2,407 articles
Scottish clan
Scottish clan, from Gaelic clann (children): Highland and Islands kinship group led by a chief, dating from the 11th to 12th centuries, a minority structure alongside Lowland families; suppressed after 1745, revived as heritage with invented clan tartans.
Scottish people
Scottish people: residents of Scotland defined in official statistics by self-described national identity rather than ethnicity. 65.5% identified as Scottish only in the 2022 census; 12.9% had a minority ethnic background; Scots and Gaelic are the indigenous languages.
Scottish Rite
The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite is a Masonic degree system (4°–32°, honorary 33°) governed by Supreme Councils, originating in France despite its name, with Southern (1801) and Northern (1813) US jurisdictions.
Scout Motto
Scout Motto: "Be Prepared," the motto of the Scout Movement defined by Robert Baden-Powell in Scouting for Boys as readiness in mind and body to do one's duty; used since 1907, shared by WAGGGS, translated into dozens of languages.
Seattle Freeze
Seattle Freeze: term for Seattle residents' polite but distant social culture, coined by Julia Sommerfeld in the Seattle Times' Pacific Northwest Magazine in 2005, supported by civic-engagement rankings and studied as a self-fulfilling stereotype.
Secret society
Secret society: an association keeping membership, purpose, or rituals concealed, from Freemasonry and the Illuminati to African initiation societies and college fraternities; defined by initiation rites, oaths of secrecy, and claimed hidden knowledge.
Sedentism
Sedentism is year-round residence in one settlement, contrasted with hunter-gatherer mobility. It preceded agriculture in the Natufian Levant, arose with millet in wetter north China after 8.1 ka, and appears among high-altitude Tibetan foragers.
Sefwi
Sefwi is an Akan people and region in Ghana's Western Region, comprising three traditional states and long a refuge for people fleeing wars to the north and east.
Seminole
The Seminole are a Native American people formed in 1700s Florida from Creek and other migrants; three wars and removal produced three federally recognized tribes in Florida and Oklahoma.
Seminole Nation
The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma is a federally recognized Native American nation headquartered in Wewoka, descended from Seminoles forcibly removed from Florida in the nineteenth century.
Seminole Tribe of Florida
Federally recognized Native American tribe in Florida, distinct from the Miccosukee Tribe; descendants of Seminoles who avoided 19th-century removal, never signed a peace treaty, ratified a 1957 constitution, and now run Hard Rock International and seven casinos.
Semitic people
Semitic people: conventional label for speakers of Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, Akkadian and others), coined by Schlözer in 1781 from the biblical Shem. It is a linguistic, not ethnic or racial, classification.
Seneca
Seneca (Onödowá'ga') are an Iroquoian nation of western New York, largest member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; the Seneca Nation of Indians, constitution 1848, governs Allegany, Cattaraugus, and three smaller territories.
Seneca people
Seneca (Onödowá'ga', People of the Great Hill): largest nation of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy in western New York; 1848 elected constitution, Cattaraugus and Allegany territories, key treaties of Canandaigua, Big Tree, Buffalo Creek and the 1842 Compromise.
Seneca Village
Seneca Village was a free Black community founded in 1825 on Manhattan land later taken for Central Park; its roughly 225 to 350 mostly African American property owners, with Irish and German neighbors, were displaced by eminent domain by 1857.
Senegalese diaspora
The Senegalese diaspora is the population born in Senegal or descended from Senegalese migrants living abroad, estimated at 750,000 people in 2024, with remittances nearing 10% of GDP.
Sensitivity training
Sensitivity training is a group-based organizational development method, best known as the T-group, in which small unstructured groups use feedback to build self-awareness and interpersonal sensitivity; it originated with Kurt Lewin in 1946.
Sentinelese
Sentinelese: uncontacted Indigenous people of North Sentinel Island, Andaman and Nicobar, India; hunter-gatherers of about 50-150 people who reject all contact; protected by the 1956 PAT Regulation and a 5-km exclusion zone.
Sephardic Jews
Sephardic Jews (Sfaradim, from Sefarad, Hebrew for Spain) descend from Iberian Jewry expelled in 1492 and 1497; they settled across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Amsterdam, and the Americas, preserved Ladino, and are often grouped with Mizrahi Jews.
Serb Muslims
Serb Muslims: Slavic-speaking Balkan Muslims identified as Serbs, chiefly in Sandžak and Bosnia; descendants of Ottoman-era converts, about half a million in Serbia, with contested Serb, Croat, or Bosniak national designation.
Serbs (Срби)
Serbs (Срби, Srbi) are a South Slavic people of the Balkans, speaking Serbian and mainly Eastern Orthodox, living mostly in Serbia, Republika Srpska, and Montenegro.
Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, also called Bosnian Serbs, are one of BiH's three constituent peoples, Orthodox and Cyrillic-script, about 35% in 1991, concentrated in Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity created by the 1995 Dayton Agreement.
Serbs of Montenegro
Serbs of Montenegro are the country's second-largest ethnic group: 205,370 people, 32.93% at the 2023 census, Serbian-speaking and Orthodox, with identity shaped largely by politics around statehood.
Serge F. Kovaleski
Serge F. Kovaleski, born Serge Frank Kovaleski in 1961, is a South African-born American investigative reporter who spent nearly two decades at The New York Times.
Seven Nations of Canada
The Seven Nations of Canada (les Sept-Nations du Canada) was a confederacy of Catholic mission villages in the St. Lawrence Valley allied with New France.
Seydoux family
Seydoux family, French Protestant dynasty of Swiss origin from Vaulruz; textile industrialists at Le Cateau-Cambrésis from 1824, later Schlumberger, Pathé, Gaumont, and French diplomacy.
Shan people (ရှမ်းလူမျိုး)
The Shan people are a Tai-speaking ethnic minority concentrated in Shan State in eastern Myanmar. Mostly Theravada Buddhists, they historically ruled hereditary principalities, shaping their political relationship with the Burmese state.
Shaniera Akram
Shaniera Akram (Shaniera Thompson), Australian-born social worker from Melbourne, married cricketer Wasim Akram in 2013, embraced Islam, settled in Karachi, and leads The Akram Foundation, campaigns against blindness and child abuse, and cleans Clifton beach.
Sharbat Gula (شربت ګله)
Sharbat Gula (شربت ګله), also Sharbat Bibi, is the Afghan refugee known as the "Afghan Girl" from Steve McCurry's 1984 Nasir Bagh camp portrait on the June 1985 National Geographic cover; identified in 2002, deported from Pakistan in 2016, given a Kabul house in 2017, evacuated to Italy in 2021.
Shawnee
The Shawnee are an Algonquian-speaking Eastern Woodlands people of the Ohio Valley, led historically by Tecumseh, removed to Kansas and Oklahoma, and today organized as three federally recognized tribes headquartered in Oklahoma.