930 articles
Bacha bazi (بچهبازی)
Bacha bazi (بچهبازی, "boy play") is the Afghan practice of exploiting boys as dancers and for sexual gratification. Criminalized under the pre-2021 government and banned by the Taliban's 2024 morality law, it persists, with victims fearing punishment and stigma.
Back-to-Africa movement
Back-to-Africa movement: emigrationist projects urging people of African descent in the Americas to settle in Africa, from Sierra Leone (1787) and Liberia (1819) through the ACS and Marcus Garvey's UNIA.
Bans on circus animals
Bans on circus animals: legal prohibitions or restrictions on animals, especially wild animals, in circuses, adopted in 51 countries including nationwide bans in most of Europe and Latin America, with no US federal ban.
Barbara Bush (born 1981)
Barbara Pierce Bush (born 1981), daughter of George W. Bush, is an American social entrepreneur who co-founded Global Health Corps in 2009 and served as its CEO for nine years; author of Sisters First with her twin sister.
Basava (ಬಸವ)
Basava (ಬಸವ, Basavanna), twelfth-century Kannada vachana poet and Kalachuri commander at Kalyana, central figure of the Lingayat/Virashaiva tradition; founder-versus-reformer debate and 2018 Karnataka minority-religion politics distinguish him.
Basotho migrant labour
Basotho migrant labour is the system by which men from Lesotho have worked as contract laborers, above all in South Africa's Witwatersrand gold mines, since the late 19th century.
Batya Ungar-Sargon
Batya Ungar-Sargon, American journalist and author, former opinion editor of The Forward and deputy opinion editor of Newsweek; wrote Bad News (2021) and Second Class (2024); hosts NewsNation's Batya!; self-described MAGA lefty.
Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin (1912–1987), American Quaker pacifist, socialist, and openly gay civil rights strategist; co-founder of CORE, advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., and chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.
Becoming Chinese
Becoming Chinese (also #BecomingChinese, Chinamaxxing) is a 2025-2026 TikTok trend of Western, mostly Gen Z users adopting Chinese lifestyle habits like warm water, indoor slippers, and baduanjin qigong, started by creator Sherry Zhu.
Becoming white thesis
Becoming white thesis: the whiteness-studies claim that Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants became white in America, advanced by Roediger, Ignatiev, and Brodkin and contested by Yang and Koshy's finding of no legal reclassification.
Begging
Begging is soliciting alms in public, historically regulated from medieval England's Statutes of Labourers through the 1824 Vagrancy Act to the ECHR's Lăcătuș v. Switzerland ruling and the UK's 2026 repeal.
Belarusian national revival
The Belarusian national revival (Беларускае нацыянальнае адраджэнне) is a cultural and political movement reviving Belarusian language and culture, with waves in the 1900s, the 1920s, and after 2020.
Bella Abzug
Bella Abzug (Bella Savitzky, 1920–1998), "Battling Bella," American labor and civil rights lawyer, antiwar activist, and three-term Democratic congresswoman from New York, 1971–1977; first federal gay rights bill, Child Development Act, NWPC cofounder, 1977 National Women's Conference presiding officer.
Berber Spring
The Berber Spring, or Tafsut Imaziɣen, was a period of protests and state repression in Algeria in 1980, sparked when authorities banned Mouloud Mammeri's lecture at Tizi Ouzou.
Berberism
Berberism, known today as the Amazigh movement, is an ethnocultural and political movement in North Africa seeking official recognition of the Berber (Amazigh) language and identity.
Beth Holloway
Beth Holloway, also Beth Holloway Twitty, is the American teacher and advocate, mother of Natalee Holloway, who vanished in Aruba in 2005; she founded the Natalee Holloway Resource Center and International Safe Travels Foundation and faced Joran van der Sloot's 2023 confession.
Betty Williams
Betty Williams, born Elizabeth Smyth, was a Northern Irish peace activist who co-founded the Peace People in 1976 and shared the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize with Mairead Corrigan.
Bhanwari Devi (भंवरी देवी)
Bhanwari Devi (भंवरी देवी), Rajasthani saathin social worker gang-raped in 1992 for stopping a child marriage; her case led to the Vishakha guidelines and India's POSH Act 2013.
Bhoodan movement
The Bhoodan movement was a Gandhian land-reform effort in India, starting in 1951. It evolved into the Gramdan movement, where entire villages renounced private land ownership.
Bias against left-handed people
Bias against left-handed people: stigma, forced right-hand conversion, and tool design disadvantaging the roughly 10.6% left-handed minority, rooted in right-good/left-bad symbolism and debunked pathology myths.
Bibi Aisha
Bibi Aisha (Aesha Mohammadzai) is an Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off in 2009 for fleeing a forced child marriage; her 2010 TIME cover photograph by Jodi Bieber won World Press Photo of the Year.
Bidhoba Bibaha
Bidhoba Bibaha (বিধবা বিবাহ, "widow marriage") was the nineteenth-century movement in colonial Bengal to legalize Hindu widow remarriage, led by Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar and culminating in the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856.
Big Pharma conspiracy theories
Big Pharma conspiracy theories allege pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and politicians secretly conceal cures or falsify safety data for profit. Common claims include hidden cancer cures, microchipped vaccines, and preplanned pandemics; surveys and models document their prevalence and implausibility.
Birmingham campaign
Birmingham campaign, or Project C, was the April-May 1963 SCLC-ACMHR nonviolent campaign against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, led by King, Abernathy, and Shuttlesworth, whose Children's Crusade and police dogs-and-hoses imagery drove the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Black bloc
Black bloc: a masked, all-black protest tactic, not an organization, originating with West Berlin squatters (Schwarzer Block, 1980) and the Autonomen; famous for Seattle 1999, Genoa 2001, and swarming property damage.
Black Consciousness Movement
Black Consciousness Movement (BCM): South African anti-apartheid movement of the late 1960s-1970s led by Steve Biko; founded via SASO (1969), BPC (1972); emphasized psychological liberation, inclusive 'blackness', inspired the 1976 Soweto Uprising.
Black genocide in the United States
Black genocide in the United States: contested claim that slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration amount to genocide. Centered on the 1948 UN intent definition and the 1951 Civil Rights Congress UN petition; no legal determination has been made.
Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter (BLM): decentralized US-founded movement begun in 2013 as #BlackLivesMatter after Zimmerman's acquittal, protesting police violence against Black people, with chapters, the BLM Global Network Foundation, the M4BL coalition, and 2020 global protests.
Black Panther Party
Black Panther Party (BPP), originally Black Panther Party for Self-Defense: revolutionary Black nationalist-socialist organization founded Oct 15, 1966, in Oakland by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale; known for armed self-defense, the Ten-Point Program, free breakfast and health clinics, and FBI COINTELPRO repression.
Black people and Mormonism
Black people and Mormonism covers Black members of the Latter Day Saint movement and the LDS priesthood and temple restriction of 1852 to 1978, its Cain and Ham justifications, the 1978 Official Declaration 2 revelation, and the 2013 disavowal of past racial theories.