These Truths by Lepore

Ref: Jill Lepore (2018). These Truths. Oxford University Press.

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Summary­

• “These Truths” is a history of the European colonization of North America and an in depth look at the Political History of the United States of America, from founding to present.

• “The American Experiment rests on three political ideas, these truths: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.-Thomas Jefferson.

  • After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson’s draft, he scratched out the words “sacred & undeniable,” and suggested that “these truths” were, instead, “self-evident.” This was more than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science. This divide has nearly rent the Republic apart.

• The idea of the United States as a Constitutional Republic was meant to mark the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable, and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice.

• A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.

• (The original idea of America rests on) Rule of law, individual rights, democratic government, open borders, and free markets.

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---Defining Events- America---

• Oct, 1492: Columbus re-discovers the Americas; European Colonization follows.

  • ‘It would be the work of a moment to enslave the people of Haiti’- “with 50 men all of them could be held in subjection and can be made to do whatever one might wish.”-Columbus to Ferdinand/Isabella (1492).

• 1494: The Treaty of Tordesillas; the Pope grants Spain all land W of a line ~500km W. of Cape Verde; Portugal is granted everything E.

• 1504: The Spanish King assembles a group of scholars and lawyers that determine the conquest of America “in agreement with human and divine law” because the natives possessed neither dominion nor sovereignty. 

  • Under Roman law, government exists to manage relations of property, the king’s ministers argued, and since, according to Columbus, the natives had no government, they had no property, and therefore no dominion. Regarding sovereignty, the king’s ministers turned to Aristotle’s Politics. “That some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient,” Aristotle had written. “From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” All relations are relations of hierarchy, according to Aristotle; the soul rules over the body, men over animals, males over females, and masters over slaves. Slavery, for Aristotle, was not a matter of law but a matter of nature: “he who is by nature not his own but another’s man, is by nature a slave; and he may be said to be another’s man who, being a human being, is also a possession.” Those who are by nature possessions are those who have a lesser capacity for reason; these people “are by nature slaves,” Aristotle wrote, “and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.”

  • Las Casas argued that the conquest (of the Americas) was unlawful, insisting that charges of cannibalism were “sheer fables and shameless nonsense.” The opposing argument was made by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Spain’s royal historian, who had never been to the New World. Sepúlveda cited Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery. He said that the difference between the natives and the Spaniards was as great as that “between apes and men…How are we to doubt that these people, so uncultivated, so barbarous, and so contaminated with such impiety and lewdness, have not been justly conquered?”

  • Disease spread ahead of the Spanish invaders, laying waste to wide swaths of the continent. It became commonplace, inevitable, even, first among the Spanish, and then, in turn, among the French, the Dutch, and the English, to see their own prosperity and good health and the terrible sicknesses suffered by the natives as signs from God.

• 1600-1800: ~1M Europeans migrate to British America while ~2.5M Africans are carried there by force.

  • Religious dissent in 17c England was also a form of political dissent. It was punishable by both imprisonment and execution. But if James’s divine right to rule was questioned by dissenters who fled his authority, it was being questioned, too, on the floor of Parliament. The battle between the king and Parliament would send tens of thousands more exiles across the vast and furious ocean, seeking political freedom in the colonies. It would also foster in them a deep and abiding spirit of rebellion against arbitrary rule.

  • European ships, with their fleets of people and animals and plants, brought along, unseen, battalions of diseases: smallpox, measles, diphtheria, trachoma, whooping cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, dengue fever, scarlet fever, amoebic dysentery, and influenza, diseases that had evolved alongside humans and their domesticated animals living in dense, settled populations—cities—where human and animal waste breeds vermin, like mice and rats and roaches.

• 1603: Sir Walter Raleigh is imprisoned in the Tower of London by King James for “plotting against the King.” His conviction by Coke frees the right to settle VA—a right Elizabeth had granted to Raleigh.

• 1606: King James issues a charter, granting to a body of men permission to settle on “that parte of America commonly called Virginia.”

• May, 1607: Jamestown Colony; 105 colonists (no women) aboard 3 ships land at Jamestown.

• Aug, 1619: 20 Africans (Kimbundu speakers from the Kingdom of Ndongo, captured in raids ordered by the Gov. of Angola) arrive in VA, the first slaves in British America.

• Summer, 1620: The Mayflower arrives in Plymouth with 60 adventurers and 41 men- dissenters (Pilgrims) from the Church of England, led by Bradford, who brought their wives, children, and servants.

• 1630-1640: English King Charles rules without Parliament. ~20K dissenters flee to settle in New England. Among them is John Winthrop, who joins an expedition of ‘Puritans’ in 1630 to found a colony in Massachusetts Bay.

• 1642: English Civil War breaks out; during this war, the legal fiction of the divine right of kings is replaced by another legal fiction: the sovereignty of the people.

• 1675-1676: King Phillips War (‘First Indian War’, ‘Metacom’s War’) is fought between indigenous inhabitants of New England and New England colonists and their indigenous allies. By the end of the war, the Wampanoags and their Narragansett allies are almost completely destroyed. The war begins the developments of an independent American identity as the colonists faced their native enemies without European support.

• 1739: Stono Rebellion; ~100 black men rise up and kill >20 whites in SC colony. The SC legislature passes an Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes, a set of rules for relations between the rulers and the ruled.

• 1754-1763: The French and Indian War is fought as the N. American theater of the Seven Years War between Britain and France. Under the terms of peace, France cedes Canada and all of New France E. of the Mississippi to Britain and all of its land W. of the Mississippi, the Louisiana Territory, to Spain. Spain cedes half of FL and Cuba to Britain. The war doubles Britain’s debt, leaving it nearly bankrupt.

  • Britain sorely wanted land that the French had claimed in the OH Valley, complaining, “the French have stripped us of more than nine parts in ten of N. America and left us only a skirt of coast along the Atlantic shore.” English settlers had begun advancing farther and farther inland, into territories occupied by native peoples but claimed by France. To stop them, the French had started building forts along their borders. The war stretched from Bengal to Barbados, drew in Austria, Portugal, Prussia, Spain, and Russia, and engaged armies and navies in the Atlantic and the Pacific, in the Med and the Caribbean. The French and Indian War brought Britain’s N. American colonies together.

  • Pitt promised the colonies the war would be fought “at His Majesty’s expense.” It was the breaking of that promise, and the laying of new taxes on the colonies, that would lead the colonists to break with England.

• 1764: British Parliament passes the American Revenue Act (‘the Sugar Act’) to pay its war debt and fund the defense of the colonies.

• 1765: British parliament passes the Stamp Act placing government-issued paper stamps on all manner of printed paper, from bills of credit to playing cards.

• 18 Mar, 1766: British Parliament passes the Declaratory Act, asserting its authority to make laws “in all cases whatsoever.”

• 1767: British Parliament passes the Townshend Acts, taxes on Pb, paper, paint, glass, and tea.

• Mar, 1770: Boston Massacre; British troops fire into an unruly crowd, killing 5 men. The Sons of Liberty call it a “massacre” and cry for relief from the tyranny of a standing army.

• May, 1773: British Parliament passes the Tea Act, reducing the tax on tea- to save the East India Company.

• 16 Dec, 1773: Boston Tea Party; dozens of colonists disguised as Mohawks—warring Indians—board 3 ships laden with tea that had arrived in the fall, dumping chests of the tea into the harbor.

• 1774: British Parliament passes the Coercive Acts to punish Boston for its ‘Tea Party’. The Act closes Boston Harbor and annuls the Massachusetts charter.

• Sep, 1774: Continental Congress in Philadelphia; 56 delegates from 12 of 13 mainland colonies meet to debate the newly passed Stamp Act.

• 1775-1783: The American War of Independence.

  • Most colonists remained loyal to the king. If they supported resistance, it was to fight for their rights as Englishmen, not for their independence as Americans.

  • Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of VA, intended to offer freedom to slaves who would join the British army. Edward Rutledge, a member of SC’s delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dunmore’s declaration did “more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies—than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.” Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence.

  • During the war, nearly one in five slaves in the US left their homes, fleeing American slavery in search of British liberty.

  • The shrewdest observers expected Britain to win the war, not least because the British began with 32,000 troops, disciplined and experienced, compared to Washington’s 19,000, motley and unruly. An American victory appeared an absurdity.

  • William Howe, commander in chief of British forces, set his sights first on NY and next on Philadelphia, he found that his victories yielded him little. Unlike European nations, the US had no established capital city whose capture would have led to an American surrender. More importantly, time and again, Howe failed to press for a final, decisive defeat of the Americans, fearing the losses his own troops would sustain and the danger of heavy casualties when reinforcements were at such a distance.

  • ~75K, 1 in 40 people in the US, evacuated with the British. They went to Britain and Canada, to the West Indies and India: they helped build the British Empire.

• 4 Jul, 1776: The Declaration of Independence.

  • “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable, that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government.” He’d borrowed from, and vastly improved upon, the VA Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason. Having established that a right of revolution exists if certain conditions are met, it remained to establish that those conditions obtained. The bulk of Jefferson’s draft was a list of grievances, of charges against the king, calling him to account “for imposing taxes on us without our consent,” for dissolving the colonists’ assemblies, for keeping a standing army, “for depriving us of trial by jury,” rights established as far back as Magna Carta.

  • In the longest statement in the draft, Jefferson blamed George III for African slavery, charging the king with waging “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery,” preventing the colonies from outlawing the slave trade and, “that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us.” This passage Congress struck, unwilling to conjure this assemblage of horrors in the nation’s founding document.

• 1781: The US Articles of Confederation are ratified by the states. Efforts to revise the articles prove fruitless.

• 1787: The US Constitutional Convention is held in Philadelphia.

• 4 Feb, 1789: US Presidential Elections; George Washington is elected 1st POTUS defeating John Adams in the electoral college (69-34).

• Feb, 1790: The USC establishes the Bank of the United States.

• 15 Dec, 1791: The Bill of Rights; 10 of the 12 amendments drafted by Madison are approved.  

• 5 Dec, 1792: US Presidential Elections; Federalist Candidate George Washington is re-elected POTUS defeating Federalist  candidate John Adams and Democratic-Rep. candidate George Clinton in the electoral college (132-77-50, respectively).

• 1794: The Cotton Gin is patented by Eli Whitney, making American slavery more profitable than ever.

• 1796: US Presidential Elections; Federalist Candidate John Adams is elected 2nd POTUS defeating Dem-Rep. candidate Thomas Jefferson, Federalist candidate Thomas Pinckney, and anti-federalist candidate Aaron Burr in the electoral college (71-68-59-30, respectively).

• 1800: Napoleon purchases ‘Louisiana’ from the Spanish.

• 1800: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep Candidate Thomas Jefferson is elected 3rd POTUS defeating Dem-Rep candidate Aaron Burr, Federalist President John Adams, and Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney in the electoral college (73-73-65-64, respectively).

• 1803: SCOTUS argues Marbury v. Madison, deciding SCOTUS has the right to decide whether laws passed by Congress are constitutional.

• 1803: The Louisiana Purchase; the USG purchases the Louisiana territory from Napoleon in exchange for $15M.

• 1804: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep Candidate Thomas Jefferson is re-elected POTUS, defeating Federalist Candidate Thomas Pinckney in the electoral college (162-14).

• 1807: The British Parliament abolishes the slave trade.

• 1808: US Congress abolishes the slave trade.

• 1808: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep Candidate James Madison is elected 4th POTUS, defeating Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney in the electoral college (122-47).  

• 1812-1815: The War of 1812.

  • The War of 1812 reminded northerners of the price the Republic had paid for the political calculation made in 1787. New Englanders hadn’t wanted to wage the war in the first place, and yet they found themselves powerless against the slave-owning states, grown mightier through the extension of slavery into newly acquired territories.

  • During the ongoing war between Britain and France, the British had been seizing American ships and impressing American seamen.

• 1812: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep President James Madison is re-elected POTUS, defeating opposition candidate DeWitt Clinton in the electoral college (128-89).

• 1814: Andrew Jackson leads a coalition against the Creeks, forcing them to cede >20M acres of land to the US.

• 1816-1817: Andrew Jackson compels his Cherokee allies to sign treaties selling to the US >3M acres for ~$.2/acre.

• 1816: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep Candidate James Monroe is elected 5th POTUS, defeating Federalist candidate Rufus King in the electoral college (183-34).

• 2 Mar, 1820: The Missouri Compromise; Missouri is admitted as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and a line was set at 36˚30' latitude, the southern border of Missouri: any states formed out of territories above that line would enter the Union as free states, and any states below that line would enter as slave states.

• 1820: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep James Monroe is re-elected POTUS, defeating Independent Rep. candidate John Quincy Adams in the electoral college (231-1).

• 1823: The Monroe Doctrine warns Europeans not to found any new colonies in the Western Hemisphere.

• 1824: US Presidential Elections; unaffiliated candidate John Quincy Adams is elected 6th POTUS, defeating opposition candidates Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William H. Crawford. Adams had received 84 electoral votes to Jackson’s 99; since neither candidate received a majority, the decision was made by the House.

• 1828: US Presidential Elections; Democratic Candidate Andrew Jackson is elected 7th POTUS, defeating National Rep. POTUS John Quincy Adams in the electoral college (178-83) (Britannica). The election marked the founding of Jackson’s Democratic Party.

  • “Though we live under the form of a republic,” Justice Joseph Story said, “we are in fact under the absolute rule of a single man.” Jackson vetoed laws passed by Congress (becoming the first president to assume this power). At one point, he dismissed his entire cabinet. “The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies a heap of ruins at his feet,” declared a senator from Rhode Island, “When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it.” His critics dubbed him “King Andrew.” Jackson’s first campaign involved implementing the policy of Indian removal, forcibly moving native peoples east of the Mississippi River to lands to the west.

• 28 May, 1830: The Indian Removal Policy: natives living E. of the Mississippi must settle in lands to the West.

  • How are we to develop, cherish, and protect our immense interests and possessions on the Pacific, with a vast wilderness 1500 miles in breadth, filled with hostile savages, and cutting off all direct communication? The Indian barrier must be removed.”

• 1832: US Presidential Elections; Democratic Andrew Jackson is re-elected POTUS, defeating National Rep. candidate Henry Clay in the electoral college (219-49).

• 1832: The leaders of a minority of Cherokees sign a treaty, ceding Cherokee land to GA and setting a deadline for removal by May 23, 1838.

• 1832: The Nullification Crisis; SC, led by Calhoun, argues that if a state were to decide that a law passed by Congress was unconstitutional, the Constitution would have to be amended, and if such an amendment were not ratified- the objecting state would have the right to secede from the Union.

• 1833: Formation of the Whig Party in opposition to the Democratic party.

• 1835-1836: Americans in TX rebel against Mexican rule, waging a war under the command of Sam Houston. After defeating Mexican forces, TX declares independence, founding the Rep. of Texas, with Houston as President.

• 1836: US Presidential Elections; Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren is elected 8th POTUS, defeating Whig candidate William Henry Harrison in the electoral college (100-73).

• Mar, 1837: The US financial system falls apart in the 2nd worst financial disaster in American history.

• 1840: US Presidential Elections; Whig Candidate William Henry Harrison is elected 9th POTUS, defeating Dem. POTUS Martin Van Buren in the electoral college (234-60). Harrison then promptly dies of pneumonia on 4 Apr, 1841. His VP, John Tyler, becomes 10th POTUS and comes to be called “His Accidency.”

• 1844: Theory of Marxism.

  • In Paris, philosopher Karl Marx began making predictions about the consequences of capitalism. He saw in the increase in the production of goods a decrease in the value of labor and a widening inequality between the rich and the poor. “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces…The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things…The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”-Marxism. 

• 1844: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate James Polk is elected 11th POTUS, defeating Whig candidate Henry Clay in the electoral college (170-105).

• 1845-1849: The Irish Potato Famine results in ~1M deaths. ~1.5M more Europeans migrate to the USA.

• 25 Apr, 1846- 2 Feb, 1848: The Annexation of TX & the Mexican-American War; the US acquires ~1M sqmi of Mexican territory.

  • POTUS Tyler’s plan was to annex TX and have it enter the Union as a slave state, with the hope that he could arrange for the admission of OR as a free state, maintaining the balance of free states to slave.

  • As the debate over annexation intensified, John Quincy Adams, aged 76, his facgrown haggard but his political will unbroken, warned that if TX were annexed, the North would secede; Calhoun, aged 62, warned that the South would secede if it were not. Calhoun was later appointed War Secretary following the untimely death of Upshur aboard the USS Princeton. Cast-Iron Calhoun talked about TX only with reference to slavery.

  • At the outbreak of the war, the publisher of the New York Sun established an ad hoc news-gathering network involving boats and stagecoaches and early telegraph operators. The Sun’s scheme came to be called “the wire service” and, later, the Associated Press (AP).

  • Polk’s ambition seemed limitless. He considered trying to acquire all of Mexico, from 26˚ north all the way to the Pacific. In the end, the line was set at 36˚ north. Mexico held onto Baja California, Sonora, and Chihuahua but, in exchange for $15M, ceded to the US more than half of its land.

  • To appease Free-Soilers, CA would be admitted as a free state; the slave trade would be abolished in DC; and TX would yield to NM a disputed patch of territory, in exchange for $10M. (John C. Frémont, an opponent of slavery, was elected CA’s first senator.) To appease those who favored slavery, the territories of NM, NV, AZ, and UT would be organized without mention of slavery, leaving the question to be settled by the inhabitants themselves, upon application for statehood.

• 1848: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Zachary Taylor is elected 12th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Lewis Cass in the electoral college (163-127).

• ~1850: The Industrial Era begins; powered by steam, manufacturing becomes 200x more efficient.

  • “Work” came to mean not simply labor but a place, the factory or the banker’s or clerk’s office: a place men went every day for 10-12 hours. “Home” was where women remained, and where what they did all day was no longer considered work—that is, they were not paid. The lives of women and men diverged.

• 1852: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Franklin Pierce is elected 14th POTUS, defeating Whig candidate Winfield Scott in the electoral college (254-42).

• 30 May, 1854: The USG passes the Kansas-Nebraska Act repeals the Missouri Compromise, creates two new territories- KS and NB, and allows for popular sovereignty.

  • May, 1854: The Republican Party is founded in Ripon, Wisconsin to defeat the KA-NB Act.

• 1856: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate James Buchanan is elected 15th POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate John C. Fremont and American (Know-Nothing) Candidate Millard Filmore in the electoral college (174-114-8, respectively).

• 1856: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Abraham Lincoln is elected 16th POTUS, defeating Southern Dem. candidate John Breckenridge, Dem. Candidate Stephen Douglas, and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell in the electoral college (180-72-12-39, respectively).

• 16 Oct, 1859: John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry.

• 1860: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Abraham Lincoln is elected 16th POTUS, defeating Southern Dem. candidate John Breckenridge, Dem. Candidate Stephen Douglas, and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell in the electoral college (180-72-12-39, respectively). During the campaign, the Democratic party fractures into the Northern and Southern Democratic parties.

• Jan, 1861: SC votes to dissolve its union with the USA. MS, FL, AL, GA, LA, and TX follow; In Feb, they form the CSA with Jefferson Davis as president.

• 1861-1865: The American Civil War is fought between the Union of the US North with ~2.1M soldiers and the Confederate forces of the US South with ~880K soldiers. In ~200 battles, >750K Americans die, twice as many die from disease as from wounds.

  • When the South seceded, Democratic opposition in Congress disappeared, giving Republicans a free hand. Without Democrats fighting for slavery’s expansion, Republicans had made haste to bring the West into the Union, and to exert authority over its economic development. A Republican Congress had approved the organization of new territories: the Dakotas (1861), Nevada (1861), Arizona (1863), Idaho (1863), and Montana (1864). In 1862 alone, in addition to the Homestead Act, the Republican Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act (chartering railroad companies to build the line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California) and the National Bank Act (to issue paper money to pay for it all).

  • The Civil War expanded the powers of the federal government by precedents set in both the North and the South that included not only conscription but also a federal currency, income taxes, and welfare programs. The Union, faced with paying for the war against the Confederacy, borrowed from banks and, when money ran short, recklessly printed it, producing federal legal tender, the greenback. The House Ways and Means Committee considered levying a tax on land, willing to take the risk that such a measure would be eventually struck down as unconstitutional, because a land tax is a direct tax.

• 1862: The USG establishes an Internal Revenue Bureau charged with administering an income tax, later a graduated tax, taxing incomes over $600 at 3% and incomes more than $10,000 at 5%.

• 1864: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS Abraham Lincoln is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. Candidate George McClellan in the electoral college (212-21).

• 6 Dec, 1865: Ratification of the 13th Amendment.

• 1865-1877: The US’ Reconstruction Period following the American Civil War.

  • Apr, 1866: The USG passes the Civil Rights Act, the first federal law defining citizenship.

  • Fall, 1866: Radical Republicans are elected to USC in huge numbers, passing four Reconstruction Acts to insure the civil rights of former slaves.

  • Thaddeus Stevens, a craggy-faced Pennsylvanian, led the self-styled Radical Republicans, that wing of the party staunchly committed to reconstructing the political order of Southern society. Stevens, who had been chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee under Lincoln, wanted to confiscate and distribute nearly 400M acres of Confederate land from some 70K of the Confederacy’s “chief rebels,” and distribute 40 acres to every adult freedman. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (‘The Freedmen’s Bureau’) supplied food and clothing to war refugees and to aid the settlement of freed people but, at freedmen’s conventions, rumors spread that the bureau intended to give each freedman forty acres and a mule. “I picked out my mule,” Sam McAllum, a Mississippi ex-slave later told an interviewer. “All of us did.”

  • After the Civil War, a wartime federal income tax had been allowed to expire, over the protests of John Sherman, a Republican from OH who would go on to author the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and who, countering Jefferson, pointed out that tariffs unfairly burdened the poor. “We tax the tea, the coffee, the sugar, the spices the poor man uses,” Sherman said. “Everything that he consumes we call a luxury and tax it; yet we are afraid to touch the income of Mr. Astor. Is there any justice in that?

  • During the reconstruction period, 800 black men served in state legislatures. They filled >1000 public offices, mostly in town and county government. A black man was, briefly, governor of Louisiana…Northern journalists visiting the SC legislature wrote: “The body is almost literally a Black Parliament. . . . The Speaker is black, the Clerk is black, the door-keepers are black, the little pages are black, the chairman of the Ways and Means is black, and the chaplain is coal black.” Whites called it “Negro rule.”

  • Political equality had been possible, in the South, only at the barrel of a gun.

  • The petitions written and protests staged by white Confederate women contributed to the creation of a new system of public welfare, relief for soldiers’ wives, a state welfare system bigger than any anywhere in the Union. The rise of the modern welfare system is often traced to the pension system instituted for Union veterans in the 1870s, but it was the Confederacy—and Southern white women—that laid its foundation.

• 1868: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Ulysses S. Grant is elected 18th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Horatio Seymour in the electoral college (214-80).

• 1872: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS Ulysses S. Grant is re-elected POTUS, defeating Independent Dem. Candidate Thomas Hendricks in the electoral college (286-42).

• 1876: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Rutherford B. Hayes is elected 19th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Samuel Tilden in the electoral college (185-184) despite Tilden winning the popular vote by nearly 300K votes (4,300,590-4,036,298).  

• 1880: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate James Garfield is elected 20th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Winfield Scott Hancock in the electoral college (214-155).

• 1881: TN passes the first Jim Crow law, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars.

• 1884: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Grover Cleveland is elected 22nd POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate James Blaine in the electoral college (219-182).

• 1886: End of plains warfare after Geronimo surrenders to the US Army.

• 1887: The USG passes the Dawes Severalty Act which divides Indian lands into allotments and guarantees US citizenship to Indians who agreed to live on those allotments and renounce tribal membership.

• 1888: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Benjamin Harrison  is elected 23rd POTUS, defeating Dem. POTUS Grover Cleveland in the electoral college (233-168).

• 1890s: US Jim Crow laws expand across the South.

• 1892: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Grover Cleveland is elected 24th POTUS, defeating Rep. POTUS Benjamin Harrison and Populist candidate James Weaver in the electoral college (277-145-22, respectively).

• 1896: SCOTUS argues Plessy v. Ferguson, upholding (7-1) the lower court’s ruling that Jim Crow laws did not violate the constitution establishing the notion of “separate but equal.”

• 1896: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate William McKinley is elected 25th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate William Jennings Bryan in the electoral college (271-176).

• 21 Apr, 1898- 10 Dec, 1898: The Spanish American War; the US defeats Spain in the Caribbean and Pacific. Cuba becomes independent, but Spain cedes Guam, PR, and the Philippines to the US in exchange for $20M.

• 1900: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS William McKinley is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate William Jennings Bryan in the electoral college (292-155).

• 1904: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Theodore Roosevelt is elected 26th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Alton Parker in the electoral college (336-140).

• 1908: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate William Howard Taft is elected 27th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate William Jennings Bryan in the electoral college (321-162).

• 1912: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Woodrow Wilson is elected 28th POTUS, defeating Progressive (Bull Moose) candidate Theodore Roosevelt and Rep. POTUS William Howard Taft in the electoral college (435-88-8, respectively).

• Feb, 1913: The USG passes 16th Amendment- “…Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes…”

• 1914-1918: WWI.

  • The treaty makers, chiefly the US, Britain, France, and Italy, redrew the map. They balkanized Europe by establishing new states, including Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Finland. And they punished Germany. The treaty shackled German industry. It deprived Germany of control over its own affairs. It demanded from Germany $33B in reparations.

  • Europe, composed of 17 countries before the war, had splintered into 26, all of them deeply in debt, and chiefly to Americans. Before the war, Americans owed $3.7B to foreigners; after the war, foreigners owed $12.6B to Americans.

• 1916: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS Woodrow Wilson is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Charles Evan Hughes in the electoral college (277-254).

• Dec, 1917: Prohibition, long a female crusade, is approved by Congress as a war measure.

• 1918-1939: Interlude Period between WWI and WWII.

  • The Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian Empires had fallen apart, producing, by 1918, more than a dozen new states, many of which, like Lithuania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland, experimented with democracy but did not endure as democracies. The tally was bleak and, each year, bleaker, as one European nation after another turned to fascism or another form of authoritarianism.

  • By 1934, Germany was broadcasting pro-Germany English-and foreign-language propaganda to Africa, Latin America, the Far East, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Australia, though its broadcasts to North America far outstripped the scale of all of its other programs. To the US, where it broadcast in “American English,” the Weltrundfunksender sent false “news,” chiefly having to do with claims about a “Communist Jewish conspiracy.” Newspapers took to calling this sort of thing “fake news.”

  • American indifference emboldened Germany. “America is not dangerous to us,” Hitler said. “Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified,” he said. “How can one expect a State like that to hold together—a country where everything is built on the dollar?”

• 1920: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Warren G. Harding is elected 29th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate James Cox in the electoral college (404-127).

• 1924: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Calvin Coolidge is elected 30th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate John Davis and Progressive candidate Robert Follette in the electoral college (382-136-13, respectively).

• 1928: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Herbert Hoover is elected 31st POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Alfred Smith in the electoral college (444-87).

• 1929-1930s: Stock Market Crash (1929-1932), Great Depression, Dust Bowl (1930-1936), & the New Deal.

  • Nearly half of white families and some 90% of black families endured poverty at some point during the Depression. Black families fared worse, not only because more fell into poverty but also because the roads out of poverty were often closed to them: New Deal loan, relief, and insurance programs often specifically excluded black people.

  • If the Depression, and alike the New Deal, created a new compassion for the poor, it also produced a generation of politicians committed to the idea that government can relieve suffering and regulate the economy.

  • “The magnitude of the Great Depression of 1930 was due to two things, the economic cost of WWI and the acceptance of disastrous economic policies after it.”-Shotwell.

  • “You have made yourself the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system…If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out. But if you succeed, new and bolder methods will be tried everywhere, and we may date the first chapter of a new economic era from your accession to office.”-John Maynard Keynes to the POTUS.

    • Keynes believed that the remedy for depression was government spending.

  • FDR believed the greatest disparity of wealth in the US was that between urban and rural Americans. Farming communities had worse schools, inadequate health care, and higher taxes. Poor land makes poor people, he believed. “I want to build up the land as, in part at least, an insurance against future depressions (FDR, 1931).

• Nov, 1932: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate FDR is elected 32nd POTUS, defeating Rep. POTUS Herbert Hoover and Socialist candidate Norman Thomas in the electoral college (472-59-0, respectively).

• Nov, 1936: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS FDR is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Alfred Landon in the electoral college (523-8).

• Aug, 1938: POTUS FDR receives a letter written by Szilard and signed by Einstein, warning him about “extremely powerful bombs of a new type,” fueled by U.

• 1939-1945: WWII.

  • 11 Mar, 1941: Lend Lease.

  • 7 Dec, 1941: ‘A Day which will live in infamy’; Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor.  

  • 19 Feb, 1942: Executive Order 9066; ~112K Japanese are imprisoned in camps in AZ, CA, OR, and WA.

  • 1942: The USG passes the Revenue Act; a steeply progressive income tax and vastly broadens the tax base.

  • Jul, 1944: Bretton Woods; delegates from 44 Allied nations meet in the White Mountains of NH to plan a postwar order.

  • 6 Jun, 1944: D-Day (‘Operation Overlord’).

  • Between 1940 and 1945, Americans produced 300K military planes, 86K tanks, 3M machine guns, and 71K naval ships. Farm production increased by 25%. Farmers produced 477M more bushels of corn in 1944 than they had in 1939. These supplies weren’t just for American forces; the US supplied Britain, France, the USSR, China, and other allies. 15% of American output was shipped abroad.

  • The federal budget grew at an astounding rate, from $9B in 1939 to $100B in 1945. Between 1941 and 1946, the USG spent more than it had from 1789 to 1941. In 1939, <2% of American national output went to war; by 1944, 40% did. The GDP doubled. And the GNP rose from $91B to $166B.

  • During the war, the Allied military had been interested in computers for two primary reasons: to break codes and to calculate weapons trajectories.

  • To secure Stalin’s support, FDR betrayed the principles of the Atlantic Charter in granting to Stalin, even before the war was over, territories in China, at the time an American ally. In the end, the three men agreed to a division of Germany into zones of occupation and to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals.

  • Only about a fifth of the prisoners at Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, and Dachau were, in fact, Jews; the rest were political prisoners and prisoners of war. The death camps, like Auschwitz, where nearly all the prisoners were Jews, had been closed before the Allies arrived, or else liberated by the Soviets. American reporters did not generally see them. The extent of the genocide—the murder of 6M Jews—would not reach the American public for years to come.

  • “There is not much comfort in looking into a future where you and the countries you dominate, plus the Communist parties in many other States, are all drawn up on one side, and those who rally to the English-speaking nations and their Associates or Dominions are on the other.”-Churchill writing to Stalin.

• Nov, 1940: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS FDR is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Wendell Willkie in the electoral college (449-82).

• Nov, 1944: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS FDR is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Thomas Dewey in the electoral college (432-99).

• Jul, 1945: ENIAC is first operational, making calculations a 100x faster than any earlier machine.

• 1946-1989: The Cold War.

  • Feb, 1946: George Kennan reports that the Soviets are resolute in their determination to battle the West in an epic confrontation between capitalism and communism.

  • Mar, 1947: Truman Doctrine; the US would “support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

  • 1949: The USSR tests its first atomic bomb.

  • 1949: NATO is established as an alliance between the US and W. Europe against the USSR.

  • In Latin America, Africa, and South Asia, nations and peoples that had been colonized by European powers, began to fight to secure their independence. They meant to choose their own political and economic arrangements. But, in a newly bipolar world, that generally meant choosing between democracy and authoritarianism, between capitalism and communism, between the influence of the US or the USSR.  

  • “The Negro question” was one of the principal themes of Soviet propaganda, the U.S. embassy in Moscow reported…Truman’s Justice Department urged the court to overturn Plessy, partly on the grounds that legally sanctioned racial discrimination in the US undermined American foreign policy aims.

• 1948: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Harry S. Truman is elected 33rd POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Thomas Dewey, States Rights Dem (Dixiecrat) candidate Strom Thurmond, and Progressive candidate Henry Wallace in the electoral college (303-189-39-0, respectively).

