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In 1816 Francis Ronalds built an eight-mile underground telegraph in his garden using static electricity, and the British Admiralty rejected it as wholly unnecessary. Earlier, a 1753 letter in the Scots Magazine proposed 26 wires that made pith balls twitch, and in 1809 Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring sent current down as many as 35 wires into tubes of acid, reading letters from hydrogen bubbles. Volta's battery of 1800, Ørsted's deflected compass needle, William Sturgeon's electromagnet and Joseph Henry's bell rung through a mile of wire led to the relay of 1835, while Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber strung two wires over Göttingen in 1833 and encoded letters as positive and negative pulses.

In 1837 William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone built a five-needle system for the Great Western Railway, then dropped it for a single needle on overhead poles after buried insulation rotted. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail recorded dots and dashes on paper tape and sent What hath God wrought in 1844. Gutta-percha, tested by Michael Faraday, insulated the 1850 Dover to Calais cable, the SS Great Eastern laid the Atlantic line in 1866, and by 1902 cables circled the globe. Faster machines followed, and Alexander Graham Bell's work on the harmonic telegraph led to the telephone, which Western Union dismissed as a toy before AT&T later bought its telex business.

• Operators learned to read Morse by the clicks of the stylus, so paper recorders gave way to the sounder.
• The 1851 Vienna Conference adopted Gerke's modified Morse code as a European standard.
• Émile Baudot's five-pulse code gave 32 combinations, and Creed teleprinters used compressed air to punch tape at 200 words a minute.
• Edwin Stanton ran the Union's 15,000 miles of wire straight into his War Department office.
• Cut cables pushed German Lorenz cipher traffic onto radio in World War II, where Bletchley Park intercepted and broke it.

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The House of Romanov took the Russian throne in 1613, after the 700-year Rurik line died out and the Time of Troubles brought famine, Polish and Swedish occupation and pretenders marching on Moscow. When princes refused the crown, nobles offered it to 16-year-old Mikhail Romanov, hiding with his mother at the Ipatiev Monastery, and he burst into tears and begged them to leave. He survived by consulting the Zemsky Sobor on nearly every major issue. His grandson Peter the Great toured Western Europe, learned shipbuilding and built St. Petersburg on a swamp, but the male line ended with Empress Elizabeth in 1762, and Peter III and Catherine the Great made the house a Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov branch that kept the old name.

Paul I's laws imposed male-preference succession and equal-birth marriages, and the tsar drew 24 million gold rubles a year yet was often broke by autumn because state and family finances were one. Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861 and was killed by a bomb, and Alexander III answered with repression. Nicholas II, who admitted he knew nothing of ruling, married Alix of Hesse, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, whose son Alexei had hemophilia. The family hid the illness and turned to Grigori Rasputin, while the public saw a foreign empress taking advice from a mystic. Nicholas abdicated in 1917, and in July 1918 the family and four servants were shot in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg.

• The 1944 Almanach de Gotha listed the dynasty as Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov.
• Rasputin's success may have come from stopping the doctors' aspirin, a blood thinner that worsened Alexei's bleeding.
• Diamonds sewn into the daughters' clothing deflected bullets, and the killers finished with bayonets and rifle butts.
• The bodies were burned, doused with acid and buried in the forest because the approaching White Army might make them relics.
• Prince Philip's mitochondrial DNA matched the remains, a 2007 grave held Alexei and a sister, and Anna Anderson proved to be a Polish factory worker.

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The Parthian Empire ruled from about 247 BC to 224 AD, stretching from modern Turkey to the borders of Pakistan, yet it left almost no written history of its own. It began when Arsaces I led the nomadic Parni into the Seleucid province of Parthia near the Caspian Sea while the Seleucids were distracted by wars with Egypt and internal revolts. The newcomers kept Greek accountants and Persian scribes in place, took the province's name, and under Mithridates I, around 171 BC, captured Media, Mesopotamia and Babylon. As the first native Iranian dynasty since the Achaemenids, they revived the title King of Kings while letting vassal kings and cities govern themselves in return for tribute and troops.

Early kings minted silver coins with Greek inscriptions and called themselves Philhellene to reassure Greek merchants, then later switched to the Parthian language in an Iranian revival. In 121 BC Han dynasty diplomats reached the Parthian court, making Parthia the taxing middleman for silk bound for Rome. Horse archers and armored cataphracts destroyed Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BC, Mark Antony was driven back, and Augustus had to use diplomacy to recover the lost standards. Yet nobles who controlled horse herds and revenue backed rival claimants in repeated civil wars, Trajan sacked Ctesiphon, and in 224 AD the vassal Ardashir I killed the last Parthian king and founded the Sasanian Empire.

