Class

1906

2010

A treaty signed by a minority faction, ratified by a single Senate vote, overrode a Supreme Court ruling the president simply declined to enforce.

Working-class Parisians did most of the street fighting, a wealthy cousin of the deposed king took the throne instead of the crowd's own choice, and the arrangement pleased almost no one who had actually fought for it.

More than fifty countries had uprisings within the same eighteen months, and almost all of them failed for the same reason: the workers, the middle class, and the nationalists wanted different things and only briefly pretended otherwise.

The samurai code most people picture, honour, loyalty, ritual suicide, was written up as a bestseller in 1899, three decades after the samurai class had already been legally abolished.