• 1950-1953: The Korean War.

• 1952: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS IKE is elected 34th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Adlai Stevenson in the electoral college (442-89).

• 1 Dec, 1955: Rosa Parks, a 42yo seamstress, refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery.

• 1956: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS IKE is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Adlai Stevenson in the electoral college (457-73).

• 4 Oct, 1957: Sputnik I; the USSR launches a satellite into orbit.

• 1959: An amendment to the Fairness Doctrine is passed requiring broadcasters to provide “varying opinions on the paramount issues facing the American people.”

• 1960: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate JFK is elected 35th POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Richard Nixon in the electoral college (303-219).

• 28 Aug, 1963: “I have a dream…” is delivered by MLK at the Lincoln Memorial in front of a crowed of ~300K.

• 1964: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate LBJ is elected 36th POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Barry Goldwater in the electoral college (486-52).

• 2 Jul, 1964: The Civil Rights Act outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

• 1965-1973: Vietnam War

  • The US, attempting to exert its own influence in the region, redirected its foreign aid from Europe to Asia and Africa. Between 1949 and 1952, three-quarters of American aid went to Europe; between 1953 and 1957, three-quarters went to the third world; by 1962, nine-tenths did.

  • “Modernizing” S. Vietnam meant building roads and airstrips. But guaranteeing the security of those roads and airstrips required sending and training soldiers, because the S. Vietnamese were engaged in a war with N. Vietnam. Eventually, paying for the war would require raising taxes.

  • By the time the bombing ended, in 1973, the US dropped on Vietnam and its neighbors, Laos and Cambodia, >7.5M tons of bombs, equal to 100 atom bombs, and 3x all the explosives deployed in WWII.

• 1965: LBJ’s Great Society Acts as an “unconditional war on poverty.”

  • “A great society is more than an affluent society; it was also a good society, a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”-LBJ.

  • “There is a monotony about the injustices suffered by the poor that perhaps accounts for the lack of interest the rest of society shows in them.”-Macdonald in “Our Invisible Poor.” 

  • LBJ convinced USC to pass an education act, providing millions of dollars to support low-income elementary and high school students, to amend the Social Security Act to establish Medicare, health insurance for the elderly, and Medicaid, health coverage for the poor, and a tax bill, a cut that had first been introduced before JFK’s assassination, the largest tax cut in American history. He hoped it would relieve unemployment.

  • “That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved—the Great Society.”-LBJ.

• 1968: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Richard Nixon is elected 37th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Hubert H. Humphreys and American Independent candidate George C. Wallace in the electoral college (301-191-46, respectively).

• 1972: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS Richard Nixon is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate George S. McGovern in the electoral college (520-17).

• 17 Jun, 1972: The Watergate scandal.

• 22 Jan, 1973: SCOTUS argues Roe. V. Wade, deciding that the “right of privacy…is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”

• 1975: Microsoft is founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

• 1976: Apple is founded by Stephen Wozniak and Steve Jobs in Cupertino, releasing the Apple II in 1977.

• 1976: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Jimmy Carter is elected 39th POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Gerald Ford in the electoral college (297-240).

• 1977: The first desktop computers including the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the TRS-80, first appear.

• 1977: The Term “Identity Politics” is coined by a collective of black lesbian feminists in Cambridge, MA.

• 1980: CNN is launched, providing news 24h a day.

• 1980: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Ronald Reagan is elected 40th POTUS, defeating Dem. POTUS Jimmy Carter in the electoral college (489-49).

• 1984: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS Ronald Reagan is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Walter Mondale in the electoral college (525-13).

• 1988: The Marshall Institute turns its attention to challenging the science behind global warming, with funding, in part, by ExxonMobil.

• 1988: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate George H. W. Bush is elected 41st POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Michael Dukakis in the electoral college (426-111).

• 1989: Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist in Geneva, proposes a protocol to link pages on what he called the World Wide Web. The first web page in the United States was created in 1991, at Stanford.

• 1992: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Bill Clinton is elected 42nd POTUS, defeating Rep. POTUS George H. W. Bush and Independent campaign Ross Perot in the electoral college (370-168-0, respectively).

• 1996: Fox News is launched.

• Jul, 1996: MSNBC is launched.

• 1996: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS Bill Clinton is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. Candidate Bob Dole and Reform candidate Ross Perot in the electoral college (379-159-0, respectively).

• 1998: aQ leader Bin Laden calls for a fatwa against all Americans.  

• 1998: Google is founded.

• 1999: Repeal of the Glass- Steagall Act (passed in 1933), lifting a ban on combinations between commercial and investment banks.

• 2000: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate George W. Bush is elected 43rd POTUS, defeating Dem. Candidate Al Gore and Green candidate Ralph Nader in the electoral college (271-266, respectively).

• 11 Sep, 2001: 9-11; 19 men, trained by aQ, hijack four commercial airliners and crash them into the WTC, Pentagon, and a field in PA.

• Oct, 2001: GWOT- Afghanistan begins.

• 7 Oct, 2001: The US goes to war in Afghanistan after the Taliban refuses to hand over bin Laden.

• 26 Oct, 2001: The Patriot Act, grants the federal government new powers to conduct surveillance and collect intel to prevent and investigate terrorist acts.

• 2003: GWOT- Iraq begins.

  • Methods described in the torture memos included stripping, shackling, exposure to extremes of temperature and light, sexual humiliation, threats to family members, near-drowning, and the use of dogs. Many of these forms of torment, including sleep deprivation and semi-starvation, came from a 1957 USAF study called “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War,” an investigation of methods used by the Chinese Communists who tortured American prisoners during the Korean War.

• 2003: MA becomes the first state to guarantee same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.

• 2004: Facebook is founded by 19yo Mark Zuckerberg.

• 2004: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS George W. Bush is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. Candidate John Kerry and non-candidate John Edwards in the electoral college (286-251-1, respectively).

• 2006: Twitter is launched.

• 2007: Apple launches the iPhone.

• 2008: The US Housing Market Collapse.

  • The first to fall were financial services Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, which had been wildly leveraged in high-risk subprime mortgages. The DJIA, 14,164 in Oct, 2007, had fallen to 8,776 by the end of 2008. Unemployment rose by nearly 5%. Home values fell by 20%. In the last years of Bush’s administration, nearly 900K properties were repossessed. Millions of Americans lost their homes.

• 2008: US Presidential Elections; Dem. Candidate Barack Obama is elected 44th POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate John McCain in the electoral college (365-173).

• 2012: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS Barack Obama is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Mitt Romney in the electoral college (332-206). Romney had dismissed 47% of the US population- Obama’s supporters—as people “who believe they are victims.”

• 2013: ANTIFA, is founded.

• 2013: The BLM Movement begins after a FL jury acquits George Zimmerman of all charges related to the death of Trayvon Martin.

• 2016: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Donald Trump is elected 45th POTUS, defeating Dem. Candidate Hillary Clinton in the electoral college (304-227), despite losing the popular vote (62,979,636 for Trump to 65,844,610 for Clinton).

  • Russia-sponsored hackers and trolls, posing as Americans, created fake Twitter and Facebook accounts whose purpose was to undermine the authority of the mainstream news, widen the American partisan divide, stoke racial and religious animosity, and incite civil strife (later called ‘Troll Factories’).

  • “Our goal was to make sure we were going to run as the populist, to run on our wealth and not run from it, and to monopolize the media attention by using social media unlike anybody else (Lewandowski, Trumps Campaign Advisor).”

  • Clinton, dedicating her time to fund-raising with wealthy coastal liberals from Hollywood to the Hamptons, failed to campaign in swing states and hardly bothered to speak to blue-collar white voters.

  • In the months before the election, Twitter had ~48M fake accounts, bots that tweeted and retweeted fake news.

• 2020: US Presidential Elections; Joe Biden is elected 46th POTUS, defeating Rep. POTUS Donald Trump in the electoral college (306-232).

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Constitutional Convention (1787)

• “In republican Government the majority however composed, ultimately give the law. Whenever therefore an apparent interest or common passion unites a majority what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?” What force restrains good men from doing bad things? Honesty, character, religion—these, history demonstrated, were not to be relied upon. No, the only force that could restrain the tyranny of the people was the force of a well-constructed constitution.

• Constitution: “That Assemblage of Laws, Institutions and Customs, derived from certain fix’d Principles of Reason . . . according to which the Community hath agreed to be govern’d.”

• There are three forms of government: a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a polity; governments by the one, the few, and the many. Each becomes corrupt when the government seeks to advance its own interests rather than the common good. A corrupt monarchy is a tyranny, a corrupt aristocracy an oligarchy, and a corrupt polity a democracy. The way to avoid corruption is to properly mix the three forms so that corruption in any one would be restrained, or checked, by the others (Aristotle).

• KINGS ARE BORN; presidents are elected. But how? James Wilson explained, the delegates had been “perplexed with no part of this plan so much as with the mode of choosing the President.” At the convention, Wilson had proposed that the people elect the president directly…James Madison had pointed out that since “the right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States . . . the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.” That is, in a direct election, the North, which had more voters, would have more votes. Wilson’s proposal was defeated, 12 states to 1. Some delegates to the convention had believed Congress should elect the president. This method, known as indirect election, allowed for popular participation in elections while steering clear of the “excesses of democracy”; it filtered the will of the many through the judgment of the few. The Senate, for instance, was elected indirectly: US senators were chosen not by the people but by state legislatures (direct election of senators was not instituted until the 17th Amendment, in 1913). But, for the office of the presidency, indirect election presented a problem: having Congress choose the president violated the principle of the separation of powers…Wilson had come up with another idea. If the people couldn’t elect the president, and Congress couldn’t elect the president, maybe some other body could elect the president. Wilson suggested that the people elect delegates to an Electoral College, a body of worthy men of means and reputation who would do the actual electing. This measure passed.

• King proposed that Congress at least be granted the authority to abolish the slave trade, whereupon the SC delegation made clear that any attempt to restrict the trade would force them to leave the convention.

• Slavery became the crucial divide in Philadelphia because slaves factored in two calculations: in the wealth they represented as property and in the population they represented as people. The two could not be separated. Economically, slavery was only significant in only five of the thirteen states, and in only two, SC and GA, was it the crux of the economy…The three-fifths clause not only granted slave-owning states a disproportionate representation in Congress but amplified their votes in the Electoral College. VA and PA, for instance, had roughly equivalent free populations but, because of its slave population, VA had three more seats in the house and therefore six more electors in the Electoral College, with the result that, for 32 of the first 36 years of the Republic, the office of POTUS was occupied by a slave-owning Virginian, with John Adams the only exception.

• Martin declared that the trade in slaves “was inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution and dishonorable to the American character.” He was short and red-faced, as slovenly as he was brilliant. “His genius and vices were equally remarkable,” it was said. But he proved a man of principle. He withdrew from the convention, refused to sign the Constitution, and opposed its ratification, warning that “national crimes can only be, and frequently are, punished in this world by national punishments.”

• A compromise between those opposed to the slave trade and those in favor of it was reached with a motion that Congress should be prohibited from interfering with the slave trade for a period of 20y (tabling the discussion of slavery until 1808). Madison was aggrieved. He’d have preferred no mention of slavery in the Constitution at all. “So long a term will be more dishonorable to the national character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution,” he warned.

• The Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from establishing a religion. Most Americans believed, with Madison, that religion can only thrive if it is no part of government, and that a free government can only thrive if it is no part of religion.

• Federalists approved ratification; anti-federalists opposed ratification.

• A democracy, in which the people “assemble and administer the government in person,” will always be subject to endless “turbulence and contention,” he argued, but a republic, in which the people elect representatives to do the work of governing, can steer clear of that fate by electing men who will always put the public good before narrow or partisan interests, the good of all above the good of any part or party.

• Even if Congress had fully possessed the power to tax, how to calculate the tax burden of each state remained unsettled. Should each state pay in proportion to the size of its population or in proportion to its property? In much of the country, one kind of property took the form of people. For purposes of taxation, then, would slaves count as people or as property? This led to a return to the original debate about how to calculate each state’s tax burden: by the number of inhabitants or by the value of land. The value of land was difficult to calculate—acreage alone is a poor guide, since a field is worth more than a swamp—and, as Adam Smith had argued in The Wealth of Nations, “the most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants.” Population seemed both easier to calculate and a more sensible measure, for purposes not only of taxation but also of representation. This led to a compromise, involving a fraction. A committee on revenue proposed that “two blacks be rated as equal to one freeman.” Other proposals followed, until “Mr. Madison said that in order to give a proof of the sincerity of his professions of liberality, he would propose that Slaves should be rated as 5 to 3.”

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Amendments

• 1st Amendment: Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Ratified 15 Dec, 1791.

• 2nd Amendment: Right to bear arms. Ratified 15 Dec, 1791.

• 3rd Amendment: Quartering of soldiers. Ratified 15 Dec, 1791.

• 4th Amendment: Search and seizure. Ratified 15 Dec, 1791.

• 5th Amendment: Grand jury, double jeopardy, self-incrimination, due process takings. Ratified 15 Dec, 1791.

• 6th Amendment: Right to speedy trial by jury, witnesses, counsel. Ratified 15 Dec, 1791.

• 7th Amendment: Jury trial in civil lawsuits. Ratified 15 Dec, 1791.

• 8th Amendment: Excessive fines, cruel and unusual punishment. Ratified 15 Dec, 1791.

• 9th Amendment: Non-enumerated rights retained by people. Ratified 15 Dec, 1791.

• 10th Amendment: Rights reserved to states or people. Ratified 15 Dec, 1791.

• 11th Amendment: Suits against states.

• 12th Amendment: Election of president and vice president.

• 13th Amendment: Abolition of slavery.

• 14th Amendment: Citizenship rights, equal protection, apportionment, civil war debt. Extension of Citizenship to former slaves; guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.”

  • What is a citizen? What powers can a state exert over its citizens? Is suffrage a right of citizenship, or a special right, available only to certain citizens? Are women citizens? And if women are citizens, why aren’t they voters? What about Chinese immigrants, pouring into the West? They were free. Were they, under American law, “free white persons” or “free persons of color” or some other sort of persons?

  • Before the 14th Amendment, women’s rights reformers had fought for women’s education and for laws granting to married women the right to control their own property; after the 14th Amendment, the women’s rights movement became the women’s suffrage movement.

• 15th Amendment: Right to vote cannot be denied by race.

• 16th Amendment: Income tax.

• 17th Amendment: Popular election of senators.

• 18th Amendment: Prohibition of liquor.

• 19th Amendment: Women’s right to vote.

• 20th Amendment: Presidential term and succession, assembly of congress.

• 21st Amendment: Repeal of prohibition.

• 22nd Amendment: Two-term limit on presidency.

• 23rd Amendment: Presidential vote for DC.

• 24th Amendment: Abolition of Poll Taxes.

• 25th Amendment: Presidential disability and succession.

• 26th Amendment: Right to vote at age 18.

• 27th Amendment: Congressional compensation.

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---Political Parties---

• “The fragile balance between an aristocracy of the rich and a democracy of the poor…In every society where property exists, there will ever be a struggle between rich and poor, mixed in one assembly, equal laws can never be expected. They will either be made by numbers, to plunder the few who are rich, or by influence, to fleece the many who are poor.”

• The two-party system turned out to be essential to the strength of the Republic. A stable party system organizes dissent. It turns discontent into a public good. And it insures the peaceful transfer of power, in which the losing party willingly, and without hesitation, surrenders its power to the winning party.

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1st Party System (1792-1824)

• Washington had wanted to step down after his first term. But he’d been convinced to serve a second term in hopes of uniting the Federalist and Republican factions. Parties, he warned, were the “worst enemy” of every government, agitating “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” kindling “the animosity of one part against another,” and even fomenting “riot and insurrection.” “Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge,” he urged. “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”

• Washington sought to create an enlightened admin devoid of political parties. He appointed political adversaries, Hamilton as treasurer secretary, and Jefferson, as Secretary of State, hoping the two would work together in the national interest. Hamilton proposed a series of measures to have the federal government assume the entire burden of debts incurred by the states, Jefferson disagreed. Hamilton assembled a group of powerful supporters to promote his plan, a group that later became the Federalist Party. Disillusioned, Jefferson left the Cabinet in 1794 and urged his friend, Madison, to take on Hamilton in the press: “For God’s sake, my Dear Sir, take up your pen, select your most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.” Madison did just that under the pen name of Helvidius. His writings helped fuel an anti-Federalist opposition movement, which provided the foundation for the Republican Party.

• 1790s

  • The Federalist Party is formed under Hamilton, favoring a strong central government that would support the interests of commerce and industry and close ties to Britain.

  • The Anti-Federalist Party (Jeffersonians) is formed in opposition to the Federalist Party, against ratifying the constitution and for a decentralized agrarian republic in which the federal government had limited power. The Anti-Federalist Party is later renamed the Democratic-Republican Party.

• 1796: Federalist Adams is elected POTUS.

• 1800: Democrat-Republican (Anti-Federalist) Jefferson is elected POTUS.

• 1804: Democrat-Republican (Anti-Federalist) Jefferson is re-elected POTUS.

• 1808: Democrat-Republican James Madison is elected POTUS.

• 1812: Democrat-Republican James Madison is re-elected POTUS.

• 1812-1815: The War of 1812; Federalists survive in the NE but refuse to support the war.

• 1816: Democrat-Republican James Monroe is elected POTUS. Federalists gain very few points causing the party to fracture. By 1816, the divide between Republicans and Federalists had begun to align rather closely with the divide over the question of slavery. The federalist party disappears as an organization by 1828.

  • Federalists were unable to expand their reach beyond the monied classes. As a result, the Federalists ceased to be a force after the 1816 presidential election, when they received few votes. The Republican Party, bolstered by successful presidential candidates Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, was the sole surviving national party by 1820. Infighting soon caused the Republicans to cleave into warring factions: the National Republicans and the Democratic-Republicans (Unk).

• 1820 Democrat-Republican James Monroe is re-elected POTUS.

• 1824: The Democratic-Republican splits; the Democrats becoming ‘Jacksonians’ under Andrew Jackson and the Republicans becoming the National Republicans under John Quincy Adams. The early Democratic Party stood for individual and state rights, the primacy of the Presidency over the branches of government, opposed banks (namely, the bank of the US), high tariffs, as well as modernizing programs they felt would build up industry at the expense of farmers.

• 1824: National Republican John Quincy Adams is elected POTUS.

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2nd Party System (1828-1854)

• 1828: Jacksonian (Democrat) Andrew Jackson is elected POTUS; Jackson founds the Democratic Party as the part of the common man, the farmer, the artisan: the people’s party. Jacksonian democracy distributed political power to the many, but industrialization consolidated economic power in the hands of a few.

• 1828:The Working Men’s Party is formed by laborers in Philadelphia.

• Sep, 1831: The Anti-Masons hold the first presidential nominating convention in American history.

• 1832: Jacksonian (Democrat) Andrew Jackson is re-elected POTUS; after the election, opponents of Jackson including National Republicans, Anti-Masons, and others coalesce into the Whig Party led by Henry Clay. The Whig party advocated the supremacy of Congress over the Executive branch as well as policies of modernization and economic protectionism.

• 1833: The Whig Party forms in opposition to the Democratic party during the shift to the second party system.

• 1836: Democrat Martin Van Buren is elected POTUS.

• 1840: The Liberty party is formed by abolitionists who leave the Whig party and are supported by the National Convention of Colored Men.

• 1840: Whig William Henry Harrison is elected POTUS.

• 1844: Democrat James K. Polk is elected POTUS.

• 1848: Whig Zachary Taylor is elected POTUS.

• 1850s: The issue of slavery takes center-stage in party politics, with disagreement in particular over the question of whether slavery should be permitted in the country’s new territories in the West. The Whig party attempts to straddle the issue with the KS-NB Act, where states would decide their slave status by popular sovereignty.

• 1852: Democrat Franklin Pierce is elected POTUS defeating his Whig opposition by a large margin. The Whig party declines with many joining the short-lived Know-Nothing party.

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3rd Party System (1854-1890s)

• Feb, 1854: The short-lived North American Party is formed by ~50 delegates from the American Party (‘Know-Nothings’) after a failed call for the reinstatement of the Missouri Compromise.

• May, 1854: Emergence of the Republican party as the party of reform (it had previously been the party of abolition and the party of women’s rights). It is joined by proponents of the declining Whig party. The Republican party advocates that slavery be excluded from all the territories and adopts many of the economic policies of the Whigs, such as national banks, railroads, high tariffs, homesteads, and aid to land grant colleges.

  • The Republican Party is founded in Ripon, Wisconsin, by 54 citizens (including 3 women) determined to defeat the KA-NB Act. Their new party included Abraham Lincoln and drew a coalition of former Free-Soilers, Whigs, and northern Democrats and Know-Nothings who opposed slavery. The party adopted the slogan: “Free Speech, Free Soil, and Frémont!” It included on its platform opposition to the idea that slavery could be left to the states: “We deny the authority of Congress, of a Territorial Legislature, of any individual or association of individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States, while the present Constitution shall be maintained.”

• 1856: Democrat James Buchanan is elected POTUS.

• 1860: The two-party system consisting of the Democrats and Republicans is in place; the Whig Party had disintegrated as a result of internal conflicts over patronage and disputes over the issue of slavery. The Democratic Party, while divided over slavery, remained basically intact. The Republican Party was formed in 1854 during a gathering of former Whigs, disillusioned Democrats, and members of the Free-Soil Party, a minor antislavery party. The Republicans came to prominence with the election of Abraham Lincoln.

  • While Republicans campaign for Honest Abe, Democrats gathered in Baltimore for their second convention in June. An American flag was hung in the front of the hall, embroidered with the hopeful motto: “We Will Support the Nominee.” The convention opened with the proposal of a loyalty oath: “every person occupying a seat in this convention is bound in good honor and good faith to abide by the action of this convention, and support its nominee.” The deliberations fell apart. At one point, one delegate drew his pistol on another. For the nomination, the convention was deadlocked through 57 roll calls. On June 22, 1860, the Democratic Party split: the South walked out. The next day, Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, presiding, stepped down, declaring, “The delegations of a majority of the States of this Union have, either in whole or in part, in one form or another, ceased to participate in the deliberations of this body.” But the convention ultimately nominated Douglas, as the candidate of the Northern Democratic Party, while the bolting southern delegates reconvened down the street, opened their own convention, and nominated John C. Breckinridge, U.S. senator from KT, on their first ballot, the candidate for the Southern Democratic Party.

  • During the campaign, the Democratic party fractures into the Northern and Southern Democratic parties. The platform committee had been unable to bind together the two arms of the party, producing both a Majority Report, endorsed by southern delegates, and a Minority Report, submitted by northerners, whereupon the AL, Missippi, Louisiana, TX, and FL delegations walked out of the convention in protest of the platform’s failure to include a guarantee of the rights of citizens to hold “all descriptions of property” (slaves).

• 1860: Republican Abraham Lincoln is elected POTUS.

• 1864: Republican Abraham Lincoln is re-elected POTUS.

• 1865: With the end of the Civil War, the Republican party, associated with the successful military defense of the Union is known as ‘the Grand Ole Party’. The party coalition consisted of businessmen shop owners, skilled craftsmen, clerks, and professionals who were attracted to the party’s modernization policies, and newly enfranchised African Americans. During reconstruction the Democratic party was generally in charge of the House, Senate, or both, and were known as “basically conservative and agrarian-oriented.” Democratic support came from redeemers of the Jim Crow Solid South where repressive legislation and physical intimidation prevented the newly enfranchised African Americans from voting. Other Democratic support came from small farmers in the West before the sun belt boom. As the party of states’ rights, post-Civil War Democrats opposed Civil Rights legislation and the interest of big businesses.

• 1868: Republican Ulysses S. Grant is elected POTUS.

• 1872: Republican Ulysses S. Grant is re-elected POTUS.

• 1876: Republican Rutherford B. Hayes is elected POTUS.

• 1877: Compromise of 1877; the last federal troops are withdrawn from the South. Democrat policies begin replacing Republican policies throughout the South (by 1905, most black people are effectively disenfranchised in every Southern state).

• 1880: Willard defects from the Rep. party and founds the Home Protection Party after it fails to support either Prohibition or suffrage.

• 1880: Republican James Garfield is elected POTUS.

• 1880s: The mugwumps, reformers who declared their independence from political parties, banded together and provide the foundation for the Progressive Movement.

• 1882: The US Home Protection Party merges with the Prohibition Party.

• 1884: Democrat Grover Cleveland is elected POTUS.

• 1888: Republican Benjamin Harrison is elected POTUS.

• 1890s: Rise of Populism and Progressivism

  • Rise of the Populist Party under Boy Bryan; Populists raised hell; Progressives read pamphlets. Populists generally wanted less government. Populists believed that the system was broken. Populists’ other signal reform was the graduated income tax, a measure they believed essential to the survival of a democracy undermined by economic inequality. The populist party merges with the Democratic Party.

• May, 1891: The People’s Party is founded, becoming the most successful third party in American history. Between 1889 and 1893, the mortgages on so many farms were foreclosed that 90% of farmland fell into the hands of bankers. The richest 1% of Americans owned 51% of the nation’s wealth, and the poorest 44% owned less than 2%. Populists didn’t oppose capitalism; they opposed monopolism, which Lease called “the divine right of capital,” predicting that it would go the way of “the divine right of kings.” If they weren’t quite socialists, they were certainly collectivists.

  • The People’s Party rested on a deep and abiding commitment to exclude from full citizenship anyone from or descended from anyone from Africa or Asia. (Emery’s anti-Semitism pervaded the movement as well, but it did not attach itself to arguments about citizenship.)

• 1892: The KS “People’s Party” merges with the Democratic Party; Boy Bryan sought to turn the party of white southerners into the party, as well, of western farmers and northern factory workers, leaving the Rep. party to be the party of businessman.

• 1892: Democrat Grover Cleveland is elected POTUS.

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4th Party System (1896-1932)

• ~1893: The 4th party system begins after the Panic of 1893. The Republican party dominates and the central domestic issues changed to government regulation of railroads and large corporations (‘trusts’), the protective tariff, the role of labor unions, child labor, the need for a new banking system, corruption in party politics, primary elections, direct election of senators, racial segregation, efficiency in government, women’s suffrage, and control of immigration.

• 1896: Republican William McKinley is elected POTUS; the election saw the rise of the Progressive Era. The Republican party becomes the party of big business.

  • Rise of Progressivism; Progressivism was the middle-class version of populism: indoors, quiet, passionless. Progressives wanted more, seeking solutions in reform legislation and in the establishment of bureaucracies, especially government agencies. Progressives believed that the government could fix it.

• 1900: Republican William McKinley is re-elected POTUS.

• 1904: Republican Theodore Roosevelt is elected POTUS.

• 1908: Republican William Howard Taft is elected POTUS.

• 1912: Former POTUS Teddy Roosevelt splits from the Republicans and runs as the Bull Moose Party candidate.

• 1912: Democrat Woodrow Wilson is elected POTUS.

• 1916: Democrat Woodrow Wilson is re-elected POTUS.

• 1917: Democrats forms a Women’s Division, fearing that soon-to-be enfranchised female voters would form their own voting bloc.

• 1918: Republicans forms a Women’s Division, fearing that soon-to-be enfranchised female voters would form their own voting bloc.

• ~1920: Progressives refashion their aims and began calling themselves ‘liberals’.

• 1920: Republican Warren G. Harding is elected POTUS.

• 1924: Republican Calvin Coolidge is elected POTUS.

• 1928: Republican Herbert Hoover is elected POTUs.

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5th Party System (1932-1976)

• The 5th Party System begins in response to the disruption and suffering of the Great Depression and the New Deal programs of Democrat FDR, which created a dramatic political shift. The Democrats become the part of “big government”; the dominant party retaining the presidency until 1952 and controlling both houses of congress for most of the period; and positioned the Democrat party towards liberalism. The New Deal raised the minimum wage, established the social security, and other federal services. FDR forges a broad coalition- including small farmers, Northern city dwellers, organized labor, European immigrants, Catholics, Jews, African Americans, liberals, intellectuals, and reformers, but also the traditionally Democratic segregationist white southerners. Opposition Republicans were split between a conservative wing, led by OH Senator Taft, and a more successful moderate wing under leaders Rockefeller, Javits, and Lodge.

• 1930s: Rise of conservatism; consisted not only of businessmen who opposed government regulation of the economy but also of Americans, chiefly rural Americans, who objected to government interference in their lives.

• 1932: Democrat FDR is elected POTUS; Eleanor Roosevelt not only brought women into politics and reinvented the role of the First Lady, she also tilted the Democratic Party toward the interests of women, a dramatic reversal. The GOP had courted the support of women since its founding in 1854; the Democratic Party had turned women away and dismissed their concerns. With Eleanor Roosevelt, that began to change.

  • FDR’s election also ushered in a new party system, as the Democratic and Republican Parties rearranged themselves around what came to be called the New Deal coalition, which brought together blue-collar workers, southern farmers, racial minorities, liberal intellectuals, and even industrialists and, still more strangely, women. With roots in 19c populism and early 20c Progressivism, FDR’s ascension marked the rise of modern liberalism.

  • Liberalism: Politics that shy away from an argument for government regulation of business and toward an insistence on individual rights—and to a new form of conservatism, dedicated to the fight against communism and deploying to new ends the rhetoric of freedom.

  • The New Deal placed the federal government in the pivotal role of ensuring the economic welfare of citizens. Both major political parties recognized the importance of being close to the power center of government and established national headquarters in Washington, DC.

• 1936: Democrat FDR is re-elected POTUS.

• 1940: Democrat FDR is re-elected POTUS.

• 1944: Democrat FDR is re-elected POTUS.

• Summer, 1948: At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, segregationists bolt: the entire Mississippi delegation and 13 members of the AL delegation walked out, protesting Truman’s stand on civil rights. These southerners- ‘Dixiecrats’, form the States’ Rights Democratic Party and ran a candidate to Truman’s right.

• 1948: Democrat Harry Truman is elected POTUS.

• 1950: The American Political Science Association’s Committee on Political Parties issued a report called “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.” The problem with American democracy, the committee argued, is that the parties are too alike, and too weak. The report recommended strengthening every element of the party system, from national leadership committees to congressional caucuses, as well as establishing a starker difference between party platforms. “If the two parties do not develop alternative programs that can be executed,” the committee warned, “the voter’s frustration and the mounting ambiguities of national policy might set in motion more extreme tendencies to the political left and the political right.”

  • Political elites are exceptionally well informed, follow politics closely, and adhere to a set of political beliefs so coherent—or, as Converse termed, so “constrained”—as to constitute an ideology. But the mass public has only a scant knowledge of politics, resulting in a very loose and unconstrained attachment to any single set of political beliefs…What makes a voter a moderate, Converse concluded, is not knowing very much about politics. In the 1950s, there were a lot of moderates.

• 1952: Republican IKE is elected POTUS.

• 1956: Republican IKE is re-elected POTUS.

• 1960: Simulmatics’s first commission, completed just before the Democratic National Convention, in the summer of 1960, was to conduct a study on “the Negro vote in the North” (so few black people were able to vote in the South that there was no point in simulating their votes, Pool concluded). Pool reported discovering that, between 1954 and 1956, “A small but significant shift to the Republicans occurred among Northern Negroes, which cost the Democrats about 1% of the total votes in 8 key states.” The DNC, undoubtedly influenced by the viscerally powerful student sit-ins, absorbed Simulmatics’s report, and decided to add civil rights paragraphs to the party’s platform at its convention in Los Angeles in July.

• 1960: Goldwater published a ghostwritten manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, that had become a best seller. His positions, at the time, occupied the very margin of American political discourse. He called for the abolition of the graduated income tax and recommended that the federal government abandon most of its functions, closing departments and diminishing staffs at a rate of 10% a year. Goldwater also opposed the SCOTUS decision in Brown v. Board, insisting on states’ rights, a position that aligned him with southern Democrats and also with John Birchers, whose goals included impeaching Earl Warren and withdrawing the US from the UN.

• 1960: Democrat FDR is elected POTUS.

• 1964: Democrat LBJ is elected POTUS, defeating Republican candidate Goldwater by >16M votes. So catastrophic was the loss that GOP leaders attempted to purge conservatives from leadership positions with the party. That meant purging conservative women.