• Babylon kept worshipping Marduk under Parthian rule, and Buddhism flourished in the eastern provinces.
• A later Parthian king sent live lions and Persian gazelles to the Chinese emperor as diplomatic gifts.
• The general Surena kept his horse archers supplied at Carrhae with a train of 1,000 camels loaded with arrows.
• Crassus's severed head was reportedly used as a prop in a performance of Euripides' Bacchae before King Orodes II.
• Parthian records on parchment and leather rotted away, and Roman cookbooks still preserve a dish called Parthian chicken.

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The Mycenaean centers of Mycenae, Pylos and Tiryns rose on the Greek mainland in the Late Bronze Age, roughly 1750 to 1050 BC, and a 2022 genetic study by Iosif Lazaridis and colleagues showed their people combined early European farmer ancestry with a later influx linked to Yamnaya-like steppe migrants who likely brought horses and an Indo-European language. That language was revealed as an archaic Greek when Michael Ventris, not a classical scholar, cracked Linear B in the 1950s by treating its roughly 87 signs as a syllabary and testing the name Knossos. Hittite records complained of an aggressive western power called Ahhiyawa, and Egyptian texts from the reign of Thutmose III named a land called Danaya.

Under the wanax, the king, a hierarchy ran down to the damos and enslaved workers, and palace storerooms full of pithoi tracked grain, wine, perfumed oil, bronze and the wool of some 100,000 sheep at Knossos. Some scholars now read the Pylos land records as preparations for state religious feasts rather than feudal taxation. Mycenaean stirrup jars reached Italy, Spain, Troy, Cyprus and Egypt in exchange for gold, Cypriot copper and scarce tin. Around 1200 to 1180 BC the palaces burned, and possible causes include a Dorian invasion, Sea Peoples raids, drought shown in pollen cores, or internal revolt. Linear B was forgotten, and Greeks went without writing until they adopted a Phoenician-derived alphabet in the 8th century BC.

• The fires that destroyed the palaces baked the clay tablets, preserving the records that let us read them today.
• The last Pylos tablets record watchers sent to the coast and bronze taken from temple offerings to make spear points.
• Dozens of bronze arrowheads were found in the destruction debris at the citadel of Midea.
• Egyptian records from about 1175 BC list a raider group called the Ekwesh, a name strikingly close to Ahhiyawa.
• Tiryns briefly expanded its lower town after the first wave of destruction while Pylos was abandoned for good.

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Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico until 1911 by courting American, British and French capital for railways, mines and oil, and the same rail lines let him ship rural police to crush distant revolts in days. By 1900 more than 90 percent of communal indigenous lands had been sold off or expropriated, leaving an estimated 9.5 million landless peasants in debt peonage on haciendas, some covering over a million acres. When Díaz reversed his hint of open elections in 1910, Francisco I. Madero, heir to a rich landowning family, escaped jail to the United States and issued the Plan de San Luis Potosí under the slogan effective voting, no reelection. Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco beat the federal army at Ciudad Juárez, and Díaz sailed for France.

Madero demobilized his rebels, kept the old federal army and stalled on land reform, and in February 1913, during the Ten Tragic Days, General Victoriano Huerta forced him out and had him killed. Venustiano Carranza's Plan of Guadalupe united Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, Villa and Emiliano Zapata against Huerta, whose army was dissolved in 1914. The Aguascalientes convention failed, and the winners fought each other until Obregón, having studied World War I reports, broke Villa's cavalry at Celaya in April 1915. The 1917 Constitution followed, then a Sonoran coup in 1920, the party that became the PRI, and Lázaro Cárdenas, who nationalized oil in 1938 and handed power to a civilian in 1940.

• Díaz allowed Arizona Rangers across the border to suppress striking Mexican miners at Cananea.
• At Celaya Obregón used irrigation ditches, barbed wire, trenches and interlocking machine guns against wave after wave of Villa's horsemen.
• Zapata's fighters in Morelos dismantled sugar haciendas and returned land to villages while the civil war still raged, then melted back into farming.
• Obregón remarked that no general can withstand a cannonball of 50,000 pesos, and rivals were bought off with graft.
• Zapata, killed in a 1919 ambush ordered by Carranza, later inspired the 1994 EZLN uprising in Chiapas.

