2,407 articles
Melanesians
Melanesians are the indigenous peoples of Melanesia, the western Pacific subregion spanning New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji. Distinguished by over 1,000 languages in Austronesian and Papuan families, deep genomic diversity, and a contested, race-derived name.
Melissa Bottema
Melissa Bottema (Miss Grand Netherlands 2023, Miss Nederland 2026) is a Dutch model and gymnastics coach from Winsum, Groningen. Fifth runner-up at Miss Grand International 2023 and the first Dutch woman in its top 10, she competes at Miss Universe in Puerto Rico and advocates against bullying.
Mellah of Fez
The Mellah of Fes is a Jewish quarter founded in 1438 in Fes el-Jdid by the Marinid dynasty. It became a model for other walled quarters in Morocco.
Melting pot
The melting pot is the American assimilation metaphor popularized by Israel Zangwill's 1908 Broadway play, contrasting with the salad bowl or cultural pluralism, and contested in U.S. immigration politics since the 1920s.
Melungeon
Melungeons are mixed-ancestry Appalachian families of European, African, and Native American descent, centered in Hancock and Hawkins Counties, Tennessee; term first documented 1813, self-adopted only from the 1960s.
Memon people
Memon people: a Muslim mercantile community from Sindh and Gujarat (Kutch, Kathiawar), descendants of 15th-century Lohana converts to Islam; speak Memoni, live mainly in Pakistan (Karachi) and India, with a global trading diaspora.
Memorial service of Charlie Kirk
Memorial service of Charlie Kirk, held September 21, 2025 at State Farm Stadium, Glendale, Arizona, after his September 10 assassination; about 40,000 attended, Trump and Vance spoke, Level 1 SEAR security, $2.6 million security cost.
Mende people
Mende people: West African ethnic group of southern Sierra Leone and Liberia, about 1.5 million people, one-third of Sierra Leone's population; Mande language, Poro and Sande societies, SLPP political base, distinct from the Temne.
Mennonite migrations to the Chaco
The Mennonite migrations to the Chaco brought German-speaking settlers to Paraguay in three waves between 1926 and 1948, founding the colonies Menno, Fernheim, and Neuland.
Merina people
Merina: largest of Madagascar's 18 ethnic groups, about a quarter of the population, highland rice farmers around Antananarivo of mixed Austronesian and African ancestry; historic rulers of the island until the 1896 French conquest.
Merry Pranksters
The Merry Pranksters were Ken Kesey's 1960s counterculture group, known for the 1964 Day-Glo bus Furthur trip to New York and the Acid Tests with the Grateful Dead.
Meskwaki
The Meskwaki, also called the Fox, are an Algonquian-speaking Native American people, today the Sac & Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa and the only federally recognized tribe in Iowa.
Mestizo
Mestizo: Spanish term for a person of mixed European (especially Spanish) and Indigenous American ancestry; a colonial casta category and, via 20th-century mestizaje ideology, a national identity label in Mexico, Central America, and the Andes.
Mestizo Argentines
Mestizo Argentines are Argentines of mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry. The census has no mestizo category, but genetic studies show substantial Indigenous and African admixture, especially in the northwest.
Métis
The Métis are one of Canada's three constitutionally recognized Indigenous peoples, a distinct nation emerging from the fur trade in west-central North America around Red River, with Michif and Bungi languages, the 1816 Métis flag, the Red River Resistance led by Louis Riel, and the Manitoba Act, 1870.
Mexican Americans
Mexican Americans (mexicano-americanos): the largest U.S. Hispanic origin group, over 34.6 million in 2013; incorporated through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and later Mexican immigration, concentrated in California and Texas.
Mexicans
Mexicans (mexicanos) are the people of Mexico, about 130.9 million in 2025, plus 37.2 million people of Mexican origin in the U.S., the largest Hispanic group, counted as an ethnicity, not a race.
Mi'kmaq
The Mi'kmaq (Mi'kmaw, L'nu) are an Indigenous Wabanaki Confederacy people of Mi'kma'ki in Atlantic Canada and Maine, known for the Peace and Friendship Treaties (1725-1779), which ceded no land, and for Mi'kmawi'simk language revitalization.
Miami people
Miami (Myaamia) people, an Algonquian-speaking Native American people of the lower Great Lakes; today the federally recognized Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and the unrecognized Miami Nation of Indiana, with a revitalized Miami-Illinois language.
Miao people
Miao (苗) is China's official ethnonym for several Hmong-Mien-speaking groups: Hmu, Qo Xiong, A-Hmao, and Hmong proper. About 11 million people, over a third in Guizhou; diaspora Hmong reject the term as pejorative.
Michael Carroll (lottery winner)
Michael Carroll, Norfolk man who won £9,736,131 on the UK National Lottery in November 2002 at 19 while wearing an electronic tag; dubbed "Lotto Lout", jailed in 2004 and 2006, and broke by 2010.
Migrant labour in South Africa
Migrant labor in South Africa was a historical system in which black workers took short-term contracts in mines and cities while their families remained in rural reserves.
Migration background
Migration background (Migrationshintergrund) is a German-origin statistical category classifying people who, or whose parents, did not acquire German citizenship at birth; operationalized in the microcensus since 2005, criticized as an ethnic rather than migration category, and complemented since 2021 by immigration history.
Migration to the Chapare
Migration to the Chapare is the settlement of peasants from the Bolivian highlands in the Chapare, a tropical coca-growing region of Cochabamba, from the 1950s onward.
Mikhail Zygar (Михаил Викторович Зыгарь)
Mikhail Zygar (Михаил Викторович Зыгарь), born 1981, is a Russian journalist and author, founding editor-in-chief of TV Rain (Dozhd) and writer of All the Kremlin's Men, The Empire Must Die, and War and Punishment; now exiled, a declared foreign agent, and adjunct professor at Columbia's Harriman Institute.
Millennials
Millennials, or Generation Y, are the cohort born roughly 1981-1996 (Pew definition), named by Strauss and Howe in 1991. America's largest generation since 2019; best educated, most diverse, with lower wealth and delayed marriage than predecessors.
Millet (Ottoman Empire)
Millet, Ottoman Turkish from Arabic milla, was a term in the Ottoman Empire for a non-Muslim religious community, such as Orthodox Christians, Armenians, and Jews, with limited self-rule.
Minahasan people
Minahasan people, also called the Manado people, are an Indigenous Christian ethnic group of North Sulawesi, Indonesia, formed from eight tribes united in the eighteenth century, speaking Minahasan Austronesian languages related to Philippine languages.
Minamoto clan (源氏)
Minamoto clan (源氏, Genji), Japanese aristocratic house created by Emperor Saga in 814 through dynastic shedding; its Seiwa Genji branch defeated the Taira in the Genpei War (1180–1185) and produced shogun Minamoto no Yoritomo, founder of the Kamakura shogunate.
Minangkabau people
Minangkabau: Muslim people of West Sumatra, Indonesia, about three million strong and the world's largest matrilineal society; women inherit houses and rice fields, men migrate (merantau), and adat coexists with Islam amid persistent gender asymmetries.