  • The Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and later Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” begins the breaking away of white segregationist Solid South from Democrats, and over time, creates a solidly Republican south. Anti-Vietnam war protests further alienate conservative Democrats with the “religious right” emerging as a wing of the Republican party- made up of Catholics and evangelical protestants (previously separate) united in opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

• 1968: Republican Richard Nixon is elected POTUS; the Democratic New Deal coalition begins to break. American politics becomes more polarized along ideology.

  • Liberalism, which had taught Americans to expect too much of government. “In trusting too much in government, we have asked of it more than it can deliver,” Nixon declared. “This leads only to inflated expectations, to reduced individual effort, and to a disappointment and frustration that erode confidence both in what government can do and in what people can do.”

  • By 1896, the GOP had become the party of big business. It had remained the party most supportive of women’s rights. The Equal Rights Amendment had been on the GOP platform since 1940. In 1968, in the first wave of the backlash against the women’s movement, the ERA had been left off the party’s platform. In 1972, Nixon began turning the GOP into the party opposed to abortion but, long before that effort saw its first successes, Schlafly turned the GOP into the party opposed to equal rights for women.

• 1972: The DNC institutes quotas for its delegations, requiring numbers of women, minorities, and youth but establishing no quotas for union members or the working class.

• 1972: Republican Richard Nixon is elected POTUS.

• 1974: The “no-platform movement”—the turn during which the Left started sounding like the Right- is founded by a British student group that prohibits providing a platform to anyone “holding racist or fascist views.”

• 1976: Democrat Jimmy Carter is elected POTUS.

• 1970s: Republicans become more conservative, polarization surges. The migration of Southern Democrats to the GOP explains only about a third of this shift. Much of it is better understood as a consequence of the politicization of abortion.

  • Since the rise of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, the Democratic Party had been the party of labor. But early in the 1970s, while the Republican Party was courting blue-collar white men, especially men who’d lost their manufacturing jobs, the Democratic Party began abandoning blue-collar union workers, especially white men, in favor of a coalition of women, minorities, and what had come to be called “knowledge workers,” engineers, scientists, and analysts who wore white collars and tapped away at desktop computers at technology firms, universities, consulting firms, and banks. The new Democratic understanding of the world was technocratic, meritocratic, and therapeutic. They believed that technology could fix political, social, and economic problems, and yet they also believed that they owed their own success to their talents and drive, and that people who had achieved less were less talented and driven. They tended not to see how much of their lives had been shaped by government policies, like government-funded research, or the zoning laws and restrictive covenants that had created high-quality schools in the all-white suburbs or the occasional swank urban pockets in which they typically lived.

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6th Party System (1980s-2016)

• Eventually a large majority rural and working-class whites nationwide became the base of the Republican party, while the Democrat party was increasingly made of a coalition of African Americans, Latinos, and white urban progressives. Whereas for decades, college-educated voters skewed heavily towards the Republican party, eventually high educational attainment was a marker of Democratic support.

• By the 1980s, influenced by the psychology and popular culture of trauma, the Left had abandoned solidarity across difference in favor of the meditation on and expression of suffering, a politics of feeling and resentment, of self and sensitivity…Another influence, beginning in the 1980s, was the field of trauma studies, which understood words as harm. By the early 1990s, mostly due to the influence of critical race theory, a theory of unequal speech advanced by black legal scholars including Derrick Bell, more than 350 American colleges and universities adopted hate speech codes. Other black scholars objected. “To be sure, blacks are still on the front lines of First Amendment jurisprudence—but this time we soldier on the other side,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote ruefully in 1996. “The byword among many black activists and black intellectuals is no longer the political imperative to protect free speech; it is the moral imperative to suppress ‘hate speech.’”

• 1980: Republican Ronald Reagan is elected POTUS.

• 1984: Republican Ronald Reagan is re-elected POTUS.

  • After Reagan, a so-called gender gap appeared to open. Between 1920, the beginning of women’s suffrage, and 1980, women had tended to vote disproportionately for Republican presidential candidates, if by small margins. That changed in 1980, when more women voted for Carter than for Reagan by a gap of 8 percentage points, presumably because the Democratic Party had begun billing itself as the party of women. Republican strategists concluded that, in trading (white) women for (white) men, they’d gotten the better end of the deal. Said one Republican consultant about the Democrats, “They do so badly among men that the fact that we don’t do quite as well among women becomes irrelevant.”

• 1985: Rise of the new Democrats (Clinton/Gore) following the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council.

• 1988: Republican George HW Bush is elected POTUS.

• 1990s: The US starts a long fall into an epistemological abyss. The nation had lost its way in the politics of mutually assured epistemological destruction. There was no truth, only innuendo, rumor, and bias. There was no reasonable explanation; there was only conspiracy.

• 1992: Democrat Bill Clinton is elected POTUS.

• 1995: Republican Revolution; after 40y of uninterrupted dominance by the Democratic party in the House, the Republicans gain 54 seat, taking control of both the House and Senate, in part because the South turned Republican, and in part because of the leadership of Newt Gingrich.

• 1996: Democrat Bill Clinton is re-elected POTUS.

• 2000: Republican George W Bush is elected POTUS. Bush’ political strategist Karl Rove begins eroding the norms of behavior between the parties, such as not questioning the patriotism of the other side, seeking bipartisan cooperation, etc, which were often effective though they increased polarization.

• 2004: Republican George W Bush is re-elected POTUS.

• 2008: Democrat Barack Obama is elected POTUS.

• 2012: Democrat Barack Obama is re-elected POTUS.

• 2016: Republican Donald Trump is elected POTUS.

• 2020: Democrat Joe Biden is elected POTUS.

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---Socio-Cultural Issues---

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Healthcare

• Hitler and Stalin and the socialist government of Great Britain all have used the opiate of socialized medicine to deaden the pain of lost liberty and lull the people into non-resistance. Old World contagion of compulsory health insurance, if allowed to spread to our New World, will mark the beginning of the end of free institutions in America. It will only be a question of time until the railroads, the steel mills, the power industry, the banks and the farming industry are nationalized. To pass health care legislation would be to reduce America to a “slave state.”

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Abortion

• Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.

• The more emotional the issue, the likelier voters were to turn up at the polls. And the most emotional issues—those most likely to get out the vote—turned out to be abortion and guns.

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Economics

• The growing power of the state, exercised most dramatically in huge fiscal expenditures, especially military, and funded by a progressive income tax, made possible unprecedented economic growth and a wide distribution of goods and opportunities. By 1960, two out of three Americans owned their own homes. They filled those homes with machines: dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, electric mixers and blenders, refrigerators and freezers, record players, radios, and televisions, the engines of their own abundance. So high a standard of living, so widely distributed, had never been seen before.

• “I wish I could make my ‘progressive’ friends . . . understand that democracy is possible only under capitalism and that collectivist experiments lead inevitably to fascism of one sort or another,” he’d written to Walter Lippmann in 1937. When governments assume control over economic affairs, Hayek warned, the people become slaves: “What is called economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is, in the hands of private individuals, never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.”

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Environmentalism & Nuclear Winter

• Atmospheric pollution does not honor national boundaries. No nuclear war could be winnable if a nuclear explosion would catastrophically affect the atmosphere of the entire planet.

• Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan, the wildly popular host of a PBS science series, Cosmos, became the public face of a body of scientific work that suggested that even a very limited nuclear war could lead to the end of all life on the planet by bringing about a “nuclear winter.” Critics charged Sagan with hastening unproven work into publication and, worse, into the popular press. The physicist Edward Teller attacked Sagan in Nature: “Highly speculative theories of worldwide destruction—even the end of life on Earth—used as a call for a particular kind of political action serve neither the good reputation of science nor dispassionate political thought.” Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, Richard Perle, said he wished Sagan would stop “playing political scientist.” A number of environmental scientists challenged the science behind nuclear winter, pointing out that its conclusions were mostly predictions based on models and that the science was, therefore, not certain.

• The debate over nuclear winter, in short, established the themes and battle lines of the debate over climate change, which would rage well into the 21c, long after the Cold War had ended.

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Identity Politics

• Identity Politics: Emerged in the mid 20c, out of the Black Power movement, the gay pride movement, and feminism. Left identity politics grew especially strong in the academy, where to disagree with the distinctive status of someone belonging to a particular identity group was to violate what conservatives, in an allusion to Stalinism, liked to deride as “political correctness.”

• “The squandering of energy on identity politics, the hardening of boundaries between groups, the insistence that individuals are no more than their labels, is an American tragedy,” Todd Gitlin wrote in 1995. Gitlin, who had been president of SDS in the 1960s, pointed out the irony of this tragedy: “the Left, which once stood for universal values, seems to speak today for select identities, while the Right, long associated with privileged interests, claims to defend the common good.”

• By no means were all Americans animated by ideology; in fact, not very many were. But those who thought ideologically exerted disproportionate influence over American political culture. In their terms, political opponents were no longer mere partisans, equally loyal to the United States; they were enemies of the state.

• Liberals engage in a politics of grievance and contempt: anyone who disagrees with them are racist, sexist, classist, or homophobic—and stupid.

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Early US Public Schools

• The insularity of both Irish and German communities contributed to a growing movement to establish tax-supported public elementary schools, known as “common schools,” meant to provide a common academic and civic education to all classes of Americans. They hoped that these new schools would assimilate a diverse population of native-born and foreign-born citizens by introducing them to the traditions of American culture and government, so that boys, once men, would vote wisely, and girls, once women, would raise virtuous children.

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Social Media

• Data collected online allowed websites and search engines and eventually social media companies to profile “users” and—acting as companies selling products rather than as news organizations concerned with the public interest—to feed them only the news and views with which they agreed, and then to radicalize them.

• Social media, beginning with FB, exacerbated the political isolation of ordinary Americans while strengthening polarization on both the left and the right, automating identity politics, and contributing, at the same time, to a distant, vague, and impotent model of political engagement. In a wireless world, the mystic chords of memory, the ties to timeless truths that held the nation together, faded to ethereal invisibility.

• “Online, where everyone was, in the end, utterly alone, it had become terribly difficult to know much of anything with any certainty, except how to like and be liked, and, especially, how to hate and be hated.”

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Women’s Rights Movement

• Early Women’s Equality Leaders- Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

• “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”-Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

• Man took woman’s property, passed laws in which she had no voice, subjected her to taxation without representation, denied her an education, made her a slave to his will, forbade her from speaking in public, and denied her the right to vote (1848 Seneca Falls Convention).

• “When I pass the gate of the celestials and good Peter asks me where I wish to sit, I will say, ‘Anywhere so that I am neither a negro nor a woman. Confer on me, great angel, the glory of White manhood, so that henceforth I may feel unlimited freedom.’”-Elizabeth Cady Stanton writing to Susan B. Anthony (1859).

• The consequences of writing women out of the republic’s founding documents were both lasting and devastating.

• The “women’s movement” of the 1960s and 1970s was really three movements: radical feminism, liberal feminism, and conservative antifeminism.

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Citizenship

• Under English common law, a “natural born subject” is a person born within the king’s realm or, depending on the circumstances, outside the king’s realm, but to the king’s subjects.

• OR’s 1857 constitution barred “Chinamen” from owning real estate, while CA barred Chinese immigrants from testifying in court, a provision upheld in an 1854 state supreme court opinion, People v. Hall, which described the Chinese as “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point, as their history has shown.”

• “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.”-Douglas “Composite Nation.”

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Media

• The 1930s, one in four Americans got their news from Hearst, who owned 28 newspapers in 19 cities. Hearst’s papers were all alike: hot-blooded, with leggy headlines. Page one was supposed to make a reader blurt out, “Gee whiz!” Page two: “Holy Moses!” Page three: “God Almighty!” Hearst used his newspapers to advance his politics.

• “If we persist in the practice of Republicans reading only Republican newspapers, listening only to Republican speeches on the radio, attending only Republican political rallies, and mixing socially only with those of congenial views,” its moderator warned, “and if Democrats . . . follow suit, we are sowing the seeds of the destruction of our democracy.”

• A decade of public relations and the authority of the radio had left Americans uncertain, anymore, about what was true.

• “The greatest organizers of mass hysterias and mass delusions today are states using the radio to excite terrors, incite hatreds, inflame masses, win mass support for policies, create idolatries, abolish reason and maintain themselves in power.”

• “The thing which we are all up against is propaganda,” she said. “Sometimes I think that this age is going to be called the age of propaganda, an unprecedented rise of propaganda, propaganda as a weapon, propaganda as a technique, propaganda as a fine art, and propaganda as a form of government.” The challenge to Western journalists, she said, was “to represent a theory of journalism, a theory of what journalism stands for, a thesis of journalism, a philosophy of journalism, in countries where this philosophy is fundamentally repudiated.”

• Like many social scientists of his generation, Mills argued that the US was far along the road to becoming a fully mass society rather than a community of publics…The way to tell the difference between a mass society and a community of publics is the technology of communication: a community of publics is a population of people who talk to one another; a mass society receives information from the mass media. In a mass society, elites, not the people, make most decisions, long before the people even know there is a decision to be made. The formation of what Mills called “power elites” was directly related to technological shifts, especially the rise of computing.

• In a mass democracy and with a chaos of facts. Citizens find it impossible to gather all the information they need to make an informed decision about a political issue; they are easily deluded by television and other forms of mass media and mass advertising; they struggle to sort through fact and fiction.

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Guns

• Carrying concealed weapons was prohibited by laws in Kentucky and Louisiana (1813), Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma passed similar laws.

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Campaigning

• Whitaker and Baxter won nearly every campaign they waged. The campaigns they chose to run, and the way they decided to run them, shaped the history of CA and of the country. They drafted the rules by which campaigns would be waged for decades afterward. The first thing they did, when they took on a campaign, was to “hibernate” for a week to write a Plan of Campaign. Then they wrote an Opposition Plan of Campaign, to anticipate the moves made against them.

  • Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. Rhyming’s good (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3”).

  • Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain, the more difficult it is to win support.”

  • Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention 7x to make a sale.”

  • Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good, they must dent it.”

  • Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”

  • Make it personal, candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn’t have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one.

  • Attack, attack, attack. “You can’t wage a defensive campaign and win!” Never underestimate the opposition.

  • If you can’t fight, PUT ON A SHOW!

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Voting

• In England, fewer than one in five adult men could vote; in the colonies, that proportion was two-thirds. The property requirements for voting were met by so many men that Thomas Hutchinson, who lost a bid to become governor in 1749, complained that the town of Boston was an “absolute democracy.”

• Early voting in America was done in public, not in secret. It also hardly ever involved paper and pen, and counting the votes—another affair of calculation—usually meant counting heads or, rather, counting polls. A “poll” meant the top of a person’s head. (In Hamlet, Ophelia says, of Polonius, “His beard as white as snow: All flaxen was his poll.” Not until well into the 19c did a “poll” come to mean the counting of votes.) Counting polls required assembling—all in favor of the Federalist stand here, all in favor of the Republican over there—and in places where voting was done by ballot, casting a ballot generally meant tossing a ball into a box. The word “ballot” comes from the Italian ballota, meaning a little ball—and early Americans who used ballots cast pea or pebbles, or, not uncommonly, bullets.

• In the age of popular politics, Election Day was a day of drinking and brawls. Party thugs stationed themselves at the polls and bought votes by doling out cash, called “soap,” and handing voters pre-printed party tickets. Buying votes cost anything from $2.50, in San Francisco, to $20, in Connecticut. In Indiana, men sold their suffrages for no more than the cost of a sandwich. The secret ballot was adopted in this same spirit. Both by law and by brute force, southern legislators, state by state, and poll workers, precinct by precinct, denied black men the right to vote.  

• Jim Crow defined New Deal politics. Between violence, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other forms of disenfranchisement, <4% of African Americans were registered to vote.

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Equal Rights

• For every two blacks who moved to the cities, three whites moved out. The postwar racial order created a segregated landscape: black cities, white suburbs.

• Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, emphasized the cost of Jim Crow at home to the US’ reputation around the world. “Racial discrimination in the US remains a source of constant embarrassment to this Government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations, and it jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.” Desegregation had become a matter of national security.

• The strongest reservations were those of black schoolteachers; even in Topeka, they “wanted no part of the effort to desegregate the schools.”

• In 1968, Edwards called Reagan “unfit to govern,” and two months later begins organizing a nationwide campaign for black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics—beginning with an article in the Saturday Evening Post called “Why Negroes Should Boycott Whitey’s Olympics”—which led to the clenched-fisted Black Power protest of two medal winners (the inspiration, decades later, for NFL protesters who kneeled during the national anthem).

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Alt-Right & Alt-Left

• If the favored modes of the alt-right were the women-hating troll and the neo-Nazi meme, the favored modes of the alt-left were clickbait and the call-out, sentimental, meaningless outrage—“8 Signs Your Yoga Practice Is Culturally Appropriated”—and sanctimonious accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.

• After the 12 Jun, 2015 Orlando nightclub shooting, the alt-left spent its energies attacking one another for breaches of the rules of “intersectionality,” which involve intricate, identity-based hierarchies of suffering and virtue. “One Twitter-famous intersectionalist admonished those who had called it the worst mass shooting in US history by reminding them that ‘the worst was wounded knee,’” the writer Angela Nagle reported. “Other similar tweeters raged against the use of the term Latina/o instead of Latinx in the reporting, while still others made sure to clarify that it was the shooter’s mental illness, not his allegiance to ISIS and the caliphate, that caused the shooting. Not to be outdone, others then tweeted back angrily about the ableism of those who said the shooter had a mental illness.”

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Slavery

• “A ship at anchor, with halliards broken, sails mildewed, hull empty, her bottom covered with sea-weed and barnacles, meets no resistance. But when she spread her canvas to the breeze and sets out on her voyage, turns prow to the open sea, the higher shall be her speed, the greater shall be her resistance. And so it is with the colored man.”-Frederick Douglas on Jim Crow.

• “This is the land of freedom. Every man has a right to express his opinion. And every woman. How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”-Stewart.

• “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech,” Frederick Douglass had said, in his “Plea for Free Speech.” The seventeenth-century battle for freedom of expression had been fought by writers like John Milton, opposing the suppression of religious dissent; the eighteenth-century struggle for the freedom of the press had been fought by printers like Benjamin Franklin and John Peter Zenger, opposing the suppression of criticism of the government; and the nineteenth century’s fight for free speech had been waged by abolitionists opposing southern slave owners, who had been unwilling to subject slavery to debate.

African Slavery

• In much of Africa, labor (slaves), not land, constituted the sole form of property recognized by law, a form of consolidating wealth and generating revenue, which meant that African states tended to be small and that, while European wars were fought for land, African wars were fought for labor (slaves).

• People captured in African wars were bought and sold in large markets by merchants and local officials and kings and, beginning in the 1450s, by Portuguese sea captains.

Spanish Slavery

• Spanish worked their native slaves to death while many more died of disease. Soon, they turned to another source of forced labor, Africans traded by the Portuguese.

English Slavery

• Nearly half of colonial New Englanders’ wealth would come from sugar grown by West Indian slaves.

• Many of the Africans bought by English traders were Bantu speakers and came from the area around what is now Senegambia; some were Akan speakers, from what is now Ghana; others spoke Igbo, and came from what is now Nigeria.

• By what right did the English hold these people as their slaves? Under Roman law, all men are born free and can only be made slaves by the law of nations, under certain narrow conditions—for instance, when they’re taken as POWs, or when they sell themselves as payment of debt.

• One in five New Yorkers was a slave. Slaves built the city, its hulking stone houses, its nail-knocked wooden wharves. They dug the roads, and their own graves, at the Negroes Burying Ground. They carried water for steeping tea and wood for burning. They loaded and unloaded the ships, steps from the slave market. But the liberty to freely speak, write, and publish was not theirs.

• Britain’s mainland colonies established a far different and more brutal racial regime, one that imagined only two colors, black and white, and two statuses, slave and free. Laws forbade mixed-race marriage, decreed the children of a slave mother to be slaves, and discouraged or prohibited manumissions. The owners of slaves very often had children with their female slaves, but they did not raise them as their own children, or free them, or even acknowledge them; instead, they deemed them slaves, and called them “black.” Franklin, reckoning with that racial line, added one more observation to his essay on population; he wrote about a new race, a people who were “white.”

• On the mainland, whites outnumbered blacks, four to one. On the islands, blacks outnumbered whites, eight to one.

American Slavery

• “A solemn mockery of and insult to God involved the absurdity of increasing the power of a state…in proportion as that state violated the rights of freedom.”-Luther Martin on counting slaves as voters.

• In 1765, George Mason wrote an essay to George Washington arguing that slavery was “the primary Cause of the Destruction of the most flourishing Government that ever existed”—the Roman republic—and warning that it might be the destruction of the British Empire, too.

• George Washington had in fact ordered the keeping of the “Book of Negroes” so that owners might later seek compensation for slaves carried off in British ships.

• “Where is the difference between the British Senator who attempts to enslave his fellow subjects in America, by imposing Taxes upon them contrary to Law and Justice, and the American Patriot who reduces his African Brethren to Slavery, contrary to Justice and Humanity?”-Philadelphia DR. Benjamin Rush.  

• By 1820, more than a million slaves had been sold “down the river,” from states like VA and SC to the territories of AL, LA, and MS.

• People, like cotton, were sold by grades, advertised as “Extra Men, No.1 Men, Second Rate or Ordinary Men, Extra Girls, No.1 Girls, Second Rate or Ordinary Girls.” Slavery wasn’t an aberration in an industrializing economy; slavery was its engine.

• Cotton production in the South doubled between 1815 and 1820, and again between 1820 and 1825. Cotton had become the most valuable commodity in the Atlantic world.

• Southern slave owners amounted to ~1% of the population.

• 1850: The average price of a slave in the US is ~$900 (~$35K today).

• 1860: The average price of a slave in the US is ~$1600 (~$62K today).

• The price of slaves grew so high that a sizable number of white southerners urged the reopening of the African slave trade. In the 1850s, legislatures in several states, including South Carolina, proposed reopening the trade.

• “Slavery reduced a man to a blind horse upon a tread-mill.”-Lincoln.

• If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?— You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest; you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.

French Slavery

• Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, was the largest colony in the Caribbean, and the richest. France’s most vital colony, its population consisted of 40,000 whites, 28,000 free people of color, and 452,000 slaves—half the slave population of the entire Caribbean. The world’s leading producer of sugar and coffee, the island exported nearly as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined. Its revolution began in 1791.

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Misc Quotes

“Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”-Ben Franklin.

“1880, one half of the American workforce worked on farms; by 1920, only one-quarter did.”

“Terrorism is a criminal act and requires police action and diplomacy, not military action.”-Andrew Bacevich.

“The Constitution threatens to be a subject of infinite sects, like the Bible.” And, as with many sects, those politicians who most strenuously staked their arguments on the Constitution often appeared the least acquainted with it.-Unk.

“The conservative knows that civilized society requires orders and classes, believes that man has an evil nature and therefore must control his will and appetite…and that tradition provides a check on man’s anarchic impulse.”-Kirk.

“Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past. Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. But when they do, they ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.”-Thomas Jefferson (1816). 

“The inhabitant of GA and SC who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a Govt. instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of PA or NJ who views with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice. I would sooner submit to a tax for paying for all the Negroes in the US than saddle posterity with such a Constitution….Slavery is the curse of heaven.”-Governor Morris.

“Every man his own muckraker.”-Unk.

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”-Johnson in “Taxation No Tyranny.”

“The first question a pollster should ask, have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?”-Bogart.

“Ming China was the richest country in the world, and by the late 15c, the Ming no longer allowed travel beyond the Indian Ocean, on the theory that the rest of the world was unworthy and uninteresting.”

“Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”-Ronald Reagan (1981 Inaugural Address).

“Livestock eat grass; people eat livestock: livestock turn grass into food that humans can eat. The animals that Europeans brought to the New World—cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, chickens, and horses—had no natural predators in the Americas but they did have an abundant food supply. They reproduced in numbers unfathomable in Europe. Cattle populations doubled every fifteen months. Nothing, though, beat the pigs. Pigs convert one-fifth of everything they eat into food for human consumption (cattle, by contrast, convert one-twentieth); they feed themselves, by foraging, and they have litters of ten or more. Within a few years of Columbus’s second voyage, the eight pigs he brought with him had descendants numbering in the thousands. Wrote one observer, “All the mountains swarmed with them.”

“(It is virtually a law of nature); the perpetual tendency in the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence.”-Malthus.

“The Administration’s approach to constitutional interpretation is to be rooted in the text of the Constitution as illuminated by those who drafted, proposed, and ratified it…a jurisprudence of original intention.”-Meese (1985).

“The Constitution is neither, on the one hand, a Gibraltar rock, which wholly resists the ceaseless washing of time or circumstance, nor is it, on the other hand, a sandy beach, which is slowly destroyed by the erosion of the waves, it is rather to be likened to a floating dock, which, while firmly attached to its moorings, and not therefore at the caprice of the waves, yet rises and falls with the tide of time and circumstance.”-Beck.

“A DIALOGUE Between a FEDERALIST and a REPUBLICAN”:         REPUBLICAN. Good morrow, Mr. Federalist; ’tis pleasant weather; what is the news of the day? How are elections going, and who is likely to be our president?         FEDERALIST. For my part I would rather vote for any other man in the country, than Mr. Jefferson.         REPUBLICAN. And why this prejudice against Mr. Jefferson, I pray you?         FEDERALIST. I do not like the man, nor his principles, from what I have heard of him. First, because he holds not implicit faith in the Christian Religion; 2dly, because I fear he is too great an advocate for French principles and politics; and lastly, because I understand he is violently prejudiced against every thing that is of British connection. They argue on. “What have you or anyone to do with Mr. J.’s religious principles?” the Republican asks, after which their debate nearly ends in fisticuffs.-Carolina Gazette, (~1800).

“Taxes are what we pay for in civilized society.”-Oliver Wendell Holmes (1927).

“If all events in time can be explained by earlier events in time, if history is a line, and not a circle, then the course of events—change over time—is governed by a set of laws, like the laws of physics, and driven by a force, like gravity. What is that force? Is change driven by God, by people, or by machines? Is progress the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory—the journey of a Christian from sin to salvation? Is progress the extension of suffrage, the spread of democracy? Or is progress invention, the invention of new machines?”

“The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”-Adam Smith (1776).

“All men are born into a state of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, each equal to the greatest, and subject to no body.”-John Locke.

The telegraph? “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” The postal system? “I never received in my life more than one or two letters that were worth the postage.” The nation’s much-vaunted network of newspapers? “We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.” Banks and railroads? “Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts ‘All aboard!’ when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over.”

“The state of nature is a state of war…of every man against every man.”-The Leviathan by Hobbes.

“The register of Knowledge of Fact is called History.”-The Leviathan by Hobbes.

“Talking against religion is unchaining a Tiger.”-Ben Franklin.

“The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black,”-James Otis Jr. in “Rights of the British Colonists” (1764).

“I . . . have conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained.”-Benjamin Franklin after visiting a Black School (1763).

“Decisions in a modern state tend to be made by the interaction, not of Congress and the executive, but of public opinion and the executive.-Walter Lippmann, “The Basic Problem of Democracy,” 1919.

“The malleability of public opinion, into mass delusion.”

“The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained,” he explained. That is, factions might not, in the end, consist of wise, knowledgeable, and reasonable men. They might consist of passionate, ignorant, and irrational men, who had been led to hold “counterfeit” opinions by persuasive men.

“My dear young friends,” Douglass closed. “Accept the inspiration of hope. Imitate the example of the brave mariner, who, amid clouds and darkness, amid hail, rain and storm bolts, battles his way against all that the sea opposes to his progress and you will reach the goal of your noble ambition in safety.”-Frederick Douglas.

“No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.”-Henry George (4 Jul, 1877).

“The rise of mass democracy and mass culture are harbingers of the decline of Western civilization; radical egalitarianism has produced a world of mediocrity and blandness.”-Nock.

“Over large stretches of the earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. . . . Even that most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.”-Mont Pelerin, Switzerland Statement of Aims (1947).

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”-Goldwater.

“The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,” he said, “is the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way you can make a man untrustworthy is to distrust him and to show your distrust.”-Henry Stimson on sharing Atomic Secrets.

“I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”-Smith (1950).

“Political Power comes through the Barrel of a Gun.”-Huey Newton, Founder of the Black Panthers citing Chairman Mao.

“(It is) the end of the American era…the nation is no longer a nation but a collection of two hundred million egos.”-Political Scientist Andrew Hacker (1970).

“How long are we going to abdicate law and order—the backbone of our civilization—in favor of a soft social theory that the man who heaves a brick through your window or tosses a fire bomb into your car is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?”-Gerald Ford (1966).

“Working men and women should not be asked to carry the additional burden of a segment of society capable of caring for itself but which prefers making welfare a way of life, freeloading at the expense of more conscientious citizens,” he said, inciting a racial animosity that came to be known as not backlash but “whitelash.”-Ronald Reagan (1966).

“The duty of government is to provide a basis for judgment; and when it goes beyond that, it goes beyond the prime scope of its duty.”

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.”-Murrow.

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Terminology

• Bork: To destroy a judicial nomination through political campaigning (following a failed Senate vote to nominate Bork by 58-42).

• Eggheads: Inspired by the balding Illinois Democrat Adlai Stevenson, was coined in 1952 by Louis Bromfield to describe “a person of spurious intellectual pretensions, often a professor or the protégé of a professor; fundamentally superficial, over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problems.”

• English Common Law: The body of unwritten law established by centuries of custom and cases.

• Facts: Particular explanations for how the world works.

• Fascist Propaganda: Used to control the opinions of the masses and deploy them in service of the power of the state.

• Gallup: A survey of public opinion by asking questions of a sample of the population carefully chosen to represent the whole of it.

• Haiti: ‘Land of mountains.”

• Like-Factor: A person has only 7s to be likeable before someone changes the channel (Ailes).

• Mestizos: The mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women.

• Muckraking: The action of searching out and publicizing scandalous information about famous people in an underhanded way.

• Nation: A people who share a common ancestry.

• Nation-State: A political community, governed by laws, that, at least theoretically, unites a people who share a common ancestry (one way nation-states form is by violently purging their populations of people with different ancestries).

• Satyagraha: Mahatma Gandhi’s; nonviolent direct action. Protesting injustice without violence by waiting for one’s political opponents to perform injustice, by their own violent suppression of a peaceful protest.

• State: A political community, governed by laws.

• Truth: A general understanding of the meaning of existence.

• Truther Movement: A conspiracy theory that believes the USG was behind 9/11 (started by Alex Jones).

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People

• Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634): English barrister, judge, and politician. He is often considered the greatest jurist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras (Wiki).

  • Coke, as brilliant a political strategist as he was a legal scholar, resurrected it in the 1620s and began calling it England’s “ancient constitution.” When James insisted on his sovereignty—an ancient authority, by which the monarch is above the law—Coke, countering with his ancient constitution, insisted that the law was above the king. “Magna Carta is such a fellow,” Coke said, “that he will have no sovereign.”

• Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618): English statesmen, soldier, writer, and explorer. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonization of N. America, suppressed rebellion in Ireland, helped defend England against the Spanish Armada and held political positions under Elizabeth I (Wiki).

• King James VI (I) (James Charles Stuart) (1566-1625): King of Scotland as James VI from 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the Scottish and English crowns on 1603 until his death in 1625 (Wiki).

• John Smith (1580?-1631): English soldier, explorer, colonial governor, admiral of New England, and author. Smith played an important role in the establishment of the colony at Jamestown, VA, the first permanent English settlement in N. America. He was a leader of the Virginia Colony between 1608-1609 and led an exploration along the rivers of VA and the Chesapeake Bay. He was knighted for his services to Sigismund Bathory, Prince of Transylvania (Wiki).

  • Burly and fearless John Smith, all of 26, had already fought the Spanish in France and in the Netherlands and, with the Austrian army, had battled the Turks in Hungary. Captured by Muslims, he’d been sold into slavery, from which he’d eventually escaped. Engraved on his coat of arms, with three heads of Turks, was his motto, vincere est vivere: to conquer is to live.

