Emma Goldman was a Lithuanian-born Jewish immigrant who became the best-known anarchist speaker in the United States in the early 1900s. Anarchism, as she framed it, was a vision of a free, self-creating individual inside a cooperative society, and she argued it was the most practical route to human liberation rather than a fringe fantasy. She backed her ideas with concrete projects: cooperatives, radical schools, labor actions and the journal Mother Earth. She was jailed several times, including for opposing conscription in World War I, and was deported to Soviet Russia in 1919, where she soon turned against the Bolsheviks.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.