6,078 articles
Wounded Knee Occupation
Wounded Knee Occupation: 71-day armed takeover of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by ~200 American Indian Movement activists and Oglala Lakota residents, Feb 27–May 8, 1973; declared the Independent Oglala Nation, demanded treaty enforcement and removal of tribal chairman Richard Wilson.
Wrecking (shipwreck)
Wrecking (shipwreck) is the coastal salvage of cargo and goods from wrecked ships, historically a customary right in Cornwall and elsewhere; historians show the murderous wrecker-with-false-lights myth, fixed by du Maurier's Jamaica Inn, lacks documentary support.
Writers' Union of Kazakhstan
The Writers' Union of Kazakhstan (Қазақстан Жазушылар одағы) is the only national professional association for poets and authors in Kazakhstan, dating its founding to a 1934 writers' congress.
Wurundjeri
Wurundjeri (Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung), Aboriginal people of Naarm/Melbourne, one of five Kulin Nation clans, Woi wurrung language; represented by the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation, which lodged a 2025 native title claim over greater Melbourne and entered Victoria's treaty negotiations in 2026.
Wyandot people
Wyandot (Wendat, Huron) Iroquoian-speaking people of southern Ontario; dispersed after 1649-50 defeat by the Iroquois, with descendants today at Wendake, Quebec, and Wyandot nations in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Michigan.
Xavante
The Xavante, who call themselves A'uwe, are an Indigenous people of eastern Mato Grosso, Brazil, who separated from the related Xerente around 1820 and made permanent contact with the Brazilian state in 1946.
Xennials
Xennials are an informal microgeneration born in the late 1970s to early 1980s, between Generation X and Millennials, also called the Oregon Trail Generation or Generation Catalano; the term was coined by Sarah Stankorb in 2014.
Xenophobia
Xenophobia: rejection, exclusion, or vilification of people perceived as foreigners; no binding international definition; coined in English 1880; addressed at Durban 2001; linked to racism, health harm, and hate crime.
Xhosa clan names
Xhosa clan names (iziduko, singular isiduko; also isibongo) are patrilineal kinship names of the Xhosa people of South Africa's Eastern Cape, passed father to son, governing marriage exogamy, attached to praise poems, and among some clans (abeLungu) tracing to non-African forebears.
Xhosa people
The Xhosa (amaXhosa) are a Southern Nguni people of South Africa's Eastern Cape, the second largest cultural group after the Zulu, speaking isiXhosa, a click-containing official language, with subgroups such as the Thembu and Mpondo.
Y Wladfa
Y Wladfa ("The Colony") is the Welsh settlement founded in 1865 in Chubut, Patagonia, Argentina, by Mimosa settlers seeking a Welsh-speaking community free of English influence; it survives through chapels, Eisteddfodau, and the Welsh Language Project.
Yadav
Yadav: umbrella caste identity for Ahir, Golla, Idaiyar, Kunbi and related pastoral-farming communities of India and Nepal's Terai, consolidated via the All India Yadav Mahasabha and the 1931 census; OBC-listed, 14.26% of Bihar, 4.21% of Nepal.
Yakama Nation
The Yakama Nation is a federally recognized sovereign tribe in Washington, formed in 1855 when fourteen tribes and bands confederated under the Treaty of 1855.
Yale–Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale
The Yale–Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) is a clinician-administered rating scale measuring obsessive and compulsive symptom severity in OCD, considered the gold standard since its 1989 introduction.
Yamasee
The Yamasee were an Indigenous people of the southeastern United States who emerged between Spanish Florida and Carolina, and led the 1715 Yamasee War that nearly destroyed South Carolina.
Yamato people
Yamato people (大和民族, Yamato minzoku) are Japan's majority ethnic group, over 90% of the population, formed by admixture of indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherers, Yayoi farmers from continental Asia via the Korean Peninsula, and a later Kofun-period East Asian influx.
Yankee
Yankee: colloquial term for a New Englander, then any northerner, then any American; first attested in Wolfe's 1758 letter as an insult, adopted proudly in 1775, used by Confederates for Union troops; origin unknown, possibly Dutch Janke.
Yanomami
The Yanomami are an Indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Venezuela. They live in the world's largest forested Indigenous territory, facing a health crisis from illegal mining.
Yaqui
The Yaqui (Yoeme) are an Indigenous people of the Yaqui River valley in southern Sonora, Mexico, with communities in Arizona including the federally recognized Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Tucson. Known for sustained resistance to Spanish, Mexican, and US rule and recent large-scale land restitution in Mexico.
Yardie
Yardie (yaadie, yawdie) means a Jamaican, from Patois yaad/yard meaning home or Jamaica; in British usage since the 1980s it also denotes Jamaican gang members, a media-driven sense Jamaicans often reject as a stereotype.
Yasmin Aga Khan
Yasmin Aga Khan (born 1949, Lausanne), daughter of Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan, founded the Alzheimer's Association Rita Hayworth Galas (New York 1984, Chicago 1987), which raised over $92 million; Honorary Vice Chair of the Alzheimer's Association and Honorary President of ADI.
Yauyos
Yauyos were an Andean ethnic group of the central highlands of Peru, holding the basins of the Cañete, Mala, Omas, Lurín, and Rímac rivers east of Lima.
Yazidis
Yazidis (Ēzidi, Ezdiki speakers) are a Kurdish-speaking ethno-religious minority of northern Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and the Caucasus practicing Yazidism, a syncretistic religion venerating Malak Ṭāʾus, founded around Shaikh ʿAdi; survivors of the 2014 ISIS genocide.
Ycuá Bolaños supermarket fire
The Ycuá Bolaños supermarket fire, known in Paraguay as the Tragedia de Ycuá Bolaños, occurred on August 1, 2004, in Asunción, killing hundreds and remaining Paraguay's worst peacetime disaster.
Yellow journalism
Yellow journalism: sensational 1890s American newspaper style of Hearst's Journal and Pulitzer's World, named after the Yellow Kid comic, best known for its disputed role in the 1898 Spanish-American War.
Yellow Peril
Yellow Peril: racist Western ideology, also called yellow terror or yellow menace, framing East Asians, especially Chinese, as threats; drove the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and resurged in COVID-19 anti-Asian violence and US-China AI rhetoric.
Yellow vests protests
Yellow vests protests (gilets jaunes): French grassroots movement begun November 17, 2018 against fuel taxes and social injustice, known for roundabout occupations, Saturday marches, and December 2018 concessions from Macron.
Yemenite Jews
Yemenite Jews (Teymanim) are the Jewish community of Yemen, documented from the 3rd century, tied to the Judaized Himyarite kingdom, living as dhimmis until the 1962 revolution, and airlifted almost entirely to Israel in 1949-1950's Operation Magic Carpet.
Yeonmi Park (박연미)
Yeonmi Park (박연미), born 1993 in Hyesan, is a North Korean defector, human rights activist, and author of In Order to Live (2015) and While Time Remains (2023), known for her 2014 One Young World speech and for documented inconsistencies in her escape accounts.
Yerkes–Dodson law
The Yerkes–Dodson law, from Yerkes and Dodson's 1908 mouse-shock learning study, holds that performance peaks at moderate arousal, lower for hard tasks; modern research treats the inverted U as real but oversold.