• William Bradford (1590-1657): English Puritan separatist originally from the W. Riding of Yorkshire in N. England. He moved to Holland to escape Persecution from King James I of England, and then emigrated to the Plymouth Colony on the Mayflower in 1620. He was a signatory of the Mayflower compact and went on to serve as Governor of the Plymouth Colony intermittently for ~30y between 1621 and 1657 (Wiki). HE was known as Governor of the colony of dissenters.

• John Milton (1608-1674): English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God’s expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost elevated Milton’s reputation as one of history’s greatest poets (Wiki).

• King Charles II (1630-1685): King of Scotland from 1649-1651 and King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from the 1660 Restoration of the Monarchy until his death in 1685 (Wiki).

• John Locke (1632-1704): English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the “father of liberalism.” His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy and he is an important contributor to social contract theory. His writings influenced Voltaire, Rousseau, and many others including the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the US Declaration of Independence (Wiki). 

  • Locke began by imagining a state of nature, a condition before government: To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. From this state of natural, perfect equality, men created civil society—government—for the sake of order, and the protection of their property. Locke argued that the king’s subjects were free men, because “the natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.” All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent.

  • A people who do not believe land can be owned by individuals not only cannot contract to sell it, they cannot be said to have a government, because government only exists to protect property.

• Benjamin Lay (1682-1759): Anglo-American Quaker humanitarian and abolitionist best known for his early and strident anti-slavery activities. He was also an author, farmer, vegetarian, feminist, and distinguished by his concern for the ethical treatment of animals. Lay had sailed to Barbados in 1718 where he witnessed the horrific treatment of enslaves Africans, which instilled in him his lifelong abolitionist principles (Wiki).

• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790): American polymath writer, scientists, inventor, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher who was among the leading intellectuals of his time and a founding father of the US as well as a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first Postmaster General (Wiki). Franklin was the only man to have signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. His last public act was to urge abolition.

  • Leaving his sister in Boston, Franklin settled in the tidy Quaker town of Philadelphia and began printing his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, in 1729. In its pages, he fought for freedom of the press. In a Miltonian 1731 “Apology for Printers,” he observed “that the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces” but that “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”

  • Franklin decided to thumb his nose at the government by printing excerpts from a work known as Cato’s Letters, written by English radicals Trenchard and Gordon. Cato’s Letters comprised 144 essays about the nature of liberty, including freedom of speech and of the press. “Without freedom of thought,” Trenchard and Gordon wrote, “there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as publick liberty, without freedom of speech: Which is the right of every man.”

  • “The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small,” Franklin began. As he saw it, Africans were “black”; Asians and Native Americans were “tawny”; Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, Swedes, and Germans were “swarthy.” That left very few people, and chiefly the English, as the only “white people” in the world. “I could wish their Numbers were increased,” Franklin said, adding, wonderingly, “But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.”

  • Franklin’s “JOIN, or DIE” woodcut illustrated an article, written by Franklin, about the need for the colonies to form a common defense—against France and Spain, and against warring Indians and rebelling slaves.

• George Washington (1732-1799): American military officer, diplomat, and founding father who served as the 1st POTUS from 1787-1797. Washington was appointed by the continental congress as commander of the Continental Army and led patriot forces to victory in the American Revolutionary War before serving as President of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which created and ratified the Constitution of the United States and the American Federal Government. Washington has been called the “Father of his Country” (Wiki).

  • There were >300 people enslaved at Mount Vernon; Washington owned 123; the rest were his wife’s. Washington’s will was published in newspapers from Maine to Georgia, as he knew it would be. Everyone at Mount Vernon knew the terms of his will. His 123 slaves would be freed only upon Martha Washington’s death. His wife, understandably, feared she might be murdered.

  • Washington’s beauty was marred only by his terrible teeth, which had rotted and been replaced by dentures made from ivory and from nine teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.

  • Washington hoped that Americans might “control the usual current of the passions.” “Passion” or variants of the word appear seven times in the Farewell; it is the source of every problem; reason is its only remedy.

• John Adams (1735-1826): American statesmen, attorney diplomat, writer, and founding father who was a leader of the American Revolution, the 1st VPOTUS of the US and the 2nd POTUS from 1791-1801 (Wiki).

  • “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your successes are mediocre, and if you do not rise . . . to the head of your country, it will be owing to your own Laziness, Slovenliness, and Obstinacy.”-John Adams to his son John Quincy Adams.

• King George III (1738-1820): King of Great Britain and Ireland (1760-1820) and King of Hanover, during a period when Britain won an empire in the Seven Years War but lots its American colonies and then, after the struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, emerged as a leading power in Europe. During the final years of his life, his son, future King George IV, acted as his regent (Wiki).

• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): American statemen, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and founding father who served as 3rd POTUS from 1801-1809. Among the committee of five, charged by the second continental congress with authoring a Declaration of Independence, for which he was the primary author. Jefferson was the first US Secretary of State under George Washington and the nation’s 2nd VPOTUS under Adams (Wiki).

  • Jefferson fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemings, who was the much younger half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles, who had died in 1782; they had different mothers but the same father, John Wayles, who had six children with one of his slaves, a woman named Elizabeth Hemings, herself the child of an African woman and an English man.

  • In 1789, when 16yo Sally Hemings was working for and living in the residence of 46yo Jefferson in Paris, she became pregnant. She might have left him and gained her freedom; slavery was illegal in France. Instead, she extracted from him a promise, that if she stayed with him, he would set all of their children free.

  • During his second term, an embittered Jefferson would suggest that newspapers ought to be divided into four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies. Only days after his inauguration, he’d complained that printers “live by the zeal they can kindle, and the schisms they can create.”

  • “The promise of America is that the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone.”-Thomas Jefferson.

• John Quincy Adams (1767-1848): American politician, diplomat, and lawyer who served as the 6th POTUS from 1825-1829. Quincy was the eldest son of John Adams (Wiki).

  • John Quincy Adams had begun keeping a diary in 1779, when he was twelve and on a diplomatic mission to Europe with his father. After finishing his studies and passing the bar, he’d served as Washington’s minister to the Netherlands and Portugal, as his father’s minister to Prussia, and as Madison’s minister to Russia. He spoke 14 languages. As secretary of state, he’d drafted the Monroe Doctrine, establishing the principle that the United States would keep out of wars in Europe but would consider any European colonial ventures in the Americas as acts of aggression. By the time he decided to seek the presidency, he’d also served as a US senator and as a professor of logic at Brown and professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard.

• Andrew Jackson (1767-1845): American lawyer, planter, general, and statemen who served as 7th POTUS from 1829-1837. He gained fame as a General in the US Army and served in both houses of US Congress (Wiki).

  • A national hero after the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson had gone on to lead campaigns against the Seminoles, the Chickasaws, and the Choctaws, pursuing a mixed strategy of treaty-making and war-making, with far more of the latter than the former, as part of a plan to remove all Indians living in the SE United States to lands to the west.

  • He had a well-earned reputation for being ferocious, ill-humored, and murderous, on the battlefield and off. When he ran for president, he had served less than a year in the Senate. Of his bid for the White House Jefferson declared, “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.”

• John Tyler (1790-1862): 10th POTUS from 1841-1845 after assuming the presidency on the death of William Henry Harrison only 31 days into his term of office. Tyler was a stalwart supporter and advocate of states’ rights, including slavery (Wiki).

  • By Sep, 1841, every member of Tyler’s cabinet except his secretary of state, Daniel Webster, had resigned in protest. Two days later, fifty Whig members of Congress gathered on the steps of the Capitol and banished the president from the party. Fearful for his safety, Tyler had established a presidential police force (it later became the Secret Service).

• Samuel Morse (1791-1872): American painter and inventor of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was s co-developer of Morse code and helped develop the commercial use of telegraphy (Wiki).

  • Morse had long predicted that the telegraph would usher in an age of world peace. “I trust that one of its effects will be to bind man to his fellow-man in such bonds of amity as to put an end to war,” he insisted. War was a failure of technology, Morse argued, a shortcoming of communication that could be remedied by way of a machine.

• David Walker (1796-1830): American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well. In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge, he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and a fight against slavery (Wiki).

  • Walker decided to leave SC for Massachusetts, where he opened his shop for black sailors and helped found the Massachusetts General Colored Association, the first black political organization in the US. He also began helping to circulate in Boston the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, published in New York beginning in 1827. “We wish to plead our own cause,” its editors proclaimed. “Too long have others spoken for us.”

• Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865): American lawyer, politician, and statement who served as 16th POTUS from 1861 until his assassination at Ford’s Theater, DC on 15 Apr, 1865. Lincoln led the Union through the American Civil War to defend the nation as a constitutional union and succeeded in abolishing slavery, bolstering the federal government, and modernizing the US Economy (Wiki).

  • “Lincoln privately confided his despair about what he described as the nation’s “progress in degeneracy,” a political regression: As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”-Lincoln.

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902): American writer and activist who was a leader of the women’s rights movement in the US during the mid to late 19c. She was the main force behind the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first convention to be called for the sole purpose of discussing women’s rights, and was the primary author of its Declaration of Sentiments. Her demand for women’s right to vote generated a controversy at the convention but quickly became a central tenet of the women’s movement (Wiki).

  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 32yo, drafted a manifesto. The daughter of a New York Supreme Court Justice, Stanton had grown up reading her father’s lawbooks. Earlier that spring, she’d been instrumental in securing the passage of a state Married Women’s Property Act. Under most existing state laws, married women could not own property or make contracts; anything they owned became their husbands’ upon marriage; the New York law allowed women “separate use” of their separate property. Stanton, whose husband, also a lawyer, would help found the Republican Party, was also a noted abolitionist. As Fuller had pointed out, the migration of abolitionism into party politics illustrated to women just how limited was their capacity to act politically when they could not vote. The women who gathered at Seneca decided to fight for all manner of legal reform and, controversially, for the right to vote. They felt, Stanton later wrote, “as helpless and hopeless as if they had been suddenly asked to construct a steam engine.”

• Frederick Douglass (b. Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey) (~1817-1895): American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesmen. After escaping from slavery in MD, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and NY, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive anti-slavery writings (Wiki).

  • Douglass days later delivered a blistering “Plea for Free Speech,” in which, as had Longfellow, he placed abolition in the tradition of the nation’s founding. “No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech,” Douglass said, and “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.”

• Thoreau (1817-1862): American naturalists, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book “Walden,” a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience” (originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government”), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state (Wiki).

  • Thoreau’s experiment wasn’t a business; it was an antibusiness; he paid attention to what things cost because he tried never to buy anything. Instead, he bartered, and lived on $.27/wk. At his most entrepreneurial, he planted a field of beans and realized a profit of $8.71. “I was determined to know beans,” he wrote in a particularly beautiful chapter called “The Bean-Field.” He worked, for cash, only 6w out of the year, and spent the rest of his time reading and writing, planting beans and picking huckleberries.

• Andrew William Mellon (1855-1937): American banker, businessman, industrialist, philanthropist, and politician. From the wealthy Mellon family of Pittsburgh, PA, he established a vast business empire before moving into Politics. He served as US Secretary of Treasury from 1921-1932, presiding over the boom years of the 1920s and the Wall Street Crash of 1929. A conservative Republican, Mellon favored policies that reduced taxation and the national debt of the US in the aftermath of WWI (Wiki). During Mellon’s tenure, Congress abolished the excess profits tax, cut the estate tax, exempted capital gains from income, and capped the top tax rate.

• Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924): American politician and academic who served as 28th POTUS from 1913-1921. He had served as President of Princeton University and as the Governor of NJ before winning the 1912 presidential election. Wilson changed the nation’s economic policies and led the US through WWI. He was the leading architect of the League of Nations, and his progressive stance on foreign policy came to be known as Wilsonianism (Wiki).

  • Like other Progressives, Wilson not only failed to offer any remedy for racial inequality; he endorsed it. On the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, he spoke on the battlefield at a reunion of >50K Union and Confederate veterans. “A Reunion of whom?” asked the Washington Bee: black soldiers were not included. It was, instead, a reunion between whites in the North and the South, an agreement to remember the Civil War as a war over states’ rights, and to forget the cause of slavery. “We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten,” Wilson told the veterans at Gettysburg. A week later, his administration mandated separate bathrooms for blacks and whites working in the Treasury Department; soon he segregated the entire civil service, bringing Jim Crow to the nation’s capital.

• Theodore Roosevelt Jr (‘Teddy’) (1858-1919): American politician, statesman, soldier, conservationist, naturalist, historian, and writer who served as the 26th POTUS from 1901-1909 assuming the role on the assassination of McKinley. He previously served as the 25th VPOTUS under McKinley from Mar-Sep, 1901 and as the 33rd Governor of NY from 1899-1900 (Wiki). His lasting legacy was the regulatory state, the establishment of professional federal government and scientific agencies like the Forest and Reclamation Services. Not far behind was the series of wildlife refuges and national parks he created.

  • After the destruction of the Maine, 39yo Roosevelt, determined to see combat, resigned as assistant SECNAV, formed the First US Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, charged up San Juan Hill, and returned a hero.

  • After Roosevelt lost the nomination to Taft, he formed the Progressive Party, whose convention refused to seat black delegates. But the Progressive Party was not, in fact, strictly a white man’s party; it was also a white woman’s party. Roosevelt’s new party adopted a suffrage plank and Roosevelt promised to appoint Jane Addams to his cabinet.

• Herbert Hoover (1874-1964): American politician who served as 31st POTUS from 1929-1933. Hoover held office (and was blamed for) during the Great Depression in the US. He was a self-made man who became rich as a mining engineer (Wiki). 

  • Hoover was an efficiency expert, best known for an influential 400-pg report called Waste in Industry. So great was his fame that nearly anything involving the elimination of waste, including vacuum cleaning, took his name.

  • Hoover a telephone installed on his desk in the Oval Office. He scheduled his appointments at 8-min intervals.

  • “Back to the mines,” he’d say, after a 15-minute lunch break.

• Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) (1882-1945): American statesmen and politician who served as 32nd POTUS from 1933 until his death in 1945. He had previously served as the 44th Governor of NY from 1929-1932 assistant secretary of the navy from 1913-1920, and a member of the NY Senate from 1911-1913 (Wiki).

  • “Radio lends itself to propaganda far more easily than the press.”-FDR.

  • Eleanor Roosevelt. Born in New York in 1884, she’d been orphaned as a child. She married FDR, her fifth cousin, in 1905; they had six children. Nine years into their marriage, Franklin began an affair with Eleanor’s social secretary, and when Eleanor found out, he refused to agree to a divorce, fearing it would end his career in politics.

  • FDR’s electoral coalition drew African Americans from the Rep. Party; he consulted an informal group of advisers who came to be called his “black cabinet”; and he appointed the 1st African American federal judge.

  • At the end of his first 100 days in office, FDR had secured the passage of 15 legislative elements of his New Deal. All had to do with the federal government’s role in the regulation of the economy—and therefore, with the commerce clause in Article One, Section 8, of the Constitution, which granted to Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” The New Deal broadened and intensified the longstanding debate over the nature of the Constitution. “I don’t believe in one generation deciding what the others shall do,” wrote one philosophy professor in 1931. “Our forefathers didn’t know anything about a country of 120M people, with automobiles, trains, and radios.” How could a people committed to the idea of progress shackle themselves to the past? “Hopeful people today wave the flag,” Thurman Arnold, FDR’s assistant attorney general, said; “timid people wave the Constitution.”

  • “No lover ever studied the whims of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.”-Churchill.

  • “We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations, far away.”-FDR, 1933.

  • FDR would listen to recordings of his addresses after he’d given them, to make improvements for the next time. He worked and reworked drafts so that, by the time he sat down at the microphone, he’d committed his speech to memory. Before every address, he took a nap to rest his voice. He spoke at an unusual speed—much slower than most radio announcers—and with an everyday vocabulary.

• Walter Lippman (1889-1974): American writer, reporter, and political commentator. With a career spanning 60y, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of the Cold War, coining the “stereotype” in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper and column and several books, most notable his 1922 Public Opinion (Wiki).

  • The citizens being unable to agree on basic matters of fact, they cannot agree on how to educate their children together. “This is the propagandist’s opportunity,” Lippmann wrote. With enough money, and with the tools of mass communication, deployed efficiently, the propagandist can turn a political majority into a truth. Lippmann had talked himself into a corner. He’d thought his way into a problem the Constitution had not anticipated, a problem that suggested that, under these circumstances, people would not be able to rule themselves by reason and choice, as Alexander Hamilton had hoped, but would instead be ruled by accident and force. His mind grew clouded with dread. Efficiency could not solve this problem; efficiency was part of the problem. There had to be a solution.-Lippmann.

  • In 1922, Walter Lippmann, 32yo, published “Public Opinion,” concluding that in a modern democracy the masses, asked to make decisions about matters far removed from their direct knowledge, had been asked to do too much. “Decisions in a modern state tend to be made by the interaction, not of Congress and the executive, but of public opinion and the executive,” he’d observed. Mass democracy can’t work, Lippmann argued, because the new tools of mass persuasion—especially mass advertising—meant that a tiny minority could very easily persuade the majority to believe whatever it wished them to believe.

    • The best hope for mass democracy might have seemed to be the scrupulously and unfailingly honest reporting of news, but this, Lippmann thought, was doomed to fall short, because of the gap between facts and truth. Reporters chronicle events, offering facts, but “they cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions,” he said. To govern, the people need truth, sense out of the whole, but people can’t read enough in the morning paper or hear enough on the evening news to turn facts into truth when they’re driven like dray horses all day. Lippmann suggested that the government open ten Bureaus of Intelligence, one for each department represented in the cabinet, where expert intellectuals, appointed for life (“with sabbatical years set aside for advanced study and training”), would put together all the facts and explain, to the masses, the truth. He eventually came around to seeing how silly that was, but what happened was a lot worse: by the end of the decade, managing public opinion would become a business, in the form of “public relations.”

    • Lippmann decided to work through this problem by imagining a dialogue in which Jefferson and Bryan take turns making their case to Socrates, Jefferson arguing for reason and Bryan arguing for religion, but both expressing their enthusiasm for popular rule. Each presents his case and agrees to abide by Socrates’s decision.         JEFFERSON: And what do you conclude from all this?         SOCRATES: That the common people hate reason, and that reason is the religion of an élite, of great gentlemen like yourself.         BRYAN: Reason a religion? What do you mean?         SOCRATES: The common people have always known that reason is a religion. That is why they dislike it so violently.

    • If the common people hate reason, Lippmann concluded, there’s no way a government of the people can protect the freedom of thought. The person of faith cannot accept reason as the arbiter of truth without giving up on faith; the person of reason cannot accept that truth lies outside the realm of reason.

• Dwight D. Eisenhower (‘IKE’) (1890-1969): American Military officer and statesmen who served as 34th POTUS from 1953-1961. During WWII, he served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and achieved 5-star rank as General of the Army. IKE planned and supervised two of the most consequential military campaigns of WWII- Operation Torch from 1942-1943 and Operation Overlord in 1944 (Wiki).

  • “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith, and I don’t care what it is,” Eisenhower said. During his administration, Congress mandated the inclusion of “In God We Trust” on all money and added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.

  • Eisenhower had delivered a farewell address in which he issued a dire warning about the U.S.-Soviet arms race. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” he said. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

  • Eisenhower’s politics were moderate, as was his style. He described himself as a “dynamic conservative”: “conservative when it comes to money and liberal when it comes to human beings.”

• Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) (1908-1973): American politician who served as 36th POTUS from 1963-1969, first assuming the presidency on the assassination of JFK. LBJ served as a US Rep, a US Senator, and the Senate’s Majority Leader. He holds the distinction of being one of the few presidents who served in all elected offices at the federal level (Wiki).

  • When LBJ was a boy, his father had lost his farm. He’d grown up dirt-poor. Six foot three, with long ears and no discernible end to his energy, Johnson had hitchhiked to a state teachers college and, after graduating, taught at an elementary school in Cotulla, Texas, 100 km north of the border. The students were Mexican American; there was no lunch break, because the children had no lunch to eat. Johnson organized a debating team and taught them how to fight for their ideas. When he ran for Congress, he printed signs that read “Franklin D. and Lyndon B.” Like his hero, LBJ embraced the radio, campaigning on radio stations like KNOW in Austin and KTSA in San Antonio…No unified government in American history was as productive as LBJ’s.

• Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993): American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as SCOTUS’ first African- American from 1967-1991. Prior to his judicial service, Marshall was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP legal defense and educational fund. Marshall was a prominent figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools and won 29 of 32 civil rights cases he argued before SCOTUS, culminating in the Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the court became increasingly conservative (Wiki).

  • Graduating first in his class in 1933, he two years later successfully sued, as counsel, the state of MD, arguing that, because the state provided no law school for African Americans, it had defied the “separate but equal” doctrine of the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. By 1950, Marshall had convinced the NAACP to abandon this line of argument—demanding equal facilities—in favor of arguing against separation itself. Marshall started the NAACP’s legal and educational defense fund right after he won his case against the state of Maryland.

  • Aiming to bring a challenge to segregation in the nation’s public schools to the Supreme Court, an objective endorsed by Truman’s Justice Department, Marshall began building a docket of cases in 1951. Several were eventually consolidated under a title case concerning a third grader named Linda Brown, who lived in Topeka, Kansas. Her father, Oliver L. Brown, a welder and part-time pastor, wanted her to go to a school blocks away from their house. But Topeka’s segregated school system assigned Linda to a school a long walk and a bus ride away, an hour of travel each way. Oliver Brown agreed to join a civil suit against the Topeka Board of Education, filed by the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. The case was called Brown v. Board of Education.

  • “Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place.”-Marshall.

  • Marshall presented the court with reams of empirical research on the consequences for black children of separate schooling. Jim Crow laws, Marshall told the court, are Black Codes, and the only way the court could possibly uphold them, he said, would be “to find that for some reason Negroes are inferior to all other human beings.”

• Ronald Reagan (1911-2004): American politician and actor who served as 40th POTUS from 1981-1989. He was previously 33rd Governor of CA from 1967-1975 and President of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947-1952 and from 1959-1960 (Wiki).

  • “Just as we seek to put our financial house in order and rebuild our nation’s defenses, so too we seek to protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of schoolchildren by utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgement of a Supreme Being in our classrooms.”-Reagan.

  • Founded the Brady Campaign (named for his Press Secretary) to Prevent Gun Violence.

  • During his time in office, the top income tax rate, which had been above 90% in the 1940s and 1950s, fell from 70% to 28%. He also slashed certain kinds of federal spending, arguing that Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, and other programs promoted dependency and immorality and were destructive of family life, especially by providing counterincentives to marriage. Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of illegitimate birth rose from 38% to 67% for blacks and from 6% to 17% for whites.

  • Instituted “Reaganomics.”

• Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954): English mathematician, computer scientists, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer (Wiki).

• Rosa Parks (1913-2005): American civil rights activist best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The USC honored her as the “first lady of civil rights” and “mother of the freedom movement.” Parks became a member of the NAACP in 1943 and participated in several high-profile civil rights campaigns (Wiki).

  • Parks had made a purposeful decision to challenge segregated seating on the city’s buses. The driver stopped the bus and asked her to move, and when she again refused, he called for police, who arrested her.

• Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994):  American politician who served as 37th POTUS from 1969-1974 until his resignation following the Watergate scandal. Nixon was a US Rep and US Senator from CA and VPOTUS under IKE. His 5y in the White House saw reduction of US involvement in the Vietnam War, détente with the USSR and China, the first crewed moon landings, and the establishment of the EPA and OSHA (Wiki). Richard Nixon’s rise was exponential: elected to Congress at 33, he won a Senate seat at 36, and was VPOTUS at 38.

• George Herbert Walker Bush (1924-2018): American politician, diplomat, and businessman who served as the 41st POTUS from 1989-1993. He previously served as the 43rd VPOTUS from 1981-1989 under Reagan, as a US Rep, US Ambassador to the UN, and as CIA Director (Wiki).

• Malcolm X (b. Malcolm Little) (1925-1965): American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during the civil rights movement. A spokesmen for the Nation of Islam until 1964, he was a vocal advocate for Black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the Black community (Wiki).

  • “Anybody can sit, it takes a man to stand.”-Malcom X on the SLCC’s sit-ins.

• Martin Luther King Jr (b. Michael King Jr) (1929-1968): American Baptist minister and activist who was one of the most prominent leaders in the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his assignation on 4 Apr, 1968. King advanced civil rights for people of color in the US through nonviolence and civil disobedience. Inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi, he led targeted non-violent resistance against Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination in the US.

  • 26yo MLK was drafted to lead a citywide protest that would begin the following Monday, 5 Dec, after Rosa Parks’ arrest the previous Friday. Born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a minister and NAACP leader, King had been inspired by American evangelical Christianity, by the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and by anticolonialism abroad, particularly by the rhetoric and tactics of nonviolence practiced by Mahatma Gandhi. King had wide-set eyes, short hair, and a pencil mustache. Ordained in 1948, he’d attended a theological seminary in Pennsylvania and then completed a doctoral degree at Boston University in 1955 before becoming pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. Lean and quiet as a young man, he’d grown sturdier, and more stirring as he mastered the ancient art of preaching.

• Bill Clinton (1946-): American politician who served as the 42nd POTUS from 1993-2001. He previously served as AR governor from 1979-1981 and from 1983-1992, and as AG of AR from 1977-1979. Clinton became known as a “New Democrat” as many of his policies reelected a centrist “Third Way” political philosophy (Wiki).

• George Walker Bush (1946-): American politician who served as the 4rd POTUS from 2001-2009. Son of George H. W. Bush, he was previously the 46th governor of TX from 1995-2000 (Wiki).

• Donald Trump (1946- ): American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as 45th POTUS from 2017-2021 (Wiki). Trump was the son of a real-estate man from Queens. In 1964, he graduated from military school, where he’d been known as a “ladies’ man.” He considered going to USC, to study film, but ended up studying first at Fordham University, then business at Wharton, graduating in 1968. He spent most of his time reading the listings of foreclosures on federally financed housing projects, he later said. He joined his father’s business and set out to conquer Manhattan.

  • In the summer of 1999, in a nation consumed by the politics of scandal, celebrity, pettiness, and vengeance, rumors began to spread that Donald Trump, 53, intended to run for president. Trump published a new book, The America We Deserve, that had all the trappings of a campaign manifesto. In a chapter called “Should I Run,” Trump pointed to a survey that documented his name recognition: “It was no surprise to me that 97% of the American people knew who I was.” His supporters launched a website, www.thedonald2000.org.

  • In 1973, the Department of Justice charged Trump and his father with violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act. “We never have discriminated,” Trump told the New York Times, “and we never would.” During the years when the parties swapped women for men, and Hillary left the Republican Party to become a Democrat, Trump did the reverse. In the 1970s, Trump began making donations to the Dem. Party.

  • “The simple fact is that contributing money to politicians is very standard and accepted for a NYC developer,” he explained in The Art of the Deal, his best-selling business book, published in 1987, the year he first toyed with running for president. At the time, Trump was a larger-than-life media presence, a huckster chronically in and out of bankruptcy court but a reliable ratings booster on the talk show circuit, where he was usually referred to as a “hustler.” An avid participant in the world of professional wrestling, Trump’s forays into politics were generally greeted as stunts. In 1984, he’d offered to serve as an arms negotiator with the USSR. “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” he told the WAPO.

  • “Paula Jones is a loser,” he said on NBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. “But the fact is that she may be responsible for bringing down a president indirectly.” Clinton’s statement was “a disaster,” Trump said, and he should have taken the Fifth Amendment. He’d have had more respect for Bill Clinton, Trump said, if he’d had sex with a supermodel instead of with Lewinsky.

  • Trump knew that Americans were disillusioned. “I am considering a run only because I am convinced that the major parties have lost their way,” he explained…“The Republicans, especially those in Congress, are captives of their right wing. The Democrats are captive of their left wing. I don’t hear anyone speaking for the working men and women in the center. There is very little contact between the concerns and interests of ordinary people and the agendas of politicians.”

  • Trump boasted of his legendary deal making, but his real attraction to voters, he told the columnist Maureen Dowd, was his personality, and his sex appeal. “I think the only difference between me and the other candidates,” he said, “is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.”

  • He did offer policy proposals: to close the budget deficit, he suggested raising $5.7T with a onetime 14.25% tax on the net worth of people and trusts worth $10M or more.

  • “The only thing standing between Donald Trump and the presidency,” wrote syndicated columnist Mark Shields, “is the good judgment of the American people.”

• Hillary Rodham Clinton (1947-): American politician and diplomat who served as the 67th US SECSTATE under POTUS Obama from 2009-2013, as a US Senator representing NY from 2001-2009, and as the FLOTUS from 1993-2001. She was the Dem. Party’s presidential nominee in 2016, becoming the first woman to win a presidential nomination by a major US political party. Clinton won the popular vote, but was defeated by Donald Trump in the electoral college (Wiki).

  • Before her husband took office, Hillary Rodham Clinton, a chronic over-preparer, read 43 biographies of presidential wives to equip herself for her role.

• Barack Hussein Obama (1961-): American politician who served as the 44th and first African-American POTUS from 2009-2017. He previously served as US Senator from IL from 2005-2008 and as a IL state senator from 1997-2004.

  • “Those values upon which our success depends—honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old.”-Obama.

  • After graduating from Columbia, he worked as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, planting roots in a city that had just elected its first black mayor.

  • Obama’s signature move- reconciling seemingly irreconcilable differences.

  • Obama, as a professor, cultivated the values of engaged, open-minded debate: students were to be graded for their ability “to draw out the full spectrum of views,” for their display of “a thorough examination of the diversity of opinion” and for evidence of having broken “some sweat trying to figure out the problem in all its wonderful complexity.”

  • He did not enjoy his time in the Senate. If, after the end of his term, he stayed in Washington, he told a friend, “Shoot me.” He found bloody-minded partisanship maddening. Liberals were fools if they thought they could defeat conservatives by treating them like enemies.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Chronology

• 2020: US Presidential Elections; Joe Biden is elected 46th POTUS, defeating Rep. POTUS Donald Trump in the electoral college (306-232) (Britannica).

• Nov, 2016: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Donald Trump is elected 45th POTUS, defeating Dem. Candidate Hillary Clinton in the electoral college (304-227) (Britannica), despite losing the popular vote (62,979,636 for Trump to 65,844,610 for Clinton). Clinton’s campaign misjudged Trump and not only failed to address the suffering of blue-collar voters but also insulted Trump’s supporters, dismissing half of them as a “basket of deplorables.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 12 Jun, 2016: Orlando nightclub shooting; 49 people are killed in a terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2015: “Make America Great Again”; Donald Trump begins campaigning as a Rep. for President of the USA. The backbone of his campaign is a promise to build a wall along the US-Mexican border.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 26 Jun, 2015: SCOTUS argues Obergefell v. Hodges, deciding that state bans on same-sex marriages were unconstitutional. The case had consolidated the petitions of four couples who had sought relief from state same-sex marriage bans in KT, MI, OH and TN.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2014: Facebook offers users more than 50 different genders to choose from in registering their identities; people who were baffled by this were accused online of prejudice: public shaming as a mode of political discourse grows.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2014: SCOTUS grants corporations 1st Amendment rights.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2014: The Islamic State (ISIS), a new terrorist group, gains control of territory in Iraq.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2013: The Anti-Fascist Party (ANTIFA), is founded.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2013: The Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement begins after a FL jury acquits George Zimmerman of all charges related to the death of Trayvon Martin, organizers began tweeting under the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. BLM calls for urgent attention to state-sanctioned violence against African Americans, in forms that include police brutality, racially discriminatory sentencing laws, and mass incarceration.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Dec, 2012: The Newtown Elementary School Shootings; a mentally ill 20yo shoots his mother and then goes to his former elementary school and kills 6 teachers and staff and 20 young children.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2012: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS Barack Obama is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Mitt Romney in the electoral college (332-206) (Britannica). Romney had dismissed 47% of the US population- Obama’s supporters—as people “who believe they are victims.”

