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Bachelor party
Bachelor party (stag do, buck's night, enterrement de vie de garçon): pre-wedding celebration for a groom, traced to fifth-century B.C. Sparta; modern stag/hen form from the mid-19th century, with coed parties now rising.
Bachelorette party
Bachelorette party (hen party, hen do): a pre-wedding celebration for a bride-to-be, traditionally female-only. Emerged in the 1960s-1980s from bridal showers and stag/hen parties; now averages $1,300 per attendee.
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.
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women is Susan Faludi's 1991 Crown bestseller arguing the 1980s saw a conservative media and political reaction against feminism, sparked by her debunking of the Harvard-Yale marriage study.
Badagas
Badagas, the dominant agricultural community of the Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Nadu; speak Badaga (badagu), a Kannada-descended Dravidian language; migrated from Mysore around 1600; long counted among the Nilgiri tribes but not listed as a Scheduled Tribe.
Baddeley's model of working memory
Baddeley's model of working memory, proposed by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974 and revised in 2000, is a multicomponent theory comprising a central executive, phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer, contrasted with Cowan's embedded-processes model.
Badge
Badge: an emblem signifying membership, rank, achievement, or identity, from medieval livery and regimental insignia to police shields and digital Open Badges (1EdTech, W3C Verifiable Credentials) used as micro-credentials in education.
Badoo
Badoo is a London-founded dating and social discovery app launched in 2006 by Andrey Andreev; a pioneer of web and mobile dating, now wholly owned by Bumble Inc. after Blackstone's 2019 $3 billion MagicLab acquisition.
Baduy people
Baduy people (Orang Kanekes): a Sundanese indigenous community in Kanekes Village, Lebak, Banten, Indonesia, divided into stricter Inner and looser Outer Baduy, following Sunda Wiwitan and pikukuh customary law.
Baggara Arabs
Baggara Arabs (also Shuwa Arabs) are Arabic-speaking semi-nomadic cattle herders of the Sahel's Baggara Belt, stretching over 2,500 km from Nigeria to Sudan; former camel nomads from Arabia who shifted to cattle by 1800, they speak West Sudanic Arabic and feature in the RSF's Sudan war recruitment.
Bahá'í views of marriage
In Bahá'í teaching, marriage is a spiritual bond requiring the couple's consent, that of all living natural parents, and a simple ceremony with no officiant.
Bakhtiari people
Bakhtiari (بختیاری) people: southwestern Iranian Lur-speaking Zagros group in Khuzestan, Chahar-Mahal and Bakhtiari, and Isfahan; Chahar Lang and Haft Lang divisions; 19th-century Bakhtiari tribal confederacy under the ilkhan.
Bakongo migrations between Angola and Zaire
The Bakongo migrations between Angola and Zaire are the repeated movements of Kikongo-speaking peoples across the border, including a massive refugee exodus during the Angolan war of independence.
Bakwena
The Bakwena, known in academic writing as the Kwena, are a Tswana people of Botswana and South Africa named for their crocodile totem, first settled in Botswana around 1720.
Baldassare Reina
Baldassare Reina (born 1970) is an Italian cardinal, Vicar General of the Diocese of Rome, Archpriest of Saint John Lateran, and Apostolic Administrator of Ostia, made cardinal by Pope Francis on 7 December 2024.
Balija
Balija: Telugu trading caste of southern India, also called Naidu, Vadugan, or Kavarai; historically merchant-warriors who became Vijayanagara Nayaka rulers of Madura and Tanjore.
Balinese people
The Balinese are Bali's dominant ethnic group, about 1% of Indonesia's population, mostly Hindu (83.5% of Bali, 2010 census), shaped by Majapahit Javanese influence, caste-stratified village institutions, and the modern construction of agama Hindu.
Ball culture
Ball culture (ballroom, house-ball community) is an LGBTQ+ subculture founded by Black and Latino queer and trans people in New York, with judged balls, vogue dance, and chosen-family houses; the modern scene dates to Crystal LaBeija's House of LaBeija in the early 1970s.
Balloonfest '86
Balloonfest '86: United Way of Greater Cleveland's September 27, 1986 release of about 1.5 million helium balloons from Public Square, a Guinness record, undone when a storm dropped the still-inflated balloons over the city and Lake Erie.
Baloch people
The Baloch, also spelled Baluch and called Baluchis or Balochis, are an Iranian-speaking people of Balochistan, a homeland spanning Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, where most live.
Baltic Germans
Baltic Germans (Deutschbalten) were the German-speaking elite minority of Estonia and Latvia from the 12th century to 1939, ruling as nobles, merchants, and academics before 1918 and resettling under the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
Balts
Balts (baltai, balti): Indo-European peoples of the south-eastern Baltic coast speaking Baltic languages; today only Lithuanians and Latvians survive, Old Prussians and other tribes extinct after the 13th-century Teutonic conquest.
Bamar people
Bamar (Burmans), the largest ethnic group of Myanmar at about 68% of the population, Buddhist, centered in the central plains and delta, and politically dominant since 1948 independence.
Band society
Band society: small kin-based hunter-gatherer group, also called a band, of roughly 20–50 people; egalitarian, nomadic, no formal leadership; smallest type in Service's band-tribe-chiefdom-state scheme.
Bandwagon effect
The bandwagon effect is the tendency to adopt a belief or behavior because others already have, so perceived popularity attracts additional followers, especially in elections and voting.
Bangladeshis
Bangladeshis (বাংলাদেশি) are the citizens of Bangladesh, formed from East Pakistan in 1971. Mostly Bengali Muslims, their identity alternated constitutionally between 'Bangalee' ethnic nationalism and territorial 'Bangladeshi' nationalism; large diaspora remittances sustain the economy.
Bangwato
The Bangwato, also called the Ngwato or Bamangwato, are a Tswana people of east-central Botswana who built the largest Tswana state, centered on Shoshong and later Serowe.
Bania (बनिया) (caste)
Bania (बनिया, also Baniya, Vania) is a north and west Indian cluster of Hindu and Jain Vaishya trading castes, including Agarwals, Oswals, and Marwaris, traditionally bankers, moneylenders, and shopkeepers, classified as a forward caste.
Banjara (बंजारा)
Banjara (बंजारा), also Lambadi, Lambani, Labana or Gor, is a historically nomadic Indian trader-transporter community, once Mughal army suppliers, later a Criminal Tribe under the 1871 Act, now ST in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha and SC in Karnataka.
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.