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After losing most of his French lands to Philip II in 1204, King John spent a decade squeezing the English barons to win them back, turning scutage into a routine tax, setting arbitrary inheritance reliefs and selling verdicts under a rule of vis et voluntas, force and will. His defeat at Bouvines in 1214 sparked revolt, led by Robert FitzWalter, implicated in a 1212 plot to kill the king. The rebels took London and in June 1215 met John at Runnymede, a marshy meadow between Windsor and Staines. Archbishop Stephen Langton turned their demands into a charter protecting church rights, limiting feudal payments and promising justice. Its free men meant barons, knights and merchants, and only three of over 60 clauses touched the peasantry.

Clause 61 created 25 barons empowered to seize the king's castles and lands if he ignored a breach for 40 days. John, a papal vassal since surrendering his kingdom to Innocent III, appealed to Rome, and the pope annulled the charter as shameful and demeaning, setting off the First Barons' War and a French prince's invasion. John died of dysentery in October 1216, and the regents of nine-year-old Henry III reissued it without Clause 61. In 1217 a separate forest charter made it the Great Charter by size. Henry III reissued it in 1225 for a tax, and Edward I made it statute in 1297. In the 17th century Sir Edward Coke recast it as ancient English liberty against the Stuarts, a myth later carried to the American colonies.

• The barons cited Henry I's Charter of Liberties, issued a century earlier, against John's taxes.
• A 1660 pamphlet claimed Oliver Cromwell mocked the charter as Magna Farta.
• Charles I tried to suppress discussion of the charter as its myth fed the English Civil War.
• Only three clauses of the 1297 version remain law in England and Wales, including the guarantee of judgment by peers and the law of the land.
• Four 1215 copies survive, two at the British Library and one each at Lincoln Castle and Salisbury Cathedral, added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2009.

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In 1667 Samuel von Pufendorf called the Holy Roman Empire a monstrosity, and Voltaire said it was neither holy, Roman nor an empire. It began on Christmas Day 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, using the rule of Empress Irene in Constantinople to treat the imperial throne as vacant, and the doctrine of translatio imperii to transfer Roman authority. In 962 Otto I's coronation tied Germany to Italy and the papacy, and his imperial church system made bishops, who had no legitimate heirs, into administrators whose lands returned to the crown. Medieval people saw Rome as the last earthly kingdom before the end of the world. Frederick Barbarossa added holy around 1157, and by 1512 the name added the German Nation.

The Investiture Controversy between Henry IV and Gregory VII brought excommunication, revolts and civil war, and the Concordat of Worms in 1122 cost the emperor control of bishops, empowering the princes. Charles IV's Golden Bull of 1356 fixed seven prince-electors with their own coinage, tolls and courts. Losing Italy and Burgundy spurred imperial reforms such as regional circles and a supreme court. Luther's Reformation of 1517 split the empire, and the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 let rulers choose Catholicism or Lutheranism but left out Calvinists. The Thirty Years' War from 1618 drew in Sweden and France. After Austerlitz, Francis II dissolved the empire in 1806 to keep Napoleon from claiming the Roman title.

• The empire at its height spanned modern Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and parts of Italy, France and Poland.
• Calling the empire holy let Barbarossa claim power directly from God, cutting out the pope.
• The Golden Bull required electors' sons to learn German, Latin, Italian and Czech.
• Exposed borders meant emperors needed the princes' troops and taxes, so they ruled by negotiation.
• The empire's population did not recover to its pre-1618 level until about 1750.

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In the early fifth century the Chinese Buddhist monk Fa Xian found Gupta India lightly taxed, with free movement and criminals fined rather than mutilated. The dynasty began in the late third century with Gupta and his son Ghatotkacha, minor Maharajas of disputed caste. Chandragupta I married the Licchavi princess Kumaradevi, took the title Maharajadhiraja and minted gold coins showing the couple. Samudragupta, from about 335 CE, uprooted eight northern kings, subdued forest kingdoms and beat 12 southern kings, as recorded by Harisena on the Allahabad Pillar, using cavalry and horse archers. He performed the Ashvamedha horse sacrifice and issued coins showing himself playing the veena.