• Jan, 2012: The day before Obama’s inauguration, Fox News launches a new program hosted by radio talk show celebrity Glenn Beck. Beck compares Obama to Mussolini.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2012: Islamic militants attack USG facilities in Libya.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2011: US forces find and kill Osama bin Laden.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Sep, 2011: The Occupy Wall Street Movement begins from encampments in Zuccotti Park in downtown NY. Within months, Occupy protests had been staged in more than six hundred American communities and in hundreds more cities around the world.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2010: The Alt-Right party emerges.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2009: The Tea Party (Right Wing) emerges.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2009: The “Occupy” movement first begins in response to the USG bailout and college tuition hikes at the U. of CA when students occupy a campus building and carry signs reading “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing.” The movements spreads on social media, adopting the slogan, “We are the 99%.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2008: US Presidential Elections; Dem. Candidate Barack Obama (“Hope”, “Change”) is elected 44th POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate John McCain in the electoral college (365-173) (Britannica).

• 2008: The term “alt-right” is coined by Richard Spencer.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2007: The iPhone is launched by Apple.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2007: The VA Tech Shootings; 23yo VA Tech Senior Seung Hui-Cho, shoots 50 people in Blacksburg, killing 32 of them before killing himself.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2006: Facebook launches its News Feed.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2006: Twitter is launched.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2006: WikiLeaks, an anonymous source site is established by Julian Assange, an Australian computer programmer, who styles himself after Daniel Ellsberg, the political scientist who had leaked the Pentagon Papers.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2005: Florida passes a “stand your ground” law, exonerating from prosecution citizens who use deadly force when confronted by an assailant, even if they could have safely retreated. More states follow.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2005: YouTube is launched.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2004: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS George W. Bush is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. Candidate John Kerry and non-candidate John Edwards in the electoral college (286-251-1, respectively) (Britannica).

• 2004: POTUS Bush allows the 1994 Brady Bill’s ban on the possession, transfer, or manufacture of semiautomatic assault weapons to expire.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2004: Facebook is founded by 19yo Mark Zuckerberg, partly with funding from Thiel.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2004: The New Yorker and 60 Minutes report on abuses at Abu Ghraib; the ACLU publishes the torture memos.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2003: The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court makes the commonwealth the first state to guarantee same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2003: Invasion of Iraq by a US-led coalition, with the aim of eradicating both Saddam Hussein and his WMD.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2003: Lawrence v. Texas; SCOTUS overrules its 1986 decision in Bowers by declaring a Texas sodomy law unconstitutional.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2002: In his State of the Union address, POTUS Bush describes Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an “axis of evil”-  “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 9 Jan, 2002: Yoo and a colleague submit to the DoD the first of what came to be called the torture memos, in which they conclude that international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions, “do not apply to the Taliban militia” because, although Afghanistan had been part of the Geneva Conventions since 1956, it was a “failed state.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• Nov, 2001: US President Bush signs a military order concerning the “Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism.” Suspected terrorists who were not citizens of the US were to be “detained at an appropriate location designated by the SECDEF.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 26 Oct, 2001: The USG under POTUS Bush passes the Patriot Act, granting the federal government new powers to conduct surveillance and collect intel to prevent and investigate terrorist acts.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 7 Oct, 2001: The US goes to war in Afghanistan after the Taliban refuse to hand over bin Laden. The immediate aim of the war, aided by coalition partners, was to defeat al Qaeda; its more distant aim was to replace the Taliban with a democratically elected, pro-Western government. It becomes the longest war in American history.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 11 Sep, 2001 (9-11): 9-11; 19 men, trained by aQ, an Islamic terrorist organization led by Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden hijack four commercial airliners are hijacked and crashed into the WTC, Pentagon, and a field in PA.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • “A great people has been moved to defend a great nation,” George W. Bush said, committing the US to a “war against terrorism.” IL Senator and constitutional law professor Barack Obama, offered a different interpretation in a Chicago newspaper- “The essence of this tragedy derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers,” a deformation that “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1200, 11 Sep, 2001: all flights from all U.S. airports were grounded, federal buildings were evacuated, embassies were shuttered.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1028, 11 Sep, 2001: The WTC North Tower collapses.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1003, 11 Sep, 2001: UA Flight 93 crashes into a field in Shanksville, PA, killing everyone aboard. The hijackers had intended to crash UA Flight 93, into the Capitol or the White House. This flight, unlike the first three, all of which had departed on time, was running more than half an hour late; it took off at 8:42 a.m. At 9:23, a UA flight dispatcher sent out a message: “Beware any cockpit intrusion.” At 9:26, the pilot on Flight 93 responded with seeming disbelief: “Confirm latest mssg plz.” Two minutes later, the hijackers stormed the cockpit. In the moments that followed, ten of the flight’s 33 passengers and the two surviving members of the crew managed to make phone calls. They learned about the attacks on the WTC; they decided to fight back. Ten minutes later, the passengers and crew, having taken a vote about what to do, charged the cockpit. The plane began to roll. At 10:03, United Flight 93 plowed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, twenty minutes outside of Washington. At 1015, VPOTUS authorizes the USAF to shoot it down, unaware it had already crashed.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 0958, 11 Sep, 2001: The WTC South Tower collapses in on itself, falling straight to the ground like an elevator shaft, crushing everyone inside; the burning jet fuel, at over a thousand degrees, had weakened the skyscrapers’ steel girders.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 0937, 11 Sep, 2001: AA Flight 77, traveling at 530 mph, crashes into the Pentagon.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 0903, 11 Sep, 2001: UA Flight 175 crashes into the South Tower of the WTC in NYC.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 0846, 11 Sep, 2001: UA Flight 11 crashes into the top floors of the north tower of the WTC in NYC.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2001: POTUS Bush withdraws the US from the Kyoto Protocol.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2000: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate George W. Bush is elected 43rd POTUS, defeating Dem. Candidate Al Gore and Green candidate Ralph Nader in the electoral college (271-266, respectively) (Britannica). The election is heavily contested and eventually decided by SCOTUS.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 12 Dec, 2000: Following 36 days of vote recounting, SCOTUS calls off the recount, overruling the lower court in a bitterly argued 5-4 decision, that rests on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, in a blistering dissent. “It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Just before 8:00 p.m. on Election Night, the networks announced that Gore had won Florida in a very close vote. Later that night, Fox News countermanded the networks’ prediction of a Gore victory. Ailes had hired John Ellis, Bush’s first cousin, to head Fox News’s “decision desk.” Shortly after 2:00 a.m., after getting off the phone with Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, Ellis cried out, “Jebbie says we got it!” (Later, before a House committee, Ailes said that there had not been anything inappropriate in his employing Ellis).  “Quite the contrary,” he said. “I see this as a good journalist talking to his very high-level sources on election night.”) Fox News then called the election for Bush. Four minutes later, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN followed Fox’s lead, naming Bush the next president. A crestfallen Gore conceded, but then, in yet another twist of a tale as tangled as seaweed, Gore un-conceded, telling Bush, in a second phone call, “Your little brother is not the ultimate authority on this.” A report commissioned by CNN damned the television coverage that night as a “news disaster that damaged democracy and journalism” and “played an important part in creating the ensuing climate of rancor and bitterness.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1999: The Columbine school shootings; two seniors at a high school in Columbine, CO, kill 12 students, a teacher, and themselves.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1999: The USG under POTUS Clintons repeals elements of the Glass- Steagall Act (passed in 1933), lifting a ban on combinations between commercial and investment banks.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 12 Feb, 1999: The US Senate narrowly defeats two charges of impeachment against Clinton on perjury and obstruction of justice.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1998: Google is founded.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1998: PayPal is founded by Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek, partly in the hope that it would free the citizens of the world from government-managed currency.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1998: aQ leader Bin Laden calls for a fatwa against all Americans; “the murder of Americans is the individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country, in the name of a World Islamic Front.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1997: Christensen publishes The Innovator’s Dilemma, a business bible for entrepreneurs, arguing that companies that make only “sustaining innovations” (careful, small, gradual refinements) are often overrun by companies that make “disruptive innovations”: big changes that allow them to produce a cheaper, poorer-quality product for a much larger market.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1996: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS Bill Clinton is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. Candidate Bob Dole and Reform candidate Ross Perot in the electoral college (379-159-0, respectively) (Britannica).

• Jul, 1996: MSNBC is launched.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1996: Fox News is launched, run by Roger Ailes and owned by Australian tabloid newspaper tycoon and conservative Rupert Murdoch.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 8 Feb, 1996: The USG under POTUS Clinton passes the Telecommunications Act, deregulating the communications industry, lifting virtually all of its New Deal antimonopoly provisions, allowing for the subsequent consolidation of media companies and prohibiting regulation of the Internet.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1996: The CIA forms a special unit to work against aQ and bin Laden.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1995: Yahoo is founded.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Nov, 1995: The Monica Lewinsky Scandal; POTUS Clinton engages in a 16-month affair with 21yo Lewinsky, who had begun an internship at the White House in July. Allegedly, she later said her title ought to have been “Special Assistant to the President for Blow Jobs.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1995: Michael McCurry, POTUS Clinton’s press secretary, begins opening daily press briefings to televised coverage.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1995: The Oklahoma City Bombing; Timothy McVeigh, who’d fought in the US Army as an infantryman in Kuwait, blows up a federal building in OK City, killing 168 people, including 15 babies and small children in a day care center. McVeigh said he’d bombed the building in retaliation for USG actions at Waco.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1994: Amazon is founded.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1993: Mosaic is launched as the first widely available web browser.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1993: The Waco Incident; ATF lays siege to the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh to seize illegal weapons. The siege results in a fire that kills 76 members including 25 children.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1993: POTUS Clinton appoints Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the SCOTUS.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1992: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Bill Clinton is elected 42nd POTUS, defeating Rep. POTUS George H. W. Bush and Independent campaign Ross Perot in the electoral college (370-168-0, respectively) (Britannica). Clinton won the presidency with the lowest popular vote, 43%.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1989: The CDC reports that AIDS has infected 82,764 Americans and killed 46,344 and estimates that 10x as many cases of infection had not yet been reported. 75% of cases in the 1980s were gay men.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1989: Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist in Geneva, proposes a protocol to link pages on what he called the World Wide Web. The first web page in the United States was created in 1991, at Stanford. Berners-Lee’s elegant protocol spread fast, first across universities and then to the public.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1988: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate George H. W. Bush is elected 41st POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Michael Dukakis in the electoral college (426-111) (Britannica).

• Summer, 1988: Rush Limbaugh begins broadcasting nationally, on 56 stations.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1988: The Marshall Institute turns its attention to challenging the science behind global warming, with funding, in part, by ExxonMobil.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1988: The USG signs the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1988: Soviet forces withdraw from Afghanistan after Mujahideen triumph with funding and weapons provided by the USG. Bin Laden forms al Qaeda (aQ) as a base for future jihads (‘holy wars’).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1987: The US & USSR sign an agreement to destroy intermediate-and short-range missiles.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jun, 1987: POTUS Reagan visits Berlin, demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1987: The USG under POTUS Reagan repeals the Fairness Doctrine; broadcasters, operating with federal licenses, had no obligation either to dedicate programming to the public interest or to represent opposing points of view. Along with the creation of national toll-free telephone numbers and the opening of the FM band—which meant that music stations largely abandoned AM, opening those stations for other programming—the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made possible a new kind of (political) talk radio.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1986: SCOTUS argues Bowers v. Hardwick, refusing (5-4) to overturn a ban on sodomy in GA.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1986: POTUS Reagan appoints Antonin Scalia to the SCOTUS. Scalia became the Supreme Court’s most learned and eloquent proponent of originalism. Between judges interpreting the Constitution and judges trying to figure out what the framers meant, he argued, originalism was plainly the lesser evil. “The purpose of constitutional guarantees . . . is precisely to prevent the law from reflecting certain changes in original values that the society adopting the Constitution thinks fundamentally undesirable (Scalia).”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1985: USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev begins pursuing a policy of glasnost, opening the society, and perestroika, restructuring the USSRs collapsing economy. Keen to limit defense spending, Gorbachev agrees to a series of arms limitations talks beginning in Geneva.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1984: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS Ronald Reagan is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Walter Mondale in the electoral college (525-13) (Britannica).

• 1984: The Soviet economy virtually collapses.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1984: HIV is first isolated.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1984: The George C. Marshall Institute is founded by NASA physicist Robert Jastrow; Frederick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences; and William Nierenberg, past director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, with the aim to counter Sagan by arguing that nuclear winter was not science but politics.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 23 Mar, 1983: POTUS Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) (‘Star Wars’), a plan to defend the US from nuclear attack with a network of satellite-based missiles.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1982: The New Yorker publishes a four-part series by Jonathan Schell called “The Fate of the Earth,” leading TN congressman Al Gore to convene House hearings into “The Consequences of Nuclear War on the Global Environment.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1981: AIDS as a disease is first identified.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1981: Attempted assassination of POTUS Reagan by John Hinkley Jr, the 25yo mentally ill son of the President of a Denver Oil Company, while outside the Washington Hilton Hotel with a .22 caliber revolver that he’d bought at a pawn shop in Dallas. Hinckley fires six shots in 1.7 seconds, hitting not only the president but also a DC police officer, a Secret Service agent, and James Brady, the White House press secretary. Hinckley is found not guilty by reason of insanity.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1981: George Gilder publishes “Wealth and Poverty”, the “bible of the Reagan revolution.” For Gilder, wealth is always altruistic—“capitalism begins with giving”—and “real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind,” the dependency cultivated by government relief.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1980: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Ronald Reagan is elected 40th POTUS, defeating Dem. POTUS Jimmy Carter in the electoral college (489-49) (Britannica).

• 1980: CNN is launched, providing news 24h a day. The station is first profitable in 1985.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • The cable stations, compelled to fill 24h of airtime, needed talking heads at all hours of every day, the angrier and more adversarial the talk, the higher the ratings.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1980: Osama bin Laden, 23yo, joins a resistance movement against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, supplying funds and building a network of supporters.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Dec, 1979: The USSR invades Afghanistan.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Nov, 1979: The Iran Hostage Crisis; Iranian rebels take 66 American hostages at the US Embassy and Foreign Ministry Offices and demand that the shah be returned to Iran from his exile in the US.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jan, 1979: Iran Coup; Iranian revolutionaries led by Muslim cleric Ayatollah Khomeini seizes control of the government, ousting the shah, a tyrant who had been installed and supported by the US.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1978: CA passes Prop 13, cutting the state’s property tax by 57% and eviscerating the state’s public education system.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1977: The Term “Identity Politics” is coined in a manifesto written by a collective of black lesbian feminists in Cambridge, MA- “The most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1977: 2,000 delegates and 20K attendees from 50 states meet in Houston, producing a 26-point National Plan of Action calling for government funding for abortion and an endorsement of equal rights for lesbians and gay men.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1977: The first mass-consumer desktop computers including the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the TRS-80, first appear.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1976: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Jimmy Carter is elected 39th POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Gerald Ford in the electoral college (297-240) (Britannica).

• 1976: Apple is founded by Stephen Wozniak and Steve Jobs in Cupertino, releasing the Apple II in 1977. By 1980, Apple’s IPO broke a record held by Ford since 1956. By the 1990s, wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would lead a Dem. Party that had restructured itself around their priorities.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1975: Microsoft is founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who had met as boys in Seattle, later adopting the motto “A personal computer on every desk.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1975: The NRA creates the Institute for Legislative Action as a lobbying arm.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 8 Aug, 1974: POTUS Nixon resigns from office to avoid Impeachment after the Watergate tapes were released two days prior. His VP, Gerald Ford, becomes POTUS.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 24 Jul, 1974: SCOTUS argues US v. Nixon, unanimously deciding the White House had to release the Nixon tapes.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Apr, 1974: 1,200 pages of transcripts to 46 tapes are released documenting Nixon’s wrath, his pettiness, and his vengefulness. But the June 23, 1972, transcripts were not included, and when the committee demanded them, the White House refused, and the case went to SCOTUS, in US v. Nixon.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1974: The “no-platform movement”—the turn during which the Left started sounding like the Right- is founded by a British student group that prohibits providing a platform to anyone “holding racist or fascist views.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1973: The OPEC oil embargo; in a matter of months, the cost of gas increases by a factor of five, driving up the price of other goods, too. The crisis makes plain how desperately American dependence on foreign oil ties the US to an unstable Middle East.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 22 Jan, 1973: SCOTUS argues Roe. V. Wade, deciding that the “right of privacy…is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Sarah Weddington, the attorney for “Jane Roe,” a TX woman who had sought an abortion, was willing to use any kind of argument the court would accept—liberty, equality, privacy, the 1st, Amendment, the 9th, the 14th, or the 19th.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jan, 1973: POTUS Nixon announces the end of the war in Vietnam; a peace treaty would be signed in Paris later that month.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1972: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS Richard Nixon is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate George S. McGovern in the electoral college (520-17) (Britannica), winning 61% of the popular vote and becoming the first presidential candidate to win 49 states, losing only Massachusetts and Washington, DC, to McGovern.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 17 Jun, 1972: Watergate; G. Gordon Liddy, a member of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP, formerly CREEP), directs 5 men to break into the offices of Lawrence O’Brien, the DNC Chairman, at the Watergate Hotel, to steal documents and repair wiretaps that had earlier been placed on office phones. After finishing that job, the burglars were supposed to proceed to the headquarters of the George McGovern campaign, on Capitol Hill, to do much the same, but they never got there, because they were arrested at the Watergate Hotel. Nixon hadn’t known about the break-in before it happened, but six days later, on June 23, he was captured on tape discussing a cover-up with Haldeman.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Nixon had little fear of impeachment with the notoriously corrupt and much-despised Agnew as his vice president. (He called Agnew the “assassins’ dilemma.”) But in October, Agnew pled no contest to a charge of tax evasion and resigned. Ten days later, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon told Richardson to fire Cox; when Richardson refused and resigned instead, Nixon told Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to do it; Ruckelshaus also resigned. Finally, Nixon got Solicitor General Robert Bork to fire Cox—an abuse of power that would haunt Bork, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1972: The DNC institutes quotas for its delegations, requiring numbers of women, minorities, and youth but establishing no quotas for union members or the working class.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1972: SCOTUS argues Eisenstadt v. Baird, extending Griswold’s notion of privacy from married couples to individuals. “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child (Justice Brennan).”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1972: The USG under POTUS Nixon passes the Clean Water Act.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1971: Daniel Ellsberg publishes the “Pentagon Papers,” a 7000 page, 47-volume study of the Vietnam War that had been commissioned by Robert MacNamara in 1967.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1971: SCOTUS argues Coit v. Green; deciding that racially segregated private schools are not eligible for tax-exempt status.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1971: The USC proposes the Equal Rights Amendment, passing in both the House (354-24) and the Senate (84-8).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1970s: The Chicano Movement is led by Cesar Chaves and US Farm workers to protect the rights of undocumented laborers.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1970: The USG under POTUS Nixon establishes the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and expands the Clean Air Act.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1970: The USG under POTUS Nixon passes Title X, which includes a provision under which doctors on military bases could perform abortions. “No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition (Nixon).”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1969: Black studies departments are founded at colleges—the first in 1969, at San Francisco State—followed by Chicano studies and women’s studies departments—the first founded at San Diego State in 1970—and sexuality and gender studies.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1969: Chicano activist Gonzales leads a walkout of Mexican American students in protest over the American history curriculum in Denver, insisting that it be revised to “enforce the inclusion in all schools of this city the history of our people, our culture, language, and our contributions to this country.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1968: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Richard Nixon and his ‘silent majority’ is elected 37th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Hubert H. Humphreys and American Independent candidate George C. Wallace in the electoral college (301-191-46, respectively) (Britannica).

  • 6 Jun, 1968: Robert Kennedy is assassinated while leaving the ballroom of a hotel in LA. Having urged Johnson in 1963 not to withdraw from Vietnam, Kennedy ran against it as “Johnson’s war.” 

  • Nixon knew that the more violent the riots, and the worse the news from Vietnam, the better his chances. Deciding that peace would bar his road to the White House, he arranged for Anna Chennault, born in China and the widow of a U.S. general, to act as a conduit to promise South Vietnam that it would get better peace terms if it waited until after the election, and a Nixon victory. Johnson heard rumors about the arrangement, called Nixon, and confronted him. Nixon, lying, denied the rumors.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1968: The American Indian Movement (AIM) is founded, challenging the story of the nation’s origins—the goal of AIM’s occupation of the prison on Alcatraz, an occupation that lasted from the end of 1969 through the middle of 1971, was for the island to become a Native American Studies center.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1968: S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist and environmental scientist who had worked on satellites and was now a deputy assistant secretary of the interior, organizes a symposium on “Global Effects of Environmental Pollution.” Four papers are presented at a panel on “Effects of Atmospheric Pollution on Climate.” (What would come to be called CC science had its origins in the study of nuclear weapons fallout.)-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1968: During a protest of the Miss America contest, radical feminists crown a sheep as Miss America; burned girdles, high-heeled shoes, and Playboy magazines in a trash can; and unfurled a “Women’s Liberation” banner, shouting, “Freedom for Women!”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1968: Resignation of Robert McNamara, LBJ’s SECDEF and architect of the Vietnam War.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 4 Apr, 1968: Assassination of MLK on the balcony of his hotel in Memphis, TN, by white ex-convict James Earl Ray.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jan, 1968: The Tet Offensive; during Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the North Vietnamese conducted raids all over South Vietnam, including on the US embassy in Saigon. Johnson had claimed that the North Vietnamese were weak and that the war was nearly won. The Tet Offensive exposed the depth of that lie.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1967: SCOTUS argues Loving v. Virginia; overturning miscegenation laws.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1967: The Kerner Commission issues a 426-page report calling for $30B in urban spending and, as conservatives read it, essentially blaming whites for the violence in black neighborhoods. The commission recommends spending more money on public housing, instituting a massive jobs program, and committing to desegregation of public education. Kerner and his colleagues warned that failing to change course “could quite conceivably lead to a kind of urban apartheid with semimartial law in many major cities, enforced residence of Negroes in segregated areas, and a drastic reduction in personal freedom for all Americans, particularly Negroes.” Except for a recommendation about expanding urban policing, Johnson ignored it.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1966: The National Organization for Women (NOW) is established by Friedan and Murray with the legalization of abortion as their top priority.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 6 Aug, 1965: The USG under POTUS LBJ enacts the Voting Rights Act.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 8 Mar, 1965: POTUS LBJ declares a “War on Crime”, a war in which the police were empowered to act like a military force, using helicopters to patrol city neighborhoods and computer simulations to anticipate crime. Money that had gone to cities for antipoverty measures was used to fight crime.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1965: The USG under POTUS LBJ passes the Immigration and Nationality Act, replacing the old quota system with a new system that did not discriminate on the basis of race or national origins. The new quota system mandated an equivalence: quotas from any country, anywhere in the E. Hemisphere, were the same: 20,000 per country. And it also raised the total number of immigrants per year to 290,000.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 21 Feb, 1965: Malcolm X is killed in Manhattan by three men from the Nation of Islam armed with pistols and shotguns. He was shot 10x, once in the ankle, twice in the leg, and 7x in the chest.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1965: Creation of the US Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, which funds 80K crime control projects and vastly expands the police powers of the federal government.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1965: The USGs Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, established in wake of the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” releases the report “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment” which includes an appendix on “Atmospheric CO2,” which lays out, with much alarm, the consequence of “the invisible pollutant” on the planet as a whole.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1965: SCOTUS argues Griswold v. Connecticut, striking down state bans on contraception, and overturning the conviction of Estelle Griswold, the head of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Connecticut, who’d been arrested for dispensing contraception.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1965: The USG under POTUS LBJ passes the Economic Opportunity Act and the Food Stamp Act.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1964: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate LBJ is elected 36th POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Barry Goldwater in the electoral college (486-52) (Britannica) and by >16M popular votes. So catastrophic was the loss that GOP leaders attempted to purge conservatives from leadership positions with the party. That meant purging conservative women.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Goldwater had campaigned for a constitutional amendment to guarantee Bible reading and prayer in public schools, but Johnson, who had broad support among evangelical Christians, made sure Goldwater had little success with that constituency.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2 Jul, 1964: The USG under POTUS LBJ passes the Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; giving the attorney general power to enforce desegregation; allowing for civil rights cases to move from state to federal courts; and expanding the Civil Rights Commission. Southern Democrats had filibustered for 54 days. Strom Thurmond said that the “so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason.” Supporters of the bill eventually broke the filibuster..-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Segregationist from Virginia, Howard Smith, introduced an amendment adding the word “sex” into the bill, a proposal so ridiculous that he was certain it would spell the legislation’s defeat.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Apr, 1964: Malcolm X advocates that black men arm themselves, delivering a speech in Cleveland called “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in which he argues that revolution requires elections.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jan, 1964: POTUS LBJ announces an “unconditional war on poverty.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• End, 1963: Ngo Dinh Diem is assassinated in a US-sanctioned coup.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 28 Aug, 1963: “I have a dream…” is delivered by MLK at the Lincoln Memorial in front of a crowed of ~300K. Mahalia Jackson, behind him on the platform, called out “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” He paused, for an instant. “I still have a dream,” he said. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” He found his rhythm, and the depth of his voice, and the spirit of Scripture. “I have a dream today,” he said, shaking his head. “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted.”-These Truths by Lepore.

  • The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were promissory notes, he said, a promise that all men would be guaranteed their rights. “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note.” “We are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Apr, 1963: MLK leads a protest in Birmingham, AL, part of a long-planned campaign in the most violent city in the South. In June, Wallace said that if black students tried to enter the campus of the state university in Tuscaloosa, he’d block the door himself. Wallace had pledged to his supporters, “No other son of a bitch will ever out-nigger me again.” In 1962, with a speechwriter who doubled as an organizer for the KKK, Wallace had won the governorship, with 96 percent of the vote.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • “And I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”-Wallace.

• 1960s: Efforts to legalize abortion begin, not by women’s rights activists, but by doctors, lawyers, and the clergymen who run planned parenthood.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1963: Assassination of POTUS JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald with an Italian military surplus rifle that he’d ordered from the NRA magazine, American Rifleman.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1963: Publication of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and “American Women” and the official report of the Commission on the Status of Women.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1963: SCOTUS strikes down mandatory religious expression in schools including bible reading and the recitation of the Lord’s prayer.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1962: Malcolm X first reaches a national audience after police in LA gun down 7 Black Muslims, members of mosque 27, a mosque Malcolm X had organized in the 1950s—who were loading dry cleaning into a car.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1962: Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” is published, bringing attention to a growing scientific concern about the effects of industrial pollution on water, soil, and air.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1962: Friedman publishes “Capitalism and Freedom”, arguing that personal freedom can only be assured by the free market system.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1962: SCOTUS declares mandatory school prayer unconstitutional.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1961: SCOTUS overturns a MD law requiring employees to declare their belief in God.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1961: Formation of the Peace Corps by POTUS JFK.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1960: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate JFK is elected 35th POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Richard Nixon in the electoral college (303-219) (Britannica). Needing to win both black votes in the North and white votes in the South, Kennedy decided to run as a civil rights candidate, to woo those northerners, and chose LBJ for his running mate, hoping that the Texan could handle the southerners.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 26 Sep, 1960: US Presidential candidates Nixon and Kennedy meet in a bare CBS television studio in Chicago, without an audience; the event was broadcast live by CBS, NBC, and ABC. Nixon was sick; he’d been in the hospital for twelve days. He was in pain. And he was unprepared. A skilled debater who’d enjoyed nothing but political gain from his appearances on television, and, most lately, from the Kitchen Debate, he’d barely been briefed for his appearance with Kennedy.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1 Feb, 1960: Four freshmen from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, refuse to give up their seats at a lunch counter in a segregated diner inside a Woolworth’s store. Theirs wasn’t the first sit-in—over the past three years alone, there’d been sit-ins in 16 cities—but it was the first to capture national attention.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1960: Formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1960: MIT’s Walt Rostow publishes “Stages of Economic Growth” which helps convince POTUS Kennedy to commit more resources to Vietnam.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1960: POTUS IKE’s ten distinguished commissioners deliver their report, writing that “Discrimination on the basis of race must be recognized as morally wrong, economically wasteful, and in many respects dangerous”; called for federal action to support voting rights; urged the denial of federal funds to employers who discriminate on the basis of race; and insisted upon the urgency of ending segregation in education.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Eisenhower had appointed ten eminent men—politicians and editors, business and labor leaders, and the presidents of universities and charities—to a Commission on National Goals.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Early 1960s: Environmental scientists studying the effects of nuclear weapons on the natural world begin noticing that nuclear explosions deplete the Ozone layer that protects the Earth’s atmosphere, an effect that could be measured by comparing the ozone layer both before and after the US and the USSR agree to stop atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons in 1963.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1959: An amendment to the Fairness Doctrine is passed requiring broadcasters to provide “varying opinions on the paramount issues facing the American people,” because regarding “public controversies” the “public has a chance to hear both sides.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 4 Oct, 1957: Sputnik I; the USSR launches a satellite into orbit, creating a political panic: the next obvious step was putting a nuclear weapon in a missile head and firing it by rocket.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 25 Sep, 1957: US troops escort 9 black teenagers to High School. “Mob rule cannot be allowed to overrule the decisions of our courts,” Eisenhower said on television, ordering a thousand paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to AR.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Orval Faubus, Democratic governor of Arkansas, wasn’t personally opposed to integration; he sent his own son to an integrated college outside of town. But the sentiment of his constituents—who were nearly all white, in a state where blacks were regularly blocked from voting—led him to consider opposition to school desegregation a political opportunity too good to miss. He sought an injunction against desegregation of the schools, and the state court agreed to grant it. Thurgood Marshall got a federal district court to nullify the state injunction, but on September 2, 1957, Faubus went on television to announce that he was sending 250 National Guardsmen to Central High School in Little Rock. If any black children tried to get into the school, Faubus warned, “blood will run in the streets.” Faubus—who’d earned the nickname “that sputtering sputnik from the Ozarks”—decided to shut down Little Rock’s high schools rather than integrate them.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1957: SCOTUS argues Yates v. US, establishing that the First Amendment protects all political speech, even radical, reactionary, and revolutionary speech, unless it constituted a “clear and present danger.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 13 Nov, 1956: SCOTUS rules that the Montgomery bus law is unconstitutional.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1956: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS IKE is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Adlai Stevenson in the electoral college (457-73) (Britannica). The campaign included the first ever televised debate between presidential candidates.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 5 Dec, 1955: MLK delivers a sermon on civil rights at Montgomery’s Holt Street Baptist Church to >5K people.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • “As you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” Pressed into benches, people began stomping their feet and calling out, “Yes!”…“The only weapon we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.” Joining a tradition of American oratory that dated back to the day Frederick Douglass concluded that he could make a better argument against slavery if he decided the Constitution was on his side instead of against him, King called this protest an American protest. “If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic nation—we couldn’t do this,” he said, pausing for the thunder of assent. “If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime—we couldn’t do this.” It was as if the roof might fall. “But the great glory of American democracy,” his voice swelled, “is the right to protest for right.”-MLK.

• 1 Dec, 1955: Rosa Parks, a 42yo seamstress, refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, AL. Parks had made a purposeful decision to challenge segregated seating on the city’s buses. The driver stopped the bus and asked her to move, and when she again refused, he called for police, who arrested her.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1955: Disneyland, the amusement park opens as a reimagined 1939 World’s Fair.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1955: Ho Chi Minh and his Communist Party rise to power in N. Vietnam while US-backed Catholic nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem comes to power in the South.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1954: French forces are defeated in Vietnam. A treaty divides independent Vietnam at the 17th parallel.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Apr-Jun, 1954: The Army-McCarthy hearings are convened by the US Senate to investigate charges that McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn—later Donald Trump’s mentor, that the Army was communist.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 8 Sep, 1953: Death of SCOTUS Justice Vinson. IKE appoints Warren in his place. Warren would remain at his post for 16y, presiding over the most liberal bench in the court’s history. Brown v. Board was the first case the Warren Court tackled.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 16 Apr, 1953: In POTUS IKEs first major address as president, weeks after Stalin’s death- “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1952: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS IKE is elected 34th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Adlai Stevenson in the electoral college (442-89) (Britannica).

