• Rosetta Stone stone monument that includes the same passage carved in hieroglyphics, demotic script, and Greek and that was used to decipher the meanings of many hieroglyphs

• Rosie the Riveter popular name for women who worked in war industries during WWII

• rotten borough rural town in England that sent members to Parliament despite having few or no voters

• Ruhr Valley coal-rich industrial region of Germany

• russification making a nationality's culture more ethnically Russian

• Russo-Japanese War conflict between Russia and Japan in 1904–1905 over control of Korea and Manchuria

S

• Sabbath a holy day for rest and worship

• sacrament sacred ritual of the Roman Catholic Church

• Safavid Shiite Muslim empire that ruled much of present-day Iran from the 1500s into the 1700s

• Sahara largest desert in the world, covering almost all of North Africa

• salon informal social gathering at which writers, artists, philosophes, and others exchanged ideas

• samurai member of the warrior class in Japanese feudal society

• Sandinistas a socialist political movement and party that held power in Nicaragua during the 1980s

• sans-culotte working-class man or woman who made the French Revolution more radical; called such because he or she wore long trousers instead of the fancy knee breeches that the upper class wore

• Sapa Inca the title of the Inca emperor

• sati Hindu custom that called for a widow to join her husband in death by throwing herself on his funeral pyre

• satirize make fun of

• savanna grassy plain with irregular patterns of rainfall

• schism permanent division in a church

• scholasticism in medieval Europe, the school of thought that used logic and reason to support Christian belief

• scientific method careful, step-by-step process used to confirm findings and to prove or disprove a hypothesis

• scorched-earth policy military tactic in which soldiers destroy everything in their path to hurt the enemy

• scribe in ancient civilizations, a person specially trained to read, write, and keep records

• secede withdraw

• secret ballot votes cast without announcing them publicly

• sect a subgroup of a major religious group

• secular having to do with worldly, rather than religious, matters; nonreligious

• segregation forced separation by race, sex, religion, or ethnicity

• selective borrowing adopting or adapting some cultural traits but discarding others

• self-determination right of people to choose their own form of government

• sepoy Indian soldier who served in an army set up by the French or English trading companies

• serf in medieval Europe, a peasant bound to the lord's land

• shah king

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