Revolution

Khomeini spent fifteen years exiled from Iran for opposing the Shah, then returned to build a state with far more centralised religious authority than the monarchy he replaced ever claimed.

A runaway printer's apprentice became the one man to sign the Declaration, the peace treaty with Britain, and the Constitution, having spent decades as a slaveholder before turning into a public abolitionist.

A young officer's ambush of a French detachment helped start a world war, and the general it made famous later gave up power twice, on his own terms, which is rarer than the story usually admits.

The man later called the only wholly admirable figure in modern history conquered a kingdom with a thousand volunteers and then handed it to a monarchy he privately despised, because unification mattered to him more than his own republicanism did.

A general who trained in the Spanish army he later fought crossed the Andes with an army that lost half its mules, then walked away from power at the moment he could have claimed the most of it.

The peasant strategy Mao's own party first rejected won him a country, and the archives that later opened show how much the resulting record was built to fit him.

The man who built a continent-wide system for suppressing revolution was toppled by one in a single day in 1848, which either proves the system was fragile all along or that thirty years is a long run for any settlement.

He told a fellow negotiator he might have just signed his own death warrant, and eight months later, on a rural road in his own county, he had.

Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the paramilitaries of a government her own socialist movement had helped install, and historians still argue how far up that government the responsibility for her killing reached.

Simon Bolivar founded a union of South American republics meant to outlast him, then spent his final years being voted out of the offices he had created for it one by one, a dissolution the record notes without fully explaining.

The revolution he spent decades preparing succeeded without him in the room, yet both governments that later split China still claim him as their founder.

The document most Americans picture being signed on the Fourth of July was mostly signed a month later, and the vote that mattered had already happened two days earlier.

1763

A revolution historians cannot even agree on the start date of, because it was really two long wars, a famine of governance, and a peasantry that ran out of patience.

1787

1959

1916

Historians still can't agree whether Reagan's pressure or Gorbachev's own convictions ended the Cold War, and the honest answer is probably that neither side wants to give up the credit.

1949

The vote counters walked out before the soldiers did: thirty computer technicians quit a government election tally over what they called deliberate manipulation, three weeks before generals started defecting toward the crowd instead.

1911

The rebellion Greeks fought alone for six years is remembered in the West largely for the one naval battle three foreign fleets fought for them almost by accident.

1804

1956

1970

A Russian official's plan to draft young Polish radicals into decades of army service to defuse unrest instead set off the very rebellion he was trying to prevent, and its defeat produced the single largest deportation in Russian history.

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.

Most of the juntas that started this began by insisting they were still loyal to the Spanish king, which makes it hard to say exactly when a movement to preserve the monarchy became a war to end it.

1934

1917

1974

1991

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.

1917

1789

Trotsky tried to end Russia's war by simply declaring it over without signing anything, a strategy called neither war nor peace that lasted exactly until Germany resumed advancing and proved it did not work.

1783

1815

1989

1789

The man who wrote that all men are created equal held more than six hundred people as property, and for two centuries historians were reluctant to say plainly what that meant for one enslaved family in particular.

A man freed from slavery years before the revolution that made him famous led the only successful slave uprising to found a state, then died in a French mountain prison denied medical care because of his colour.

His own dying warning about Stalin's growing power went largely unheeded, which makes the question of how much responsibility Lenin bears for what followed him one the sources themselves cannot fully settle.