizing labels are continually challenged and redefined. One historian may write a new history of the Renaissance in Europe; another may claim that there was no such thing as the European Renaissance.

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Fredrick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis

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Turner saw the land frontier was ending, since the U.S. Census of 1890 had officially stated that the American frontier had broken up. He sounded an alarming note, speculating as to what this meant for the continued dynamism of American society as the source of America's innovation and democratic ideals was disappearing.

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Charles Beard's Interpretation of the US Constitution

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He said there were two revolutions: one against Britain to obtain home rule, and the other to determine who should rule at home. Beard argued the Constitution was designed to reverse the radical democratic tendencies unleashed by the Revolution among the common people, especially farmers and debtors. In 1800, said Beard, the farmers and debtors, led by plantation slave owners, overthrew the capitalists and established Jeffersonian democracy.

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Karl Marx's Interpretation of the European Industrialization

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According to Karl Marx, industrialisation polarised society into the bourgeoisie (those who own the means of production, the factories and the land) and the much larger proletariat (the working class who actually perform the labour necessary to extract something valuable from the means of production). He saw the industrialisation process as the logical dialectical progression of feudal economic modes, necessary for the full development of capitalism, which he saw as in itself a necessary precursor to the development of socialism and eventually communism.