  • Project X: A CBS plan to use the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) to predict the election; the first commercial computer in world history.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • During the train ride to Chicago, Nixon secretly swayed CA delegates to throw their support behind Ike—a scheme forever after known as the “great train robbery”—and the general had rewarded him with a spot on the ticket. After the convention, the press revealed that Nixon had an $18,000 slush fund. Eisenhower’s advisers urged him to dump Nixon, and asked Nixon to step down. Nixon, facing the end of his political career, decided to make his case to the public. He labored over it, writing the speech of his life. On September 23, 1952. Nixon said he intended to do something unprecedented in American politics. He would provide a full financial disclosure, an accounting of “everything I’ve earned, everything I’ve spent, and everything I owe.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1951: SCOTUS argues Dennis v. US, upholding the Smith Act of 1940 and deciding (6-2) that First Amendment protections of free speech, press, and assembly did not extend to communists. This decision gave the Justice Department a free hand in convicting and sentencing communists.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Sep, 1950: USC passes the Internal Security Act, over Truman’s veto, requiring communists to register with the attorney general and establishing a loyalty board to review federal employees.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 9 Feb, 1950: McCarthy delivers a speech before the OH County Republican Women’s Club, in Wheeling, WV- “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party,” he said, “I have here in my hand a list of 205…names that were made known to the Secretary of State as members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” He had no list.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Dec, 1949: Mao Zedong, the chairman of China’s Communist Party, visits Moscow to form an alliance with Stalin.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1949: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) establishes the Fairness Doctrine, a standard for television news that required a “reasonable balance” of views on any issue put before the public.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1949: The USSR tests its first atomic bomb.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1949: NATO is established as an alliance between the US and W. Europe against the USSR and any further Soviet aggression.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1948: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Harry S. Truman is elected 33rd POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Thomas Dewey, States Rights Dem (Dixiecrat) candidate Strom Thurmond, and Progressive candidate Henry Wallace in the electoral college (303-189-39-0, respectively) (Britannica).

  • “Dewey Defeats Truman!”-Chicago Daily Tribune (3 Nov, 1948).

  • At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia that summer, segregationists bolt: the entire MS delegation and 13 members of the AL delegation walked out, protesting Truman’s stand on civil rights. These southerners, known as Dixiecrats, form the States’ Rights Democratic Party and ran a candidate to Truman’s right.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1948: The Berlin Airlift occurs after the Soviets blockade Berlin.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1948: Czechoslovakia Coup; Soviet supported communist party members take over the Czechoslovakia government.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Apr, 1947: The term “cold war” is coined by financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch, during a speech in SC, “We are today in the midst of a cold war.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1947: Truman Doctrine; POTUS Truman announces that the US would “support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” (Truman aides later said that the president himself was unpersuaded by the growing fear of communism but was instead concerned about his chances for reelection).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1947: The US National Security Act establishes the CIA and the NSA; creating the position of the chairman of the JCS; and made the War Department, now housed in the Pentagon, into the DoD.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Feb, 1946: George Kennan, an American diplomat in Moscow, sends the State Department an 8,000-word telegram in which he reports that the Soviets are resolute in their determination to battle the West in an epic confrontation between capitalism and communism. “We have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure (Kennan).”-These Truths by Lepore.

• Sep, 1945: POTUS Truman asks USC to act on FDR’s 2nd Bill of Rights by passing what came to be called a Fair Deal, which includes universal medical insurance funded with a payroll tax.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jul, 1945: ENIAC is first operational, making calculations a 100x faster than any earlier machine. Its first assignment, in the fall of 1945, came from Los Alamos: using nearly a million punch cards, each prepared and entered into the machine by a team of female programmers, ENIAC calculated the force of reactions in a fusion reaction, for the purpose of devising a H-bomb.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • In Aug, 1942, Mauchly proposed using vacuum tubes to build a digital electronic computer that would be much faster. The US War Department funded it on April 9, 1943. Construction of ENIAC began in June 1943.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1945: 12M Americans are on active duty, compared to 300K in 1939.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 25 Apr- 26 Jun, 1945: The UN’s founding conference takes place in San Francisco.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 7 May, 1945: Germany unconditionally surrenders.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 30 Apr, 1945: Hitler commits suicide.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 28 Apr, 1945: Italian partisans kill Mussolini, dumping his body on the street, where a mob urinates on it, and hangs him by his heels.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 25 Apr, 1945: American forces fighting Germany from the west and Soviet forces driving from the east met on the Elbe River.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 15 Apr, 1945: CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow delivers, on American radio, the first eyewitness description of a Nazi concentration camp to reach the American public.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 12 Apr, 1945: Death of POTUS FDR while sitting for a portrait at his retreat, the Little White House, in Warm Springs, GA of a cerebral hemorrhage at 1535. Truman becomes POTUS.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1945: US National Debt reaches $258B, which calls for an unprecedented rise in taxes.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1944: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS FDR is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Thomas Dewey in the electoral college (432-99) (Britannica).

• Jul, 1944: Bretton Woods; as victory in Europe nears, delegates from 44 Allied nations meet in the White Mountains of NH to plan a postwar order that could avoid the fatal mistakes of the last peace. The Bretton Woods Conference committed itself to open markets and free trade, and to Keynesianism, founding the IMF, which would establish a fixed rate of currency exchange. Keynes chaired the commission that established the international bank, which eventually became known as the World Bank.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 6 Jun, 1944: D-Day (‘Operation Overlord’); One million men eventually participated in the invasion along a fifty-mile stretch of the Normandy coast, the largest seaborne invasion in history. It began at fifteen minutes past midnight, when paratroopers from the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions fell from the sky, trying to drop behind enemy lines under cover of darkness. Infantrymen carrying heavy packs weighted with ammunition stormed five land-mined beaches, wading through neck-high water under fierce gunfire. A fleet of bombers and fighter planes attacked from the sky.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jun, 1944: FDR signs the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act (‘The GI Bill of Rights’), extending to the 16M Americans who served in the war a series of benefits, including a free, four-year college education, zero-down-payment low-interest loans for homes and businesses, and a “readjustment benefit” of $20/weekk for up to 52 weeks, to allow returning veterans to find work. ~8M Americans—took advantage of the GI Bill’s educational benefits. Those who did enjoyed average earnings of $10,000–$15,000 more than those who didn’t. More than one in four veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill’s home loans, which meant that by 1956, 42% of WWII vets owned their own homes (34% for nonveterans). But the bill’s easy access to credit and capital was far less available to black veterans. Banks refused to give black veterans loans, and restrictive covenants and redlining meant that much new housing was whites-only. African American veterans were excluded from veterans’ organizations; they faced hostility and violence; and, most significantly, they were barred from taking advantage of the GI Bill’s signal benefits, its education and housing provisions. In some states, the American Legion, the most powerful veterans’ association, refused to admit African Americans, and proved unwilling to recognize desegregated associations.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • By 1948, the cost of the GI Bill constituted 15% of the federal budget. But, with rising tax revenues, the GI Bill paid for itself almost 10x over. It created a new middle class, changed the face of American colleges and universities, and convinced many Americans that the prospects for economic growth, for each generation’s achieving a standard of living higher than the generation before, might be limitless.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1944: “The Road to Serfdom” is first published in England.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1944: Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, commissioned by the Carnegie Corp, publishes “An American Dilemma.” The American dilemma, according to Myrdal, was the tension between, on the one hand, the American creed of human rights and personal liberty and, on the other, racial injustice.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jul, 1943: The Big Three- FDR, Churchill, Stalin, meet in Tehran to plan the campaign against Germany.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1943: SCOTUS argues Hirabayashi v. US, narrowly upholding the constitutionality of a curfew. “Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,” Chief Justice Harlan Stone said, in the majority opinion…“This is not a case of keeping people off the streets at night,” he said. “It is the case of convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp . . . solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1943: The Pentagon opens in DC, having been built in sixteen months.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1942: The USG under FDR passes the Revenue Act, which includes a steeply progressive income tax and vastly broadens the tax base: 85% of American families file a return.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1942: The USG under FDR passes a Second War Powers Act, granting to the president authority over “special investigations and reports of census or statistical matters” and establishing the National War Labor Board and the Office of Price Administration, ceding considerable control over the economy to the federal government and, in particular, to the executive branch.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 19 Feb, 1942: FDR signs Executive Order 9066, authorizing the secretary of war to establish military zones. The US Army issues Public Proclamation 1 in March, directing aliens to demarcated zones. Restrictions began with curfews and proceeded to relocation orders. Eventually, some 112K Japanese, a number that included 79K US citizens, were ordered from their homes and imprisoned in camps in AZ, CA, OR, and WA.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1 Jan, 1942: The US, Britain, China, and the USSR (the Big 4) adopt a “Declaration by United Nations.” The document was signed on 2 Jan by 26 nations. All subscribe to the “common program of purposes and principles” of the Atlantic Charter and forswore the making of a separate peace. The Big Four also agreed to a military strategy: to concentrate on defeating Germany, first by bombing Germany and then by landing in France.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1942: The US implements the Bracero Program, which allows Mexican migrant workers into the US.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 11 Dec, 1941: Hitler declares war on the US; this was Hitler’s worst miscalculation, since it was by no means clear that FDR would have been able to convince Congress to declare war on Germany if Hitler hadn’t acted rashly.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Dec, 1941: The USC passes the War Powers Act only days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, granting to the executive branch special powers to prosecute the war, including the power to surveil letters, telegraph messages, and radio broadcasts.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 7 Dec, 1941: ‘A Day which will live in infamy’; Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor, sinking 4 Battleships, destroying nearly 200 planes, and killing >2400 Americans and wounding another 1100. 64 Japanese military men were killed.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 14 Aug, 1941: The Atlantic Charter is issued by FDR and Churchill as a commitment “after the final destruction of Nazi tyranny,” to a postwar world of free trade, self-determination, international security, arms control, social welfare, economic justice, and human rights. The charter agreed to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and “to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” And they pledged themselves to what had been the tenets of Roosevelt’s New Deal, “improved labour standards, economic advancement, and social security.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jun, 1941: FDR issues Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in defense industries.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 11 Mar, 1941: POTUS FDR authorizes the Lend-Lease Act; the US would lend military equipment to Britain in exchange for long-term leases of territory for American military bases. Hearst, Lindbergh, and Ford, staunch nationalists, found the America First Committee in response.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 6 Jan, 1941: POTUS FDR, in his annual address to Congress, argues that the US must exert its might in securing for the world “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1940: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS FDR is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Wendell Willkie in the electoral college (449-82) (Britannica).

• 1940: Turing, who would later be prosecuted for homosexuality and kill himself with cyanide, builds a single-purpose computer able to break the codes devised by Germany’s Enigma machine.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Sep, 1940: Churchill refuses to surrender to Germany, even after the German blitz kills ~40K Londoners.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 4 Jun, 1940: Churchill delivers a rousing speech to the House of Commons, “…we shall never surrender…until in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 10 May, 1940: Winston Churchill becomes the British PM.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1939: German forces under Hitler invade Poland.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1939: FDR issues an executive order declaring a limited national emergency following Germany’s invasion of Poland.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jul, 1939: POTUS FDR places the secretaries of war and the navy under his own authority as CIC, removing them from the military chain of authority.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1939: Germany annexes Czechoslovakia.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1939: POTUS FDR asks the FBI to compile a list of possible subversives; known as the ABC list, because of its rating systems: people on the list were labeled: A, immediately dangerous; B, potentially dangerous; or C, a possible Japanese sympathizer.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1939: The Manhattan Project, a secret federal project to develop an atomic bomb, begins. By the end of the war, it employs 130,000 staff, and cost $2B.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Late, 1938: FDR proposes a plan by which the US would manufacture airplanes for Britain and France and build a 10,000-plane American air force. In 1939 he presented this plan, with a budget of $300M, to Congress. “This program is but the minimum of requirements,” the president said.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 9 Nov, 1938: Kristallnacht, named for the smashed glass that littered the streets; Nazis across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland burn >7K Jewish shops and >1K synagogues, murdering shopkeepers, and arresting >30K Jews.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2000, 30 Oct, 1938: Orson Welles begins his regular CBS broadcasts of Welle’s Mercury Theatre on the Air, an hour-long radio drama.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Sep, 1938: German forces attempt to seize the Sudetenland, a portion of Czechoslovakia. In what came to be called the Four-Power Pact, Italy, England, and France agree to allow Germany to seize parts of Czechoslovakia.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Aug, 1938: POTUS FDR receives a letter written by Szilard and signed by Einstein, warning him about “extremely powerful bombs of a new type,” fueled by U.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1938: German chemists discover nuclear fission.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1938: The USG under FDR passes the Federal Firearms Act, which prohibitively taxes the private ownership of automatic weapons (“machine guns”), mandates licensing for handgun dealers, introduces waiting periods for handgun buyers, requires permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon, and creates a licensing system for dealers.-These Truths by Lepore.

• May, 1938: Martin Dies Jr., a beefy 37yo conservative Democrat from TX and a fly in Lyndon Johnson’s eye, convenes the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate suspected communists and communist organizations.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 15 Mar, 1938: Hitler announces the Anschluss- the unification of Germany and Austria, before a swastika-waving crowd of 200K German Austrians at Vienna’s Heldenplatz.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 29 Mar, 1937: SCOTUS argues West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, deciding (5-4) to sustain a minimum wage requirement for women.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1937: Harvard Doctoral student Howard Aiken finds a model of Charles Babbage’s early 19c Difference Engine. Aiken proposes to IBM to build a new and better version, not mechanical but electronic. That project began at IBM in 1941 and three years later moved to Harvard, where Aiken, now a naval officer, was in charge of the machine, known as Mark I. The Mark I was programmed by longtime Vassar professor Grace Murray Hopper. “Amazing Grace,” her colleagues nicknamed her, and she understood, maybe better than anyone, how far-reaching were the implications of a programmable computer. As she would explain, “It is the current aim to replace, as far as possible, the human brain.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1936: English mathematician Alan Turing completes a PhD at Princeton, writing “On Computable Numbers,” in which he predicts the possibility of inventing “a single machine that can be used to compute any computable sequence.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1936: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS FDR is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Alfred Landon in the electoral college (523-8) (Britannica) and with >60% of the popular vote. He is later inaugurated on 20 Jan (moved from 4 Mar).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1936: Germany, under Hitler, forms an axis alliance with the Japan and Italy.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1936: A 35K strong German force deploys into the Rhineland, meeting no armed resistance.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1936: Publication of Keynes’s Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1936: The Spanish Civil War is fought between the democratic government and a right-wing insurgency aided by Hitler and Mussolini.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1935: USC passes the first of five Neutrality Acts, pledging that the US would keep clear of war in Europe.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1935: Italian forces under dictator Benito Mussolini invades Ethiopia.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1935: The USC passes the National Labor Relations Act, granting to workers the right to organize, and establishes the Works Project Administration, to hire millions of people to build roads and schools and hospitals.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 14 Aug, 1935: The USG under POTUS FDR passes the Social Security Act. Drafted by Perkins, the act establishes pensions, federal government assistance for fatherless families, and unemployment relief. This allows New Dealers to distinguish between old-age and unemployment programs (cast as insurance, paid for by annuities created from payroll taxes acting as insurance premiums) and poverty programs, like Aid to Dependent Children (cast as welfare).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1935: The German government under Hitler passes the Nuremburg Laws, stripping German Jews of citizenship.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 27 May, 1935: SCOTUS decides three unanimous decisions, kicking the teeth out of the New Deal. Most importantly, it found that the National Recovery Administration, which FDR had called the “most important and far-reaching legislation in the history of the American Congress,” was unconstitutional, because Congress had exceeded the powers granted to it.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1934: The USG under FDR fails to pass an anti-lynching bill. After twenty-three lynching’s in 1933, anti-lynching legislation was introduced into Congress. The next year, a man named Claude Neal, accused of rape and murder, was taken from a jail in Alabama and brought to Florida, where he was tortured, mutilated, and executed before four thousand spectators. In the Senate, southern Democrats waged a filibuster against the anti-lynching bill. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing,” Roosevelt told the NAACP’s Walter White. “Southerners, by reason of the seniority rule in Congress, are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees.” The anti-lynching bill died.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1934: US State first reports to FDR on the possibility of sabotage by Japanese Americans.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 6 Jun, 1934: The USG under POTUS FDR passes the Securities Exchange Act, creating the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC).-These Truths by Lepore.

• Oct, 1933: Germany under Chancellor Hitler withdraws from the League of Nations. Jewish refugees trying to flee to the US found themselves blocked by a grotesque paradox: Nazi law mandated that no Jew could take more than $4 out of the country; American immigration laws banned anyone “likely to become a public charge.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 16 Jun, 1933: The USG under POTUS FDR passes the Glass-Steagall Act, which establishes the FDIC and effectively separates commercial banking from investment banking.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 16 Jun, 1933: POTUS FDR establishes the Public Works Administration, which oversees tens of thousands of infrastructure projects, from repairing roads to building dams, as well as cultural and arts initiatives, including the Federal Writers’ Project and the Federal Theatre Project.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 12 May, 1933: The USG under POTUS FDR passes the Agricultural Adjustment Act to address the problems faced by the more than one in three Americans who worked on farms.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 12 Mar, 1933: POTUS FDR delivers his first “fireside chat.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 9 Mar, 1933: The USG under POTUS FDR passes the Emergency Banking Act, aimed at restoring public confidence in the financial system after a weeklong bank holiday.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1933: Hitler informs his cabinet of his intention to establish a Ministry of Propaganda, appointing Joseph Goebbels, as its head. Goebbels reports in his diary that “broadcasting is now totally in the hands of the state.” Having seized control of the airwaves, Hitler seized control of what remained of the government. On March 23, Hitler addressed the German legislature, the Reichstag, its doors barred. Speaking beneath a giant flag of a swastika, Hitler asked the Reichstag to pass the Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich, essentially abolishing its own authority and granting to Hitler the right to make law. The government then outlawed all parties but the Nazi Party.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 30 Jan, 1933: Hitler is appointed German chancellor.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1932: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate FDR is elected 32nd POTUS, defeating Rep. POTUS Herbert Hoover and Socialist candidate Norman Thomas in the electoral college (472-59-0, respectively) (Britannica). The simplest explanation was that the public blamed Hoover for the Depression. FDR’s election also ushered in a new party system, as the Democratic and Republican Parties rearranged themselves around what came to be called the New Deal coalition, which brought together blue-collar workers, southern farmers, racial minorities, liberal intellectuals, and even industrialists and, still more strangely, women. With roots in 19c populism and early 20c Progressivism, FDR’s ascension marked the rise of modern liberalism. Elected during a national emergency, Roosevelt assembled a “brain trust” that included Frances Perkins as his secretary of labor, the first female member of a presidential cabinet.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1931: The analog computer called a differential analyzer, is invented at MIT by FDR research czar Vannevar Bush.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1930: >3M Germans are unemployed (out of 66.3M population).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1930-1936: The Dust Bowl; drought plagues the American plains, sowing despair and reaping death. Soil turns to dust and blows away. Schools shut their doors, children grew thin, and babies died in their cradles. Farm families, displaced by debt and drought, wander westward, carrying what they could in dust-covered jalopies.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1930: The USG under POTUS Hoover passes the Tariff Act. Other nations, retaliating, pass their own trade restrictions, shrinking world trade by a quarter. US imports fall. In 1929, the US had imported $4.4B in foreign products; in 1930 imports declined to $3.1B. Then US exports fell. To protect American wheat farmers, the tariff on imported grain had been increased by almost 50%. But by 1931, American farmers found themselves able to sell only about 10% of their crops. Creditors seized farms and sold them off at auction. Foreign debtors, unable to sell their goods in the US, proved unable to pay back their debts to American creditors.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Oct, 1929: The Stock Market Collapse; over 3w, the DJIA falls from 326-198 with stocks losing nearly ~40% of their value. At first the market rallies; by Mar, 1930, stocks traded on the DJIA regain nearly 75% of the valued they’d lost. Still, the economy teetered and then it tottered, a depression set in, and by late spring stock prices were once again plummeting. Hoover, master of emergencies, steered the country through the crash, but when the Depression began he did very little except to wait for a recovery and attempt to reassure a panicked public. He believed in charity, but he did not believe in government relief, arguing that if the US were to provide it the nation would be “plunged into socialism and collectivism.”-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1929-1932: 1 in 5 US banks fail, the unemployment rate climbs from 9% in 1930- 16% in 1931- 23% in 1932, by which time 12M Americans were jobless. By 1932, national income, $87.4B in 1929, had fallen to $41.B . In many homes, family income fell to zero. One in four Americans suffered from want of food.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Prior to the crash, the USA had produced 42% of the worlds output.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1928: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Herbert Hoover is elected 31st POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Alfred Smith in the electoral college (444-87) (Britannica).

• 1928: CBS Radio begins broadcasting.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1927: Charles Lindbergh becomes the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic alone.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1927: The USG passes the Federal Radio Act (‘the Constitution of the Air’). Under the terms of the Radio Act, the Federal Radio Commission (later the FCC) adopts an equal-time policy, and debates between political candidates became one of early radio’s most popular features.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1927: The term ‘Mass Communication’ is first used, when the NY Times describes the radio as “a system of mass communication with a mass audience.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1926: NBC Radio begins broadcasting.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1925: TN becomes the first state to ban the teaching of evolution, after which the ACLU convinces Scopes to test the law.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1925: Scopes Monkey Trial; High school biology teacher John Scopes is charged with the crime of teaching evolutionary theory.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1925: The term ‘Mass Hysteria’ is first used.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1924: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Calvin Coolidge is elected 30th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate John Davis and Progressive candidate Robert Follette in the electoral college (382-136-13, respectively) (Britannica).

• 1924: Formation of the US Border Patrol; soldiers armed points of entry, and deportation of “illegal aliens” became USG Policy.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1924: The USC passes the National Origins Act.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1924: The USG passes the Immigration Act; the bill had two parts; an Asian Exclusion Act, extending the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, all but banning immigrants from anywhere in Asia, and a National Origins Act, which restricts the annual number of European immigrants to 150K and establishes a quota by which the number of new arrivals is made proportional to their representation in the existing population. The purpose of the quota system was to end immigration from Asia and to curb the admission of southern and eastern Europeans, deemed less worthy than immigrants from other parts of Europe. Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and other Asians, deemed nonwhite, could not immigrate into the US legally, were deemed unassimilable, and were excluded from citizenship on racial grounds. More profoundly, the law categorized Europeans as belonging to nations—they were sorted by “national origin”—but categorized non-Europeans as belonging to “races”—they were sorted into five “colored races” (black, mulatto, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1923: Army Veterans Henry Luce and Briton Hadden found “Time” Magazine, with the idea that, in the age of efficiency, it would save readers time by offering them a weeks’ worth of news in an hour with each issue containing 100 articles, none over 400 words long. Originally, they wanted to call it “Facts.” Time establishes the practice of fact-checking- an elaborate method of checking, fact by fact. To do this work, they hired young women just out of college.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1923: The Equal Rights Act (ERA) is first introduced into USC.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1923: Death of POTUS Harding; his VP, Calvin Coolidge becomes POTUS.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1921: POTUS Harding and his Rep. Congress raise taxes on imports and place restrictions on immigration. Import taxes are raised a second time the following year (1922).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1921: The term “broadcasting” is first used.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1920: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Warren G. Harding is elected 29th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate James Cox in the electoral college (404-127) (Britannica).

• Mar, 1920: The US Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles—and the League of Nations—by 7 votes.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1919: The Egyptian revolution occurs as a nationwide revolt led by Saad Zaqhlul and other members of the Wafd Party against British occupation of Egypt and Sudan. The Revolution leads to the UK’s 1922 recognition of Egyptian Independence and the establishment of the Kingdom of Egypt (Wiki).

• 1919: The USG under POTUS Wilson signs a tax bill, raising taxes on incomes, doubling a tax on corporate earnings, eliminating an exemption for dividend income, and introducing an estate tax and a tax on excess profits. Rates for the wealthiest Americans rose from 2% to 77%, but most people paid no tax at all (80% of the revenue was drawn from the income of the wealthiest 1% of American families). Then, when taxes raised on income and business failed to cover the price of war, the federal government began selling war bonds. 22M Americans heeded the call to buy Liberty and Victory Bonds, leading to one unanticipated effect of the war: it introduced ordinary Americans to the experience of buying securities.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1918: The USG under POTUS Wilson passes a Sedition Act. <2 dozen people had been arrested under the 1798 Sedition Act. During WWI, the Justice Department charged >2K Americans with sedition and convicted half of them.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1918: The GOP forms a Women’s Division, fearing that soon-to-be enfranchised female voters would form their own voting bloc.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 8 Jan, 1918: POTUS Wilson proposes a 14-point program for world peace.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Lippmann worked for a secret intelligence organization called the Inquiry, whose objective was to imagine the terms of the peace by redrawing the map of Europe. The Inquiry, needing a peerless stock of maps, took over the NY offices of the American Geographical Society. In that library, Lippmann, 28, drafted a report called “The War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests.” Revised by Wilson, Lippmann’s report became Wilson’s 14 Points, which the president submitted to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918, calling for a liberal peace that included free trade, freedom of the seas, arms reduction, the self-determination of colonized peoples, and a League of Nations.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Dec, 1917: Prohibition, long a female crusade, is approved by Congress as a war measure as part of the wartime expansion of the powers of the state. “No drunken man was ever efficient in civil or military life,” said TN senator McKellar. Outside of Congress, Americans were dubious. “A man would be better off without booze but the same is true of pie,” was the position taken by Clarence Darrow.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1917: The ACLU is founded to defend conscientious objectors required to enlist during WWI. After the war it extended into peacetime its wartime mission of protecting Americans from assaults on civil liberties.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1917: The DNC forms a Women’s Division, fearing that soon-to-be enfranchised female voters would form their own voting bloc.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1916: US Presidential Elections; Dem. POTUS Woodrow Wilson is re-elected POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate Charles Evan Hughes in the electoral college (277-254) (Britannica).

• 1916: Madison Grant, president of the NY Museum of Natural History, publishes “The Passing of the Great Race” (‘The Racial Basis of European History’), a “hereditary history” of the human race, in which he identifies northern Europeans (the “blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe” that he called the “Nordic race”) as genetically superior to southern Europeans (the “dark-haired, dark-eyed” people he called “the Alpine race”) and lamented the presence of “swarms of Jews” and “half-breeds.” In the US, Grant argues, the Alpine race was overwhelming the Nordic race, threatening the American republic, since “democracy is fatal to progress when two races of unequal value live side by side.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1916: The National Woman’s Party is founded by Suffragist Alice Paul.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1916: Planned Parenthood is founded by Margaret Sanger as a birth control organization.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1916: The USG forms the Bureau of Efficiency.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1915: Emergence of the 2nd KKK. By the 1920s, its 5M members attack Jews and Catholics as vehemently as they attack blacks.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1915-1918: The Great Migration; >500K African Americans from the US South move to the N. and W.; primarily settling in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, and LA. Before the Great Migration began, 90% of all blacks in the US lived in the South. Another 1.3M leave the South between 1920 and 1930. By the beginning of WWII, 47% of all blacks in the US lived outside the South.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1915: The USG forms the Coast Guard.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1914: The first feminist newspaper, “The Woman Rebel,” is launched by Margaret Sanger in which she first coins the term ‘birth control’.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1913: Peak of the British Empire, producing 8% of the world’s output.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1913: Russian-born doctor turned policymaker Isaac Rubinow publishes his landmark study on Social Insurance arguing that “sickness insurance” could eradicate poverty.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Feb, 1913: The USG passes 16th Amendment- “…Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several stations, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Americans later came to argue about the income tax more fiercely almost than anything before, but when it started, they wanted it desperately, and urgently.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1912: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Woodrow Wilson is elected 28th POTUS, defeating Progressive (Bull Moose) candidate Theodore Roosevelt and Rep. POTUS William Howard Taft in the electoral college (435-88-8, respectively) (Britannica).

• 1912: The term ‘Mass Consciousness’ is first coined.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1912: Italian statistician Corrado Gini, Chair of Statistics at the University of Cagliari, devises what comes to be called the Gini index, which measures economic inequality on a scale from zero to one. If all the income in the world were earned by one person and everyone else earned nothing, the world would have a Gini index of one. If everyone in the world earned exactly the same income, the world would have a Gini index of zero. In between 0 and 1, the higher the number, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1911: Taylor publishes “The Principles of Scientific Management” in which he times Bethlehem steelworkers with a stopwatch, identifying the fastest worker, a “first-class man,” from among “ten powerful Hungarians,” and calculates the fastest rate at which a unit of work could be done. Thenceforth all workers were required to work at that rate or lose their jobs.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1911: The UK passes a National Insurance Act.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1910s: The word ‘feminism’ is coined, as a generation of independent women, many of them college-educated—New Women, they were called—fight for equal education, equal opportunity, equal citizenship, and equal rights.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1910: A 120-acre Ford Motor plant opens in Highland Park, Michigan, the largest manufacturing site in the world.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1910: Origin of the term ‘Progressives’; after WWI, progressives refashion their aims and began calling themselves ‘liberals’. Progressivism had roots in the late 19c century populism; Progressivism was the middle-class version: indoors, quiet, passionless. Populists raised hell; Progressives read pamphlets.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1909: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded in in New York by Du Bois.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1908: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate William Howard Taft is elected 27th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate William Jennings Bryan in the electoral college (321-162) (Britannica).

• 1908: SCOTUS argues Muller v. Oregon, establishing the constitutionality of labor laws (for women), the legitimacy of sex discrimination in employment, and the place of social science research in the decisions of the courts.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1907: Beginning in IN, two-thirds of American states pass forced sterilization laws.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1906: The Great Earthquake of San Francisco; fires spread across the city, triggering the collapse of insurance companies that are unable to cover hundreds of millions of dollars in earthquake-damage claims; financial panic crosses the country.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1905: The USG forms the Forest Service.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1905: The term ‘Mass Consumption’ is first coined.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1904: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Theodore Roosevelt is elected 26th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Alton Parker in the electoral college (336-140) (Britannica).

• 1903: Henry Ford, the 40yo son of MI farmers, opens a motor car company in Detroit, where workers, timed by a clock, put together parts on an assembly line.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1901: Assassination of POTUS McKinley, shot by an anarchist in Buffalo, NY. Theodore Roosevelt, aged 42, becomes the US’ youngest POTUS.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1901: Formation of the first Billion-dollar corporation after US Steel consolidates >200 companies in the Iron and Steel business.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1901: The USG forms the National Bureau of Standards.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1901: The term ‘Mass Migration’ is first coined after ~1M immigrants enter the US.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1900: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS William McKinley is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate William Jennings Bryan in the electoral college (292-155) (Britannica).

• 1898: SCOTUS argues US v. Wong Kim Ark, upholding the notion that “the child of an Asiatic is just as much a citizen (of the US) as the child of a European.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 21 Apr, 1898- 10 Dec, 1898: The Spanish American War; the US defeats Spain in the Caribbean and Pacific. Under the terms of peace, Cuba becomes independent, but Spain cedes Guam, PR, and the Philippines to the US in exchange for $20M.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Feb, 1898: Remember the Maine; the USS MAINE blows up in Havana Harbor killing 250 US Sailors. The cause of the explosion is unknown (later be revealed to have been an accident).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1897: Formation of the National Congress of Mothers (later the Parent Teacher Association- PTA) by Phoebe Hearst, as a female auxiliary to the national legislature.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1896: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate William McKinley is elected 25th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate William Jennings Bryan in the electoral college (271-176) (Britannica).

• 1896: Herman Hollerith founds the Tabulating Machine Company, which would eventually merge with a number of others to become IBM. Hollerith, an engineer from Buffalo, NY working for the Census Bureau had introduced reforms in 1890 that allowed for the census to be tallied in just a year. Inspired by the punching of railway tickets done by conductors to identify passengers by sex, height, and hair color, Hollerith made punch cards that could automatically tabulate all of the traits surveyed by census takers: the characteristics of citizens. Hollerith fed punch cards of 12 rows and 20 columns into a tabulating machine he’d designed.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1896: The SCOTUS argues Plessy v. Ferguson, upholding (7-1) the lower court’s ruling that Jim Crow laws did not violate the constitution by arguing that separate accommodations were not necessarily unequal accommodations. The resulting legal principle—that public accommodations could be “separate but equal”- would last for more than half a century.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Homer Plessy, a shoemaker from New Orleans who looked white but who, under LA race laws was technically black, had been arrested for violating an 1890 Jim Crow law mandating separate railway cars for blacks and whites. Plessy had contrived to get arrested in order to challenge the LA law. John Ferguson, a judge in a lower court, had ruled against Plessy.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1895: The SCOTUS argues Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company, deciding (5–4) that the 1894 income tax was a direct tax, and therefore unconstitutional, one justice calling the tax the first campaign in “a war of the poor against the rich.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1894: Boy Bryan tacks an income tax amendment to a US tariff bill, which passes. But the populist victory—a 2% federal income tax that applied only to Americans who earned >$4,000.-These Truths by Lepore.