The play Devi Chandraguptam says the weak heir Ramagupta agreed to surrender his queen Dhruvaswamini to the Sakas, until his brother Chandragupta II slipped into the enemy camp, killed the Saka king, took the throne and married the queen, a story that may be self-serving propaganda. As Vikramaditya he conquered Gujarat, Saurashtra and Malwa, gaining western ports and trade with Rome, Byzantium and the Sasanids. His court at Ujjain hosted the poet Kalidasa among the Nine Jewels. Aryabhata worked with the place-value system and zero, and the Delhi iron pillar resists rust. Skandagupta repelled the Hunas, but the cost debased the coinage, and after 467 CE invaders like Mihirakula and rebel vassals ended the dynasty by 550 CE.

• Historians know Ramagupta was real from copper coins and Jain statues bearing his titles.
• The Guptas were Vaishnavite Hindus who also funded Buddhist monasteries and Jain scholars.
• Aryabhata explained that the moon shines by reflected sunlight and mapped eclipses as shadows.
• High-phosphorus iron forms a protective phosphate film that has kept the Delhi pillar intact for over 1,500 years.
• Chaturanga mirrored the army's four divisions of infantry, cavalry, chariots and elephants and led to modern chess.

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Genghis Khan gave his eldest son Jochi the westernmost lands, and Jochi's son Batu Khan, with the general Subutai, pushed across the Kipchak steppe in the 1230s, crushing the Volga Bulgars, taking Ryazan and sacking Kiev in the winter of 1240. In 1241 they defeated Polish, German and Hungarian armies, then turned back in 1242 when Ogedei died and a kurultai would choose the next Great Khan. Batu settled on the lower Volga, where his gold-covered tent likely gave the Golden Horde its name, and taxed the trade linking the northern fur trade with the Islamic world and the Silk Road. In the 1250s census officials counted hearths village by village, and Russian princes collected the tribute for the khan.

Batu's brother Berke converted to Islam and fought his cousin Hulagu, who had sacked Baghdad, at the Terek River in 1262, then allied with Egypt's Mamluks. Ozbeg Khan made Islam the state religion from 1313, and Ibn Battuta described Sarai's boulevards, baths and plumbing. The khans played Moscow against Tver with the yarlik patent to rule. The Black Death reached Caffa in the 1340s, trade and patronage dried up, and the Great Troubles of 1359 to 1381 followed. Dmitry Donskoy beat the warlord Mamai at Kulikovo in 1380. Tokhtamysh reunified the Horde and burned Moscow in 1382 after a false truce, but Timur defeated him at the Terek in 1395 and burned Sarai.

• The Mongols organized subject peoples into units of tens, hundreds and thousands to set tribute quotas.
• Hulagu's retreating troops drowned when the ice of the Terek River broke.
• Prince Mikhail of Tver was executed after Moscow's prince accused him of poisoning the khan's sister.
• In 1480 the Great Stand on the Ugra River ended without a battle as the Tatar forces withdrew.
• In 1502 the Crimean Khanate sacked what remained of the old capital.

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When Parisians stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, they found seven prisoners: four forgers, a lunatic, a failed assassin and a deviant nobleman. France was not poor: population grew from 21 to 28 million between 1715 and 1789 and the middle class tripled, but gains flowed to elites. A 1785 recession and poor harvests in 1787 and 1788 met a tax system run by tax farmers who bought collection rights and kept the surplus, while nobles and clergy were exempt and the Parlements blocked reform. Louis XVI called the Estates General in May 1789, the first since 1614, where the clergy and nobility, under 5 percent of the people, could outvote the Third Estate. It declared itself the National Assembly and took the Tennis Court Oath.

Troops ringing Paris sent crowds to the Bastille for powder, and the Great Fear saw peasants burn feudal records until the Assembly abolished feudalism in August 1789. Church land backed the assignats, which were overprinted into hyperinflation, and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy helped spark revolt in the Vendée. Postmaster Jean-Baptiste Drouet recognized the king at Varennes in June 1791. War came in 1792, the Brunswick Manifesto and an iron safe of letters sealed Louis's fate, and he was guillotined in January 1793. Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety ran the levée en masse and the Terror, about 16,000 were executed, and he fell in July 1794. Napoleon took power in the coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799.

• The crowd paraded the Bastille governor's head on a pike and pulled the fortress down.
• Robespierre argued revolutionary government needed both virtue and terror.
• Under the Law of Suspects, using monsieur instead of citizen could lead to execution.
• The Directory crushed François-Noël Babeuf's Conspiracy of the Equals in 1796.
• Abbé Sieyès, author of a famous 1789 pamphlet for the Third Estate, helped Napoleon's coup.