The Mexican Revolution, the deadliest social upheaval in Latin American history, erupted in 1910 when political reformers, peasants, and exploited workers overthrew Mexico's longtime dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Although it took just six months for the rebels to defeat Díaz, the revolution would grind on for almost another decade, as a succession of political and military leaders-many of them more interested in securing power for themselves than in helping Mexico's downtrodden masses-vied for control. By the time the revolution petered out in 1920, it had claimed more than a million Mexican...

In 1347, Europe was hit by the worst natural disaster in its recorded history: the Black Death. Now believed to be a combination of bubonic plague and two other rarer plague strains, the Black Death ravaged the continent for several terrible years before finally fading away in 1352. Most historians believe that the pandemic, which also swept across parts of Western Asia and North Africa, annihilated 33 to 60 percent of Europe's population—roughly 25 to 45 million men, women, and children. This massive depopulation had a deep impact on the course of European history, speeding up or...

As one of history's most horrific political upheavals, the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, when the Chinese Communist Party officially launched the radical movement on the orders of its autocratic chairman, Mao Zedong. He intended for the movement to revitalize China's revolutionary fervor while simultaneously accelerating the country's evolution into a true communist utopia. China's young people became the advance guard for this new revolution, forming themselves into paramilitary Red Guard units. These adolescent shock troops humiliated, beat, and murdered teachers, intellectuals, local...