• ~1893: The 4th party system begins after the Panic of 1893. The Republican party dominates and the central domestic issues changed to government regulation of railroads and large corporations (‘trusts’), the protective tariff, the role of labor unions, child labor, the need for a new banking system, corruption in party politics, primary elections, direct election of senators, racial segregation, efficiency in government, women’s suffrage, and control of immigration (Wiki).

• 1893: The US suffers an economic depression, triggered by the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia & Reading Rail Road. Within months more than 8,000 businesses, 156 railroads, and 400 banks had collapsed. One in five Americans lost their jobs.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1892: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Grover Cleveland is elected 24th POTUS, defeating Rep. POTUS Benjamin Harrison and Populist candidate James Weaver in the electoral college (277-145-22, respectively) (Britannica).

• 1892: The KS “People’s Party” merges with the Democratic Party; Boy Bryan sought to turn the party of white southerners into the party, as well, of western farmers and northern factory workers, leaving the Rep. party to be the party of businessman.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1890s: The term ‘Mass production’ is coined; as factories get bigger and faster, the number of people who worked in them skyrockets, and the men who owned them got staggeringly rich.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1890s: US Jim Crow laws expand across the South; Courthouses provide separate Bibles. Bars provide separate stools. Post offices mandate separate windows. Playgrounds had separate swings. In Birmingham, for a black child to play checkers with a white child in a public park became a crime. Slavery had ended; segregation had only begun.-These Truths by Lepore.

• May, 1891: The People’s Party is founded, becoming the most successful third party in American history. The People’s Party rested on a deep and abiding commitment to exclude from full citizenship anyone from or descended from anyone from Africa or Asia.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Between 1889 and 1893, the mortgages on so many farms were foreclosed that 90% of farmland fell into the hands of bankers. The richest 1% of Americans owned 51% of the nation’s wealth, and the poorest 44% owned less than 2%. Populists didn’t oppose capitalism; they opposed monopolism, which Lease called “the divine right of capital,” predicting that it would go the way of “the divine right of kings.” If they weren’t quite socialists, they were certainly collectivists.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1891: GA becomes the first state to demand separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1891: The National Woman’s Alliance is founded by Sarah Emery and Lease, and dedicated to uniting the causes of suffrage and populism; its Declaration of Purposes called for “full political equality of the sexes.” The platform called for the secret ballot, public ownership of the railroads, a graduated income tax, an eight-hour workday, and the direct election of US senators (who were still being elected by state legislatures). Female suffrage was not among the party’s demands.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1888: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Benjamin Harrison  is elected 23rd POTUS, defeating Dem. POTUS Grover Cleveland in the electoral college (233-168) (Britannica).

• 1887: The USG passes the Dawes Severalty Act which divides Indian lands into allotments and guarantees US citizenship to Indians who agreed to live on those allotments and renounce tribal membership. The Dawes Act leads to forced assimilation and the continual takeover of native lands. In 1887 Indians held 138M acres; by 1900, they held only half of that territory.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1886: End of plains warfare after Geronimo, of the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apaches, becomes one of the last native leaders to surrender to the US Army.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1886: SCOTUS argues Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, deciding that “corporations are persons within the meaning of the 14th Amendment.” After that, the 14th Amendment, written and ratified to guarantee freed slaves equal protection and due process of law, became the chief means by which corporations freed themselves from government regulation. Rights guaranteed to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1882: Roscoe Conkling tells the SCOTUS that when he’d helped draft the 14th Amendment, the committee had changed the word “citizens” to “persons” in order to protect the rights of corporations.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1884: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Grover Cleveland is elected 22nd POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate James Blaine in the electoral college (219-182) (Britannica).

• 1883: The trade publication ‘Journalist’ first identifies journalism as a new profession that shared with the social scientists a devotion to facts.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1883: Wells, the daughter of former slaves, is asked to leave the “ladies’ car” of a train in Mississippi and move to the car for blacks. She refuses, taking the case to court.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1883: The state of IL passes a law for an 8h workday for women; the IL Supreme Court later strikes it down.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1882: The US Home Protection Party merges with the Prohibition Party.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1882: The USG passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first-ever immigration law, which bars immigrants from China from entering the US and, determining that the 14th Amendment did not apply to people of Chinese ancestry, decrees that Chinese people already in the US were permanent aliens who could never become citizens.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1882-1930: The KKK terrorizes the countryside, burning homes and hunting, torturing, and killing people, lynching >3,000 black men and women. Black politicians elected to office are thrown out. And all-white legislatures pass a new set of black codes, known as Jim Crow laws, that segregated blacks from whites in every conceivable public place.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1881: TN passes the first Jim Crow law, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 26 Oct, 1881: The shootout at the OK Corral occurs in Tombstone, AZ, when Wyatt Earp and his brothers confront the McLaury gang after one of their men had violated an 1879 city ordinance by failing to leave his gun at the sheriff’s office.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1880: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate James Garfield is elected 20th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Winfield Scott Hancock in the electoral college (214-155) (Britannica).

• 1880: Willard defects from the Rep. party and founds the Home Protection Party after it fails to support either Prohibition or suffrage.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1877: US Railroad workers protest wage cuts and go on strike in cities across the country.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1876: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Rutherford B. Hayes is elected 19th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Samuel Tilden in the electoral college (185-184) despite Tilden winning the popular vote by nearly 300K votes (4,300,590-4,036,298) (Britannica). Unwilling to accept the result of the election, Republicans dispute the returns in FL, LA, and SC. Eventually, the decision was thrown to an electoral commission that brokered a nefarious compromise: Democrats agreed to throw their support behind Rutherfraud B. Hayes in exchange for a promise from Rep. to end the military occupation of the South. For a minor and petty political win over the Dem. Party, Republicans first committed electoral fraud and then, in brokering a compromise, abandoned a century-long fight for civil rights. As soon as federal troops withdrew, white Democrats, calling themselves the “Redeemers,” took control of state governments of the South, and the era of black men’s enfranchisement came to a violent and terrible end.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1875: Andrew Carnegie builds his first steel mill.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1875: SCOTUS argues Minor v. Happersett, deciding that the constitution “did not automatically confer the right to vote on those who were citizens.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1874: Barbed wire is first patented.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 4 Jul, 1873: The Grange, an organization of ~1M small farmers in the South and Midwest, issue a farmers Declaration of Independence, calling for an end to “the tyranny of monopoly,” which they described as “the absolute despotism of combinations that, under the fostering care of government and with wealth wrung from the people, have grown to such gigantic proportions as to overshadow all the land and wield an almost irresistible influence for their own selfish purposes in all its halls of legislation.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1872: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS Ulysses S. Grant is re-elected POTUS, defeating Independent Dem. Candidate Thomas Hendricks in the electoral college (286-42) (Britannica).

• 1872: The Prohibition Party becomes the first party to declare itself in favor of women’s suffrage.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1872: A US nationwide depression occurs after Jay Cooke and Company bank declares bankruptcy. Jay Cooke had illegally invested the banks savings into his brother Henry’s, railroad ventures. The proposed Northern Pacific railway that was supposed to go through lands owned and occupied by the Sioux, who, in 1872, began fighting against the US Army, which caused investors to pull out. >100 banks and ~20K businesses failed. Even after the worst of the depression was over, the price of grain kept on falling. A farmer’s profit on a bushel of corn had been forty-five cents in 1870; by 1889, that same bushel had fallen to ten cents.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1871: The National Rifle Association (NRA) is founded by former NYT reporter, as a sporting and hunting association; most of its business consisted of sponsoring target-shooting competitions. Not only did the NRA not oppose firearms regulation, it supported and even sponsored it.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1870: Standard Oil is founded by Rockefeller.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1870: Chinese immigrants and their children comprise ~9% of the population of CA, and one-quarter of the state’s wage earners.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1868: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Ulysses S. Grant is elected 18th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Horatio Seymour in the electoral college (214-80) (Britannica).

• 1868:The US and China sign a treaty stating that “Chinese subjects visiting or residing in the US, shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, and exemptions in respect to travel or residence, as may there be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1868: The ‘New Departure’; black and white women attempt to gain the right to vote by exercising it: they went to the polls and were arrested when they tried to cast ballots.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1865-1877: The US’ Reconstruction Period following the American Civil War.

  • 1877: Compromise of 1877; the last federal troops are withdrawn from the South. Democrat policies begin replacing Republican policies throughout the South (by 1905, most black people are effectively disenfranchised in every Southern state).-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 20 Apr, 1871: The USG under POTUS Grant enact the Klan Act, empowering the POTUS to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat the KKK and other terrorist organizations. The act makes it illegal to restrict or interfere with suffrage, the Klan only increased its efforts to take back the South, rampaging across the land.

  • 24 Feb, 1868: Congress impeaches POTUS Johnson (1246-47), charging him with violating a recently passed Tenure of Office Act, however the Senate vote, 35–19, falls one vote shy of the two-thirds required.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Fall, 1866: Radical Republicans are elected to USC in huge numbers, passing four Reconstruction Acts to insure the civil rights of former slaves. POTUS Johnson vetoes all 4. Congress overrides all four vetoes. The Reconstruction Acts divided the former Confederacy into five military districts, each ruled by a military general. Each former rebel state was to draft a new constitution, which would then be sent to Congress for approval. In an act of constitutional coercion, Congress made readmission to the Union contingent on the ratification of the 14th Amendment. Under the terms of Reconstruction, men who had been Confederate soldiers could not vote, but men who had been slaves could. In the former Confederacy, most white men who were able to vote were Democrats; 80% of eligible Republican voters were black men.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Apr, 1866: The USG passes the Civil Rights Act (overriding Johnsons Veto), the first federal law defining citizenship. “All persons born in the US and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the US.” It declared that all citizens have a right to equal protection under the law; its provisions included extending the Freedmen’s Bureau. Congress’s stand by the radical republicans who dominated congress, marked the first time that it had ever overridden a presidential veto.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1866: The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is founded in TN as a fraternal organization of Confederate veterans who dressed in white robes, in order to appear as “the ghosts of the Confederate dead, who had arisen from their graves in order to wreak vengeance.” The Klan was a resurrection of the armed militias that had long served as slave patrols that for decades had terrorized men, women, and children with fires, ropes, and guns, instruments of intimidation, torture, and murder.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Winter, 1865: Southern legislatures consisting of former secessionists begin passing “black codes,” new, racially based laws that effectively continue slavery by way of indentures, sharecropping, and other forms of service. In SC, children whose parents were charged with failing to teach them “habits of industry and honesty” were taken from their families and placed with white families as apprentices in positions of unpaid labor.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 6 Dec, 1865: Ratification of the 13th Amendment. The abolition of slavery renders the three-fifths clause obsolete. With each black man, woman, and child counting not as three-fifths of a person but as five-fifths, Southern states gain seats in Congress. Black men, if they were able to vote, were almost guaranteed to vote Rep. For Republicans in Congress to maintain their hold on power, then, they needed to be sure the Southern states didn’t stop black men from voting.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 31 Jan, 1865: The 13th amendment finally passes by the required two-thirds majority (119 to 56), the congressional hall for a moment falls silent.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • “America has washed her hands at the clear spring of freedom.” Only time would tell whether the water from that spring could ever clean the stain of slavery.-A Black Union Soldier.

  • 1864: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony knock on doors, gathering 400K signatures demanding passage of the 13th Amendment, prohibiting slavery in the US. The measure was approved by the Senate, 33–6, on 8 Apr, 1864.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1864: US Presidential Elections; Rep. POTUS Abraham Lincoln is re-elected POTUS, defeating Dem. Candidate George McClellan in the electoral college (212-21) (Britannica).

• Oct, 1864: The National Convention of Colored Men in Syracuse, NY, calls for “full measure of citizenship” for black men—not women.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1864: Montana is admitted as a US territory.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1863: Arizona and Idaho are admitted as US territories.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1863: Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war, establishes the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission; its investigators report that “the chief object of ambition among the refugees is to own property, especially to possess land, if it only be a few acres.” It proposed a definition of citizenship guaranteeing its privileges and immunities, and insuring equal protection and due process to all citizens. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” it began. “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the US; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1862: The USG under POTUS Lincoln passes the Homestead Act, making available up to 160 acres of “unappropriated public lands” to individuals or heads of families who would farm them for five years and then pay a small fee.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1862: The USG under POTUS Lincoln passes the National Bank Act to issue paper money to pay for the Homestead and Pacific Railway Acts.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1862: The USG under POTUS Lincoln passes the Pacific Railway Act, chartering railroad companies to build the line from Omaha, NB to Sacramento, CA.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1861: The Dakota Territories are admitted to the US.-These Truths by Lepore. 

• 1861-1865: The American Civil War is fought between the Union of the US North with ~2.1M soldiers and the Confederate forces of the US South with ~880K soldiers. In ~200 battles, >750K Americans die, twice as many die from disease as from wounds.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 2215, 14 Apr, 1865: John Wilkes Booth assassinates POTUS Lincoln with a derringer in Ford’s Theatre, a playhouse six blocks from the White House. Lincolns VP, Andrew Johnson, becomes 17th POTUS. With Lincoln’s death, Johnson set for himself the task of protecting the South. He talked not about “reconstruction” but about “restoration”: he wanted to bring the Confederate states back into the Union as fast as possible, and to leave matters of citizenship and civil rights to the states to decide.-These Truths by Lepore.

    • 11 Apr, 1865: John Wilkes Booth, a well-known Shakespearean actor, stood uneasily in a crowd, watching Lincoln deliver a speech in which the president explained the terms of the victory. “That means nigger citizenship,” Booth muttered.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 9 Apr, 1865: End of the Civil War; Confederate General Lee surrenders his command to Union General Grant in the parlor of a farmhouse in Appomattox, VA.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1 Jan, 1863: POTUS Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation- “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper.” The Emancipation Proclamation frees all slaves within the Confederate states, but it had not freed slaves in the border states, and it had not made slavery itself impossible: that would require a constitutional amendment. In SC, the Proclamation was read out to the First SC Volunteer Infantry, a regiment of former slaves. At its final lines, the soldiers began to sing, quietly at first, and then louder: My country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing!-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 22 Sep, 1862: POTUS Lincoln announces a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, he would free nearly every slave held in every Confederate state in exactly 100 days—on New Year’s Day 1863.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1862: The USC lifts a ban on blacks in the military.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1862: The USG under POTUS Lincoln establishes an Internal Revenue Bureau charged with administering an income tax, later turned into a graduated tax, taxing incomes over $600 at 3% and incomes more than $10,000 at 5%.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Aug, 1861: Lincoln’s SECSTATE, William Seward, issues an order: “Until further notice, no person will be allowed to go abroad from a port of the US without a passport either from this Department or countersigned by the Secretary of State.” From then until the end of the war, this restriction was enforced; its aim was to prevent men from leaving the country in order to avoid military service.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Jun, 1861: The Western portion of VA holds their own convention on whether to cede from the USA and join the CSA, voting, effectively, to cede from VA, becoming WV.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 17 Apr, 1861: VA Governor Henry Wise walks into the VA convention and takes out his pistol and says that, by his order, VA was now at war with the federal government, and that if anyone wanted to shoot him for treason, they’d have to wrestle his pistol away from him first. The convention votes 88–55 to recommend secession. That went to the state’s electorate on May 23, which voted 125, 950–20,373 in favor. Most who opposed it were in the W. part of the state.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 12 Apr, 1861: The Battle of Fort Sumpter, SC; the US Civil War begins after Confederate Forces fire on US troops. VA, AR, TN, and NC join the confederacy shortly after.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Jan, 1861: SC holds a convention in which they vote to repeal the state’s ratification of the Constitution, declaring, “The union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.” Six states follow—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. In Feb, they form the Confederate States of America (CSA) with former Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis as president, a man the Texan Sam Houston once called “as ambitious as Lucifer and as cold as a lizard.”-These Truths by Lepore.

    • One of the first things the new state of Georgia did was to pass a law that made dissent punishable by death.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1860: US Presidential Elections; Rep. candidate Abraham Lincoln is elected 16th POTUS, defeating Southern Dem. candidate John Breckenridge, Dem. Candidate Stephen Douglas, and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell in the electoral college (180-72-12-39, respectively) (Britannica). During the campaign, the Democratic party fractures into the Northern and Southern Democratic parties. The platform committee had been unable to bind together the two arms of the party, producing both a Majority Report, endorsed by southern delegates, and a Minority Report, submitted by northerners, whereupon the Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida delegations walked out of the convention in protest of the platform’s failure to include a guarantee of the rights of citizens to hold “all descriptions of property” (meaning slaves).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1860: The average price of a slave in the US is ~$1600 (~$62K today).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 24 Nov, 1859: Publication of “On the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin, in which he refutes the racial arguments of ethnologists like Louis Agassiz. The book leads to the rise of Darwinism and contributes to the secularization of the university.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 16 Oct, 1859: John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry; Brown with 21 men attack and capture an arsenal at Harpers Ferry, VA (now part of WV). They halt a train leaving Harpers Ferry but then let it go. As the train sped through the MD countryside to Baltimore, passengers threw hastily written notes out the windows, warning people about the insurrection. Barely 12h after the raid had begun, headlines were being telegraphed across the continent: “INSURRECTION…at Harper’s Ferry…GENERAL STAMPEDE OF SLAVES.” US soldiers commanded by Robert E. Lee retake the arsenal, capturing Brown and killing or capturing all of his men. News of Brown’s attack convinces southern slave owners that their worst fears were right: abolitionists were murderers. What most outraged slave owners was the number and stature of northerners who, on learning of Brown’s raid, celebrated him as a hero and a martyr. On 30 Oct, in Concord, Thoreau, shoulders slumped, hat to his chest, delivered “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” “Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?” Thoreau asked. Brown, he said, was, for his commitment to equality, “the most American of us all.”-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 8 Dec, 1859: On the day of John Brown’s funeral, Mississippi congressman Reuben Davis gave a speech in Congress: “John Brown, and a thousand John Browns, can invade us, and the Government will not protect us.” The Union had betrayed the South, Davis argued. “To secure our rights and protect our honor we will dissever the ties that bind us together, even if it rushes us into a sea of blood.”-These Truths by Lepore.

  • “We hold these truths to be Self Evident; That All Men are Created Equal,” it began, proceeding to establish a right to revolution: “The history of Slavery in the Unites States, is a history of injustice & Cruelties inflicted upon the Slave in evry conceivable way, & in barbarity not surpassed by the most Savage Tribes. It is the embodiment of all that is Evil, and ruinous to a Nation; and subversive of all Good.”-Brown.

  • 2 Nov, 1859: Brown speaks at his sentencing after being found guilty of murder, conspiracy, and treason; “If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit.”-Brown.

  • “The second of December, 1859, this will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution,—quite as much needed as the old one.”-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

• 14 Feb, 1859: Oregon is admitted as a US State. Oregon’s proposed constitution, which also places severe restrictions on the growing number of immigrants from China—“No Negro, Chinaman, or Mulatto shall have the right of suffrage”—both prohibit slavery and bar blacks from entering the state.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1859: The state of AR requires that all free blacks leave the state by the end of the year or be reenslaved.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1859: Formation of the African Labor Supply Association by men from Mississippi, AR, and Louisiana, anticipating the passage of an act to reopen the slave trade.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1859: A Southern Commercial Convention meeting in Montgomery, AL, votes that “all laws, State and Federal, prohibiting the African slave trade, ought to be repealed.” Not content to wait for any of these laws to pass, southern vigilantes known as “filibusters” outfitted ships with arms and ammunition and attempted to conquer Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, and Brazil in order to extend a market for slaves.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 12 Aug, 1858: Completion of an undersea cable stretching across the Atlantic from Britain to the US.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 6 Mar, 1857: SCOTUS argues Dred Scott v. Sandford, deciding that the US Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of Black African descent, and thus they could not enjoy the rights and privileges the constitution conferred upon American citizens. The debate had been raging since 1787. Does the Constitution sanction slavery, or does it not? Frederick Douglass had come to find the very question an absurdity. Taney did not, writing for a 7–2 majority (5 of the judges were slaveholders), the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. But it was his logic that staggered. Congress had no power to limit slavery in the states, Taney argued, because the men who wrote the Constitution considered people of African descent “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” No “negro of the African race,” he ruled, could ever claim the rights and privileges of citizenship in the United States.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.”-Frederick Douglas.

• 1856: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate James Buchanan is elected 15th POTUS, defeating Rep. candidate John C. Fremont and American (Know-Nothing) Candidate Millard Filmore in the electoral college (174-114-8, respectively) (Britannica). Buchanan defeats Frémont by a landslide, arguing that if Frémont, a known opponent of the extension of slavery to the territories were elected, it would lead to civil war.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1856: The USC passes a law declaring that only the secretary of state “may grant and issue passports,” and that only citizens can obtain them.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1855: The MA legislature, urged on by Charles Sumner, makes integration of native-born and foreign-born citizens in US public schools mandatory. No other state followed. Instead, many specifically passed laws making integration illegal.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1854-1859: Bleeding Kansas (‘Blood Kansas’, ‘Border War’); KS, left to decide whether it would enter the Union as a free or a slave state, breaks out in outright war. Southerners move into Kansas to vote for slavery; northerners move into Kansas to vote against it. Eventually, they began shooting one another.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 30 May, 1854: The USG passes the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repeals the Missouri Compromise, creates two new territories- KS and NB, and allows for popular sovereignty, to which both territories vote to allow slavery (which would have not been permitted by the Missouri Compromise). The Kansas-Nebraska controversy made the Democratic Party into the party of slavery, and it spelled the end of the American Party, also known as the Know-Nothing Party. The Kansas-Nebraska Act also drew 45yo Abraham Lincoln out of his law practice and back into politics.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • May, 1854: The Republican Party is founded in Ripon, Wisconsin, by 54 citizens (including 3 women) determined to defeat the KA-NB Act. Their new party included Abraham Lincoln and drew a coalition of former Free-Soilers, Whigs, and northern Democrats and Know-Nothings who opposed slavery. The party adopted the slogan: “Free Speech, Free Soil, and Frémont!” It included on its platform opposition to the idea that slavery could be left to the states: “We deny the authority of Congress, of a Territorial Legislature, of any individual or association of individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States, while the present Constitution shall be maintained.”-These Truths by Lepore.

    • One of the party’s best, and best-paid, speakers was Anna Dickinson, who became the first woman to speak in the Hall of the House of Representatives.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Feb, 1854: The short-lived North American Party is formed by ~50 delegates from the American Party (‘Know-Nothings’) after a failed call for the reinstatement of the Missouri Compromise.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1852: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Franklin Pierce is elected 14th POTUS, defeating Whig candidate Winfield Scott in the electoral college (254-42) (Britannica).

• 1850: The average price of a slave in the US is ~$900 (~$35K today).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1849: General Narciso Lopez leads a failed expedition to seize Cuba from Spain by force (U-S-History.com).

• 1848: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate Zachary Taylor is elected 12th POTUS, defeating Dem. candidate Lewis Cass in the electoral college (163-127) (Britannica).

• Jun, 1848: Formation of the Free-Soil Party at a convention in Buffalo, NY by democrats and whigs who opposed the extension of slavery into the newly acquired territories. They settle on ex-president Martin Van Buren and adopt as their motto “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men!”-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Salmon Chase drafted the party’s platform, which very closely followed Chase’s interpretation of Madison’s Notes. The Constitution couldn’t be rejected, Chase argued, it had to be reclaimed. His key ideas, he explained, were three: “1. That the original policy of the Government was that of slavery restriction. 2. That under the Constitution Congress cannot establish or maintain slavery in the territories. 3. That the original policy of the Government has been subverted and the Constitution violated for the extension of slavery, and the establishment of the political supremacy of the Slave Power.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1848: POTUS Polk attempts to purchase Cuba from Spain for $100M. Spain declines; “(rather than sell Cuba to the US, Spain) would prefer seeing it sunk in the ocean.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1848: Organizations in various US states begin advocating for women’s suffrage. Prior to universal suffrage, women achieve the right to vote in eight states: Colorado (1893), Idaho (1896), Utah (1896), Washington (1910), California (1911), Arizona (1912), Kansas (1912) and Oregon (1912).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1847: After buying his freedom, Frederick Douglass returns to the US and founds the North Star newspaper.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 25 Apr, 1846- 2 Feb, 1848: The Mexican-American War; US forces defeat Mexican forces and the US acquires nearly 1M sqmi of Mexican territory.

  • 2 Feb, 1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is signed, formally ending the Mexican- American War. Under the treaty, the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the US. The gain to the US was as great as the loss to Mexico. In 1820, the US had spanned 1.8M sqmi, with a population of 9.6M people; Mexico had spanned 1.7M sqmi, with a population of 6.5M people. By 1850, the US had acquired 1M sqmi of Mexico, and its population had grown to 23.2M; Mexico’s population was 7.5M.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Feb, 1847: US Forces led by General Taylor defeat a Mexican Army commanded by Antonio López de Santa Anna near Monterrey.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 25 Apr, 1846: Mexican forces kill 11 US Soldiers in a skirmish. POTUS Polk asks Congress to declare war.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1846: USC passes the Wilmot Proviso (for 32yo Dem. David Wilmot) 83-64 decreeing that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist” in any territories acquired through the war with Mexico. Massachusetts abolitionist and staunch opponent of the war Charles Sumner predicted that the proviso would lead to “a new crystallization of parties, in which there shall be one grand Northern party of Freedom.” Supporters of the Wilmot Proviso argued that slavery and democracy could not coexist.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Nov, 1845: Polk sends an envoy to Mexico with $25M in hopes of buying three stretches of land: the Nueces Strip, a patch of disputed territory claimed by both TX and Mexico; NM; and Alta CA, north of Baja CA and including parts of what became AZ, NV, CO, UT, and WY. When Mexico refused to treat with the Polk delegation, Polk ordered US troops into the Nueces Strip; they set up camp along the Rio Grande. To lead them, Polk passed over more experienced generals in favor of Zachary Taylor, a fellow southerner unlikely to question his questionable orders. Polk hoped to provoke a confrontation and soon got what he was after.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1 Mar, 1845: The USG under POTUS Polk passes a resolution annexing TX. Under the compromise, the eastern portion of Texas would enter the Union as a slave state, but not the western portion.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1845: John C. Frémont publishes his report of the Exploring Expedition to OR and CA.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1845-1854: ~2.5M Europeans migrate to the USA.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1845-1849: The Irish Potato Famine results in ~1M deaths. ~1.5M more Europeans migrate to the USA.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1844: US Presidential Elections; Dem. candidate James Polk is elected 11th POTUS, defeating Whig candidate Henry Clay in the electoral college (170-105) (Britannica).

• 1844: Riots between Catholics and Protestants in Philadelphia leave 20 Americans dead.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 28 Feb, 1844: An explosion occurs on the USS Princeton as the ship passes Mount Vernon; when the crew lights the Peacemaker for its final salute, the gun explodes killing 7 men including War Secretary Upshur along with Tyler’s secretary of the navy and a NY merchant named David Gardiner. The death of Upshur has serious political consequences. To replace him, Tyler appoints Calhoun as his new SECSTATE. And Cast-Iron Calhoun talks about TX only with reference to slavery.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1843: ~800 Americans travel the Oregon Trail, carrying their children in their arms and pulling everything they owned in wind-swept wagons.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1843: The USG repeals the 1841 Bankruptcy protection laws after 41K Americans file for bankruptcy.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1843: John C. Frémont publishes his report of an exploration between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains.-These Truths by Lepore.

• May, 1843: Resignation of US War Secretary Webster, the last remaining member of Tyler’s original cabinet, in protest against the plan to annex TX. Abel Upshur becomes Tyler’s Secretary of War. Upshur, like Tyler, was a southern aristocrat, disdainful of the people (they “read but little,” he said, “and they do not think at all”). Upshur believed that slavery solved the problem of the tensions between capital and labor by giving even a white man of desperate circumstances a reason to accept the economic order: “However poor, or ignorant or miserable he may be, he has yet the consoling consciousness that there is a still lower condition to which he can never be reduced.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• Sep, 1841: POTUS Tyler is banished from his own Whig Party after 50 Whig members of Congress gather on the steps of the capital and banish him from the party. Fearful for his safety, Tyler establishes a presidential police force (it later became the Secret Service).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1841: The USG passes a federal law offering bankruptcy protection to everyone.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1840: The Liberty party is formed by abolitionists who leave the Whig party and are supported by the National Convention of Colored Men.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1840: US Presidential Elections; Whig Candidate William Henry Harrison is elected 9th POTUS, defeating Dem. POTUS Martin Van Buren in the electoral college (234-60) (Britannica). Harrison then promptly dies of pneumonia on 4 Apr, 1841. His VP, John Tyler, becomes 10th POTUS and comes to be called “His Accidency.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1839: The Evangelical Liberal Party is formed pledging to abolish slavery.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1839: The Cherokee men who had signed the treaty to cede Cherokee lands to GA and resettle to the West are murdered in Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1839: NY Lawyer John O’Sullivan argues that Democracy is nothing more or less than “Christianity in its earthly aspect.” O’Sullivan would later coin the term “manifest destiny” to describe this set of beliefs, the idea that the people of the USA were fated “to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given for the development of the great experiment of liberty.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jan, 1839: French painter and inventor Louis Daguerre presents to the French Academy of Sciences the results of experiments in which he takes pictures by exposing to light polished, Ag-coated Cu sheets in the presence of the vapor of I-crystals. Portraits of Cu were called daguerreotypes, of glass, ambrotypes, and of Fe, tintypes.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1837: POTUS Van Buren takes office; 5w later, the US financial system falls apart in the worst financial disaster in American history, second only to the crash of 1929. What began with the Panic of 1837 ends only after a 7y long depression, well into a decade of despair known as “The Hungry Forties.” Whigs dubbed the new president Martin Van Ruin, which was unfair, since the fall was the result of Jackson’s decisions, not Van Buren’s, the consequence, above all, of unregulated banking industry.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1836: US Presidential Elections; Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren is elected 8th POTUS, defeating Whig candidate William Henry Harrison in the electoral college (100-73) (Britannica).

• 1835-1836: Americans in TX rebel against Mexican rule, waging a war under the command of Sam Houston. After defeating Mexican forces, TX declares independence, founding the Rep. of Texas, with Houston as President. When Houston sends a proposal to Congress requesting annexation, the measure fails, for three reasons. 1) Jackson feared annexation would provoke a war with Mexico, which did not recognize TX independence. 2) From the point of view of the US, which, along with Britain and France, did recognize TX independence, TX was a foreign country, which meant that its annexation was an altogether different issue than it had been in 1825, when John Quincy Adams, as SECSTATE, had sought to acquire the territory. 3) If TX were admitted to the Union, it would enter as a slave state.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 10 Sep, 1833: POTUS Jackson announces that the USG will no longer use the Second Bank of the US, the country’s national bank, using his executive power to remove all federal funds from the bank, in the final salvo of what has become known as “The Bank War.” Jackson’s decision unmoors the American economy.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • In 1832, $59M in paper bills was in circulation, in 1836, $140M. Without the national bank’s regulatory force, very little metal backed up this blizzard of paper, American banks holding only $10.5M in gold. Both speculators and the president looked to the West.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1833: The New York Sun newspaper first appears.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1833: Formation of the Whig Party in opposition to the Democratic party during the shift to the second party system.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1833: The first Female Anti-Slavery Society is founded in Boston; by 1837, 139 Female Anti-Slavery Societies had been founded across the country, including more than 40 in MA and 30 in OH.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1832: US Presidential Elections; Democratic Andrew Jackson is re-elected POTUS, defeating National Rep. candidate Henry Clay in the electoral college (219-49) (Britannica).

