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Most People Picture History Wrong, These Facts Will Set them Straight

Khalid Elhassan April 25, 2020 34 min

Franklin D. Roosevelt - Joseph Stalin — The Big Three of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, at the Tehran Conference in 1943. Rare Historical Photos

28. The Nineteenth Century Was Rife With Terrorism

We tend to think of political terrorism as a modern phenomenon, one that emerged in the twentieth. In reality, political terrorism has roots going all the way back to ancient Judea, when Jewish radicals such as the Zealots and Sicarii engaged in widespread terrorism to free themselves from the Romans. Relatively more recently, modern political terrorism as we know it has its roots in the nineteenth century, when numerous radical groups set up shop and turned to violence in a bid to achieve political ends.

One such was the Russian Empire’s Narodnaya Volya, or “People’s Will”. An underground revolutionary organization, People’s Will sought to overthrow Russia’s Tsarist autocracy by acts of violent propaganda calculated to spark a mass revolt. They are best known for their assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and for being the forerunners of even bigger and more effective anarchist and socialist organizations in the following decades.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.