• 1832: The Nullification Crisis; SC, led by Calhoun, argues that if a state were to decide that a law passed by Congress was unconstitutional, the Constitution would have to be amended, and if such an amendment were not ratified—if it didn’t earn the necessary approval of 3/4 of the states—the objecting state would have the right to secede from the Union. POTUS Jackson responds with a proclamation in which he calls Calhoun’s theory of nullification a “metaphysical subtlety, in pursuit of an impracticable theory.” Jackson’s case amounted to this: the US is a nation; it existed before the states; its sovereignty is complete. “The Constitution of the US,” Jackson argued, “forms a government, not a league.” In the end, Congress adopts a compromise tariff and SC accepts it. “Nullification is dead,” Jackson declares.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • The nullification crisis was less a debate about the tariff than it was a debate about the limits of states’ rights and about the question of slavery, an early augury of the civil war to come. SC had the largest % of slaves of any region in the country…The tariff cut the duty on imports in half, it still worried southerners, who argued that it put the interest of northern manufacturers above southern agriculturalists. The South provided two-thirds of American exports (almost entirely in the form of cotton) and consumed only one-tenth of its imports, leading its politicians to oppose the tariff by endorsing a position that came to be called “free trade.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1832: SCOTUS argues Worcester v. GA, Marshall- “The Cherokee Nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, . . . in which the laws of GA can have no force, and which the citizens of GA have no right to enter…The Acts of GA are repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the US.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1832: The leaders of a minority of Cherokees sign a treaty, ceding Cherokee land to GA and setting a deadline for removal by May 23, 1838. By the time the deadline came, only 2,000 Cherokees had left for the West; 16,000 more refused to leave their homes. US Army General Winfield Scott, a fastidious career military man from VA known as “Old Fuss and Feathers,” arrived to force the matter. He begged the Cherokees to move voluntarily. “I am an old warrior, and have been present at many a scene of slaughter,” he said, “but spare me, I beseech you, the horror of witnessing the destruction of the Cherokees.” On the forced march 800 miles westward and, by Jefferson’s imagining, backward in time, one in four Cherokees died, of starvation, exposure, or exhaustion, on what came to be called the Trail of Tears.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1831: SCOTUS argues Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. In his opinion, Marshall defines the Cherokee as “domestic dependent nations,” a new legal entity—not states and not quite nations, either.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Sep, 1831: The Anti-Masons hold the first presidential nominating convention in American history.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 21-23 Aug, 1831: Nat Turners’ slave rebellion; 30yo revivalist preacher Nat Turner leads an insurrection in VA that kills dozens of whites before he and his followers are caught. Turner is hanged.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 28 May, 1830: The USG under POTUS Jackson passes the Indian Removal Policy in which native peoples living E. of the Mississippi are required to settle in lands to the West.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Fall, 1829: David Walker publishes “An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.” The antislavery argument for gradual emancipation, with compensation for slave owners, became untenable.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1829: Jacob Bigelow, the Rumford Professor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at Harvard, delivers a series of lectures called “The Elements of Technology.” Before Bigelow, “technology” had meant the arts. Bigelow used the word to mean the application of science for the benefit of society.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1829: POTUS Jackson declares Indian removal one of his chief priorities and argues that the establishment of the Cherokee Nation violated Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: “no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State” without that state’s approval.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1828: US Presidential Elections; Democratic Candidate Andrew Jackson is elected 7th POTUS, defeating National Rep. POTUS John Quincy Adams in the electoral college (178-83) (Britannica). The election marked the founding of Jackson’s Democratic Party- the party of the common man, the farmer, the artisan: the people’s party.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1828: Gold is discovered on Cherokee land, just 80km from New Echota.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1828: The Working Men’s Party is formed by laborers in Philadelphia.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1826: Publication of “The Last of the Mohicans” by James Fennimore Cooper.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1825: Completion of the 360-mile Erie Canal, after 8y of digging. Before the canal, the wagon trip from Buffalo to New York City took 20d; on the canal, it took 6.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1824: US Presidential Elections; unaffiliated candidate John Quincy Adams is elected 6th POTUS, defeating opposition candidates Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William H. Crawford. Adams had received 84 electoral votes to Jackson’s 99; since neither candidate received a majority, the decision was made by the House (Britannica).

• 1823: The Monroe Doctrine, crafted by John Quincy Adams, warns Europeans not to found any new colonies in the Western Hemisphere, partly in order to keep the path clear for Americans.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1822: The Negro Seamen Act is passed by the SC Legislature, requiring black sailors to be held in prison while their ships were in port.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Early 1800s: The American Temperance Movement begins, led by women spurred to not least because drunken husbands tended to beat their wives. Few laws protected women from such assaults. Husbands addicted to drinking also spent their wages on liquor, leaving their children hungry. Since married women had no right to own property, they had no recourse under the law. Convincing men to give up alcohol seemed the best solution.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1820s-1830s: The Second Great Awakening; a religious revival sweeps the USA emphasizing spiritual equality and strengthening protests against slavery and against the political inequality of women. Before the revival began, 1:10 Americans were church members; by the time it ended, that ratio had risen to 8:10. The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1820: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep James Monroe is re-elected POTUS, defeating Independent Rep. candidate John Quincy Adams in the electoral college (231-1) (Britannica).

• 1820: Death of British King George III. His son, George IV, assumes the throne (Wiki).

• 15 Mar, 1820: Maine, formerly part of Massachusetts, is admitted as a US State, making the number of free and slave states equal at 12 each.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 2 Mar, 1820: The Missouri Compromise is brokered by Clay (‘the Great Compromiser’). Missouri is admitted as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and a line was set at 36˚30' latitude, the southern border of Missouri: any states formed out of territories above that line would enter the Union as free states, and any states below that line would enter as slave states.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 14 Dec, 1819: Alabama is admitted as a US State in which slavery is practiced.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1816-1817: Future POTUS Andrew Jackson compels his Cherokee allies to sign treaties selling to the US >3M acres for ~$.2/acre. When the Cherokees protested, Jackson reputedly said, “Look around, and recollect what happened to our brothers the Creeks.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 21 Dec, 1816: The American Colonization Society is formed at the Davis Hotel in Washington DC to found a colony in Africa “to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population.” They elected a president, Bushrod Washington, George Washington’s nephew and a Supreme Court justice. Andrew Jackson served as a VP.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1816: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep Candidate James Monroe is elected 5th POTUS, defeating Federalist candidate Rufus King in the electoral college (183-34) (Britannica). Federalists gain very few points causing the party to fracture. The party disappears as an organization by 1828.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1816: Indiana is admitted as a US State in which slavery is legal.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1816: Mississippi is admitted as a US State in which slavery is legal.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 3 Mar, 1815: USC tables a resolution to abolish the three-fifths clause.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1814: Future POTUS Andrew Jackson leads a coalition of US and Cherokee forces against the Creeks, forcing them to cede >20M acres of land to the US.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1812: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep President James Madison is re-elected POTUS, defeating opposition candidate DeWitt Clinton in the electoral college (128-89) (Britannica).

• 1812-1815: The War of 1812 is fought as an extension of the Napoleonic Wars between the US and Britain.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 8 Jan, 1815: The Battle of Orleans; TN General Andrew Jackson leads American forces to a stunning victory against the British.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1814: The Hartford Convention is held in CT; delegates from five New England states meet to discuss the ongoing war with Britain, and debate possible actions, including secession.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1813: The British capture the nation’s capital, Madison and his cabinet flee to VA, the President’s House is all but destroyed.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1812: The Hartford Convention; N. states threaten to secede from the Union over their opposition to the war with Britain.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1812: The USG under POTUS Madison declares war on Britain, the South supporting the declaration, and New England and the mid-Atlantic states mostly opposing it.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1812: Louisiana is admitted as a US State in which slavery is legal.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1810: The US Census counts 7.2M people.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1808: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep Candidate James Madison is elected 4th POTUS, defeating Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney in the electoral college (122-47) (Britannica).

• 1808: US Congress abolishes the slave trade.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1807: The USG under POTUS Jefferson passes the Embargo Act, banning all American exports to Britain.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1807: The British Parliament abolishes the slave trade.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1806: The USG under POTUS Jefferson secures the passage of a Non-Importation Act, banning certain British imports.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1804: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep Candidate Thomas Jefferson is re-elected POTUS, defeating Federalist Candidate Thomas Pinckney in the electoral college (162-14) (Britannica).

• 1804: Mass and CT call for the abolition of the three-fifths clause.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1803: Ohio is admitted as a US State in which slavery is legal.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1803: The Louisiana Purchase; POTUS Jefferson and Madison arrange for their fellow Virginian, James Monroe, to travel to Paris to offer Napoleon $2M for New Orleans and FL (he was authorized to pay as much as $10M). Unexpectedly, Napoleon offered to sell the entire Louisiana Territory for $15M. Monroe, seizing the opportunity, made the purchase.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1803: The former slaves of French Saint-Domingue declare Independence, establishing the Rep. of Haiti.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1803: SCOTUS argues Marbury v. Madison, a suit against Jefferson’s SECSTATE, James Madison. Marshall granted to the Supreme Court a power it had not been granted in the Constitution: the right to decide whether laws passed by Congress are constitutional. Marshall declared: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” One day, those words would be carved in marble.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1802: Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a French weaver, invents an automated loom. By feeding into his loom stiff paper cards with holes punched in them, he could instruct it to weave in any pattern he liked. Two decades later, the English mathematician Charles Babbage used Jacquard’s method to devise a machine that could “compute”; that is, it could make mathematical calculations.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1802: The USG restricts the residency period required for an immigrant to become a citizen back to 5y (from 14) .-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1801: War breaks out between Britain and France; Napoleon withdraws his forces from Saint-Domingue.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1801: Marshall is appointed chief justice of the SCOTUS.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 17 Feb, 1801: US Presidential Elections; Dem-Rep Candidate Thomas Jefferson is elected 3rd POTUS defeating Dem-Rep candidate Aaron Burr, Federalist President John Adams, and Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney in the electoral college (73-73-65-64, respectively) (Britannica). He is inaugurated 2 weeks later on the 4th of March, the first to be inaugurated in Washington DC.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Summer, 1800: VA blacksmith Gabriel (‘the American Toussaint’) leads a failed slave rebellion in VA, marching under the slogan “Death or Liberty.” Gabriel and 26 followers are tried and executed.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1800: The USG passes the first bankruptcy law, replacing debtors’ prison with bankruptcy protection, spurring investment, speculation, and the taking of risks.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1800: The US Census counts 5.3M people.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1800: Napoleon purchases “Louisianan’ from the Spanish, who had held it since 1763. Louisiana encompassed ~1M sqmi W. of the Mississippi and was inhabited by Spaniards, Creoles, Africans, and Indians.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1800: ‘The Revolution of 1800’; Jefferson defeats Adams, becoming the 3rd POTUS. From New England, Federalist Timothy Pickering dubbed Jefferson a “Negro President” because twelve of his electoral votes were a product of the three-fifths clause. Without these “Negro electors,” as northerners called them, he would have lost to Adams, 65-61. “The election of Mr. Jefferson to the presidency,” John Quincy Adams remarked, represented “the triumph of the South over the North—of the slave representation over the purely free.”-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Out of a total U.S. population of 5.23M, only about 600K people were eligible to vote.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Feb, 1799: A group of revolutionaries led by Harry Washington (one of George Washington’s escaped slaves) declare independence from the British in Sierra Leone, although the rebellion is swiftly put down, and its instigators banished.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1798: The USG passes the Alien and Sedition Acts, granting to the president the power to imprison noncitizens he deemed dangerous and to punish printers who opposed his administration: 25 people are arrested for sedition, 15 indicted, and 10 convicted; that ten included 7 Rep. printers who supported Jefferson.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1798: The USG enacts the Naturalization Act, extending the residency period required for an immigrant to become a citizen from 5-14 years, but under the terms of the law, only a “free white person” could become a citizen.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1797: POTUS John Adams signs the Treaty of Tripoli, securing the release of American captives in N. Africa, and promising that the USA would not engage in a holy war with Islam because “the Government of the USA is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1796: US Presidential Elections; Federalist Candidate John Adams is elected 2nd POTUS defeating Dem-Rep. candidate Thomas Jefferson, Federalist candidate Thomas Pinckney, and anti-federalist candidate Aaron Burr in the electoral college (71-68-59-30, respectively) (Britannica).

• 1794: The Cotton Gin, which pulls seeds from cotton plants, until then a tedious process, is patented by Eli Whitney, making American slavery more profitable than ever.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 5 Dec, 1792: US Presidential Elections; Federalist Candidate George Washington is re-elected POTUS defeating Federalist  candidate John Adams and Democratic-Rep. candidate George Clinton in the electoral college (132-77-50, respectively) (Britannica).

• 1792: The US’ first stock market crash occurs after >$1M worth of bank notes, signed by Pintard, weren’t worth the paper on which they were printed leading to the insolvency of Duer and Pintard’s investment bank.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1792: The New York Stock Exchange is founded in response to the Panic of 1792 as a ban on private bidding on stocks.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 15 Dec, 1791: The Bill of Rights; 10 of the 12 amendments drafted by Madison are approved by the necessary three-quarters of the states. The amendments are a list of the powers Congress does not have. Madison had submitted the 12 amendments to Congress on 8 Jun, 1789 “to make the Constitution better in the opinion of those who are opposed to it.” He had wanted the amendments written into the constitution, each in its proper place, but instead they were added at the end.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1791: Thomas Paine pens the first parts of “Rights of Man” from England.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jul, 1790: USC establishes the nation’s capital on a ten-mile square stretch of riverland along the Potomac River, in what was then VA and MD, and to found, as mandated in the Constitution, a federal district called Washington.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Feb, 1790: The USC passes a bill establishing the Bank of the United States, for a term of 20y, to print a national currency and assume the debts incurred by both the Continental Congress and the states during and after the revolution. The deal, known as the ‘dinner table bargain’ was worked out between Hamilton and Madison over dinner at Jefferson’s rooms on Maiden Lane, NY. Hamilton threw his support behind a plan to locate the nation’s capital in the South, in exchange for Madison’s support and the support of his fellow southerners for Hamilton’s plan for the federal government to assume the states’ debts.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 11 Feb, 1790: A group of Quakers present two petitions, one from Philadelphia and one from NY, urging Congress to end the importation of slaves and to gradually emancipate those already held.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1790: The first US census counts 3.9M people, including 700K slaves. The Census counts 140K free citizens in NH, which meant that the Granite State got four seats in the House. But South Carolina, with 140K free citizens and 100K slaves, got 6 seats. The population of Mass was greater than the population of VA, but VA had 300K slaves and so got 5 more seats. If not for the three-fifths rule, the representatives of free states would have outnumbered representatives of slave states by 57 to 33.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 24 Sep, 1789: POTUS Washington signs the Judiciary Act, establishing the number of justices, six; defines the authority of the court (narrow); and creates the office of attorney general, to which Washington appoints Edmund Randolph.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 4 Mar, 1789: The US’ first Congress convenes in NYC’ City Hall. They establish several departments, to which POTUS Washington appoints secretaries: the Department of State, headed by Jefferson; the Department of the Treasury, headed by Hamilton, and the Department of War, headed by Henry Knox.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 30 Apr, 1789: Inauguration of George Washington as first POTUS.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 4 Feb, 1789: US Presidential Elections; George Washington is elected 1st POTUS defeating John Adams in the electoral college (69-34) (Britannica).

• 9 Jan, 1788: The US Constitution is ratified by CT, DE, GA, NJ, and PA.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 17 Jul, 1787: The constitutional convention adopts the CT compromise, establishing equal representation in the Senate, with two senators for each state, and proportionate representation in the House, with one representative for every 40,000 people (at the last minute this was changed to 30,000). And, for purposes of representation, each slave would count as three-fifths of a person—the ratio that Madison had devised in 1783. A federal census, conducted every ten years, was instituted to make the count.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Oct, 1787- May, 1788: The Federalist Papers are published under the pen name Publius as a collection of 85 essays, 51 written by Alexander Hamilton, ~20 from Madison, and the rest by John Jay.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Aug, 1786: Shay’s rebellion; >1000 armed farmers in W. Massachusetts led by veteran Daniel Shays, protests the government, blockades courthouses, and seizes a federal armory. In Jan, 1787, the Massachusetts governor institutes martial law deploying a 3000-man militia across the state in an attempt to suppress the Rebellion and regain the federal armory.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1786: The American Continental Congress is nearly bankrupt, unable to pay its creditors.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1782: The US issues its first passports.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1782: The VA legislature passes a law allowing slave owners to free their slaves.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1781: The US Articles of Confederation are ratified by the states (after 4y in draft). Efforts to revise the articles prove fruitless, as the continental congress has no standing to resolve disputes between states nor any authority to set standards or to regulate trade. The new nation was riddled, as a result, with 13 different currencies and 13 separate navies. Most urgently, Congress lacked the authority to raise money, which it needed both to make good on its debts and to pay for troops in the NW Territory, a swath west of the Alleghenies, N. of the Ohio River, and E. of the Mississippi that the federal government had acquired from the states.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1777: The Declaration of Rights in VT’s constitution specifically bans slavery: men might be indented as servants till the age of 21, or women till the age of 18, but no one past that age could be held in bondage. (This provision would have made VT the first state to abolish slavery, except that in 1777 VT was not a state but an independent republic; it would not join the US until 1791).-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jun, 1776: Continental Congress; PA delegate John Dickinson drafts the “Articles of Confederation;” “The Name of this Confederacy shall be ‘The United States of America,’” he wrote, possibly using that phrase for the first time. It may be that Dickinson found the phrase “the united states” in a book of treaties used by Congress; it included a treaty from 1667 that referred to a confederation of independent Dutch states as the “the united states of the Low Countries.” In Dickinson’s draft, the colonies—now states—were to form a league of friendship “for their Common Defence, the Security of their Liberties, and their mutual & general Wellfare.”

  • 7 Jun, 1776: VA delegate Richard Henry Lee introduces a resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” A vote on the resolution was postponed, but Congress appoints a Committee of Five to draft a declaration: Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, NY delegate Livingston, and CT delegate Sherman. Jefferson agrees to prepare a first draft. The Declaration explained what the colonists were fighting for; it was an attempt to establish that the cause of the revolution was that the king had placed his people under arbitrary power, reducing them to a state of slavery: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jan, 1776: Thomas Paine publishes “Common Sense;”- “Let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest, they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world,” he began, as if he were telling a child a once-upon-a time story. They will erect a government, to secure their safety, and their liberty. And when that government ceases to secure their safety and their liberty, it stands to reason that they may depose it. They retain this right forever.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 19 Apr, 1775- 1783: The American War of Independence; American forces under Gen. George Washington defeat British colonial forces, gaining independence for the USA.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1782: The Battle of Saintes; the British defeat a French and Spanish invasion of Jamaica. Britain keeps the Caribbean, but gives up America.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 19 Oct, 1781: British General Cornwallis surrenders his force at Yorktown, VA, ending the fighting in N. America. Cornwallis had fortified Yorktown as a naval base in hopes of taking the Chesapeake, however his troops were besieged by a combination of French forces under Marquis de Lafayette and American forces.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • May, 1780: British forces led by Gen. Clinton capture Charleston.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1780: Britain declares war on the Dutch, partly because they had been supplying arms and ammunition to the Americans.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • May, 1779: Congress proposes to enlist 3K slaves in SC and GA and to pay them with their freedom. “Your Negro Battalion will never do,” warned John Adams. “S. Carolina would run out of their Wits at the least Hint of such a Measure.” He was entirely correct. The SC legislature rejected the proposal, declaring, “We are much disgusted.”-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1779: Spain joins the French-American alliance while Germany enters the conflict in support of the British by supplying paid soldiers called, by Americans, Hessians.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Dec, 1778: British forces led by General Clinton capture Savannah, Georgia, setting their sights on Charleston, SC, the largest city in the South. The USC debates arming slaves.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1778: The British King sends commissioners authorized to repeal all acts of Parliament that had been opposed by the colonies since 1763, but when Congress demands that the king recognize American independence, the commissioners refuse. At this point, although Clinton held NYC and fighting continued to the W., the theater of war moved to the S; British ministers decided to make a priority of saving the wealthy sugar islands, to give up on the northern and middle mainland colonies, and to try to keep the southern colonies in order to restore the supply of food to the West Indies.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1778: France enters the conflict as an ally of the US, at which point Lord North, keen to protect Britain’s much richer colonies in the Caribbean from French attack, consider simply abandoning the American theater. The involvement of France brought the fighting to the wealthy West Indies, where the French capture the British colonies of Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, Montserrat, Tobago, St. Kitts, and Turks and Caicos.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1777: The PA Legislature passes the first abolition law in the Western world, decreeing that any child born to an enslaved woman after March 1, 1780, would be free after 28y of slavery, and banning the sale of slaves.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1777: British forces led by General Howe capture Philadelphia while, to the north, British commander Burgoyne suffers a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Saratoga. This American victory helped Jay, Adams, and Franklin, serving as diplomats in France, to secure a vital treaty with France.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Jun, 1775: USC votes to establish a continental Army with George Washington as its commander (nominated by John Adams).-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 19 Apr, 1775: The American War of Independence begins when General Thomas Gage, in charge of British troops, seizes ammunition stored outside of Boston, in nearby Charlestown and Cambridge, sending 700 soldiers to do the same in Lexington and Concord. 70 armed militiamen (‘minutemen’)—farmers who pledged to be ready at a moment’s notice—met them in Lexington, and more in Concord. The British soldiers kill 10 of them, losing 2 of their own. The rebel forces then lay siege to Boston, occupied by the British army.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 14 Apr, 1775: The PA Society of the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in is founded by ~24 men, 17 of them Quakers. They shortly after change their name to the PA Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery-These Truths by Lepore.

• Sep, 1774: 56 delegates from twelve of the thirteen mainland colonies meet in Philadelphia as the First Continental Congress, to debate the newly passed Stamp Act. However, the Coercive Acts appeared to many delegates to be merely Massachusetts’s problem.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1774: The British Parliament passes the Coercive Acts to punish Boston for its ‘Tea Party’. The Act closes Boston Harbor and annuls the Massachusetts charter, effective in June, 1774.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 16 Dec, 1773: The Boston Tea Party; dozens of colonists disguised as Mohawks—warring Indians—board 3 ships laden with tea that had arrived in the fall, dumping chests of the tea into the harbor.-These Truths by Lepore.

• May, 1773: The British Parliament passes the Tea Act, which reduces the tax on tea—as a way of saving the East India Company- but again asserted Parliament’s right to tax the colonies. Townspeople in Philadelphia called anyone who imported the tea “an enemy of the country.” Tea agents resigned their posts in fear.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1772: The British empire suffers a credit crash.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Mar, 1770: The Boston Massacre; British troops fire into an unruly crowd, killing 5 men. The Sons of Liberty call it a “massacre” and cry for relief from the tyranny of a standing army.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1769: James Watt patents an improvement on the steam engine in Glasgow. Watt reckoned the power of a horse at 10x the power of a man; he defined one “horsepower (HP)” as the energy required to lift 550 pounds by one foot in one second.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1767: The British Parliament passes the Townshend Acts, taxes on Pb, paper, paint, glass, and tea. When this, too, led to riots and boycotts, the PM sent to Boston two regiments of the British army to enforce the law.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 18 Mar, 1766: The British Parliament pass the Declaratory Act, asserting its authority to make laws “in all cases whatsoever.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1766: Boston votes in favor of “the total abolishing of slavery from among us.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1766: The Massachusetts Assembly introduces an antislavery bill, but, mindful of how the question of slavery had severed the island colonies from the mainland, many in Massachusetts feared that further antislavery sentiment would sever the northern colonies from the southern. “If passed into an act, it should have a bad effect on the union of the colonies,” one assemblyman wrote to John Adams in 1771, when the bill came up for a vote.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1765: The British parliament pass the Stamp Act placing government-issued paper stamps on all manner of printed paper, from bills of credit to playing cards. Stamps were required across the British Empire, and, by those standards, the tax levied in the colonies was cheap: colonists paid only two-thirds of what Britons paid. Opponents of the act began styling themselves the Sons of Liberty (after the Sons of Liberty in 1750s Ireland) and describing themselves as rebelling against slavery.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • In October, the month before the Stamp Act was to take effect, 27 delegates from 9 colonies met in a Stamp Act Congress in New York’s city hall. The Stamp Act Congress collectively declared “that it is inseparably essential to the Freedom of a People, and the undoubted Right of Englishmen, that no Taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their Representatives.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1764: The British Parliament passes the American Revenue Act (‘the Sugar Act’) to pay its war debt and fund the defense of the colonies. Up until 1764, the colonial assemblies had raised their own taxes; Parliament had regulated trade. When Parliament passed the Sugar Act, which chiefly required stricter enforcement of earlier measures, some colonists challenged it by arguing that, because the colonies had no representatives in Parliament, Parliament had no right to levy taxes on them. Taxation without representation, men like Adams argued, is rule by force, and rule by force is slavery. This argument had to do, in part, with debt. “The Borrower is a slave to the Lender.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 27 Apr, 1763- 25 Jul, 1766: Pontiacs Rebellion; dissatisfied with British rule in the Great Lakes following the French & Indian War (1754-1763), a confederation of Indians led by Odawa Chief Pontiac capture British forts in the Great Lakes region and Ohio Valley. 8 forts are destroyed and hundreds of colonists captured or killed. British Army expeditions in 1764 led to peace negotiations over the following 2y. During the conflict, British officers at Fort Pitt attempt to infect besieging Indians with blankets exposed to smallpox (Wiki). Pontiac, it was said, had been stirred to action by a prophecy of the creation on earth of a “Heaven where there was no White people.” Fearing the cost of suppressing more Indian uprisings, George III issued a proclamation decreeing that no colonists could settle west of the Appalachian Mountains.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 22 Sep, 1761-1820: King George III rules Great Britain and Ireland (Wiki).

• 1760: Jamaican Slave Tacky leads a revolt with hundreds of armed men who burn plantations and kill ~60 slave owners before being captured. The reprisals are ferocious: Tacky’s head was impaled on a stake, and, as in NY in 1741, some of his followers are hung in chains while others are burned at the stake.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1758: The Philadelphia Quakers formally denounce slave trading; Quakers who bought and sold men were to be disavowed. When Lay heard the news he said, “I can now die in peace,” closed his eyes, and expired.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1754: Albany Congress; Franklin proposes a Plan of Union, to be administered by a “President General, To be appointed and Supported by the Crown, and a Grand Council to be Chosen by the Representatives of the People of the Several Colonies, met in their respective Assemblies.” The Union was to include the seven colonies labeled in his snake- NY, NJ, PA, MD, VA, NC, and SC- and the four colonies represented, in the snake, as “New England”—Mass, RI, CT, and NH. Franklin’s plan apportioned representatives for each of the eleven colonies in the Union according to the size of their populations (two each for sparsely settled NH and tiny RI, seven each for populous VA and Mass). The government, meeting in Philadelphia, would have the power to pass laws, to make treaties, to raise money and soldiers “for the Defence of any of the Colonies,” and to protect the coasts. Delegates to the Albany Congress approved the Plan of Union, and brought it back to their colony assemblies, which, fearing the loss of their own authority, rejected it. The British government, too, disapproved; as Franklin said, “it was judg’d to have too much of the Democratic.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1754-1763: The French and Indian War is fought as the N. American theater of the Seven Years War between Britain and France. British forces numbering ~45K (British and American) fight under the command of General Edward Braddock. Under the terms of peace, France cedes Canada and all of New France E. of the Mississippi to Britain and all of its land W. of the Mississippi, the Louisiana Territory, to Spain. Spain cedes half of FL and Cuba to Britain. The war doubles Britain’s debt, leaving it nearly bankrupt.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Aug, 1760: British forces capture Montreal.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • 1759: British and American forces defeat the French in Quebec, a stunning victory that led the Iroquois to abandon their longstanding position of neutrality and join with the English, which turns the tide of the war.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • May, 1754: A small force of VA militiamen and their Indian allies, led by 21y LtCol George Washington, ambush a French camp at the bottom of a Glen. The battle proves disastrous for the Virginians, who retreat to a nearby meadow and hastily erect a small wooden garrison named, suitably, Fort Necessity. Washington lost a third of his men in a single day and later surrendered.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 9 May, 1754: Benjamin Franklin prints a woodcut in the PA Gazette titled “Join, or Die,” picturing a snake, chopped into eight pieces, labeled by their initials, from head to Tail: New England, NY, NJ, PA, MD, VA, NC, SC.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1744-1748: King George’s War (‘War of the Austrian Succession’, ‘Third Intercolonial War’) is fought in the British provinces of NY, Massachusetts Bay (which includes Maine, NH, VT) and Nova Scotia between the British and the French and their indigenous allies. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ends the war in 1748 and restores Louisbourg to France, but fails to resolve any outstanding territorial issues (Wiki).

• 1743: Franklin founds the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • “But as from the Extent of the Country such Persons are widely separated, and seldom can see and converse or be acquainted with each other, so that many useful Particulars remain uncommunicated, die with the Discoverers, and are lost to Mankind.”-Franklin.

• 1739: The First Maroon War ends in Jamaica with a treaty under which the British agree to acknowledge five Maroon towns and grant Cudjoe and his followers their freedom and >1500 acres of land.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1739: Stono Rebellion; ~100 black men rise up and kill >20 whites in SC colony. The following year, the SC legislature passes an Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes, a new set of rules for relations between the rulers and the ruled. It restricts the movement of slaves, sets standards for their treatment, establishes punishments for their crimes, explains the procedures for their prosecution and codifies the rules of evidence for their trials; in capital cases, the charges were to be heard by two justices and a jury comprising at least three men. The law also made it a crime for anyone to teach a slave to write, in hopes of averting the next Jemmy, reading and preaching liberty.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1736: A group of black men on Antigua “formed and resolved to execute a Plot, whereby all the white Inhabitants of the Island were to be murdered, and a new Form of Government to be established by the Slaves among themselves, and they entirely to possess the Island,” its leader, a man named Court, having “assumed among his Country Men . . . the Stile of KING.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1733: 90 African slaves seize control of the Danish Island of St. John and hold it for a year.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1732: Franklin begins printing Poor Richard’s Almanack, which reaches across the colonies and gives Americans a common store of proverbs and even a shared political history.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1731: Benjamin Franklin founds the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first lending library in America.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1729: The PA Gazette is founded by Benjamin Franklin in the Quaker town of Philadelphia. In its pages, he fights for freedom of the press. In a Miltonian 1731 “Apology for Printers,” he observes “that the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces” but that “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 7 Aug, 1721: The New-England Courant is founded by James Franklin as the first “unlicensed” newspaper in the colonies.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1704: A second colonial newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, begins printing.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 8 Mar, 1702- 13 Jul, 1713: Queen Anne’s War (‘War of the Spanish Succession’, ‘Third Indian War’, ‘Second Intercolonial War’) is the second in a series of French and Indian Wars fought in N. America between the Colonial empires of Great Britain, France, and Spain. France cedes to Britain the control of Acadia, Newfoundland, Hudson Bay, and St. Kits, as agreed in the Treaty of Utrecht (Wiki).

• 1692: Salem Witch Trials; 19 men and women are convicted of witchcraft in the Massachusetts town of Salem.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1690: The first newspaper in British America, Publick Occurrences, is printed in Boston. Censored, it lasts for a single issue.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1689: Publication of “The State of Nature” by John Locke; he began by imagining a state of nature, a condition before government: To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. From this state of natural, perfect equality, men created civil society—government—for the sake of order, and the protection of their property.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • A people who do not believe land can be owned by individuals not only cannot contract to sell it, they cannot be said to have a government, because government only exists to protect property.-John Locke.

  • Locke argued that the king’s subjects were, instead, free men, because “the natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.” All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1688-1697: King William’s War (‘Second Indian War’, ‘Father Baudoin’s War’, ‘First Intercolonial War’) is fought as the N. American theater of the Nine Years War (1688-1697); the first of 6 colonial wars between New France and New England, along with their respective Native allies (Wiki).

• 1681: Pennsylvania is granted by English King Charles II to the Quaker William Penn. In his 1682 Frame of Government, a constitution for the new colony, Penn provided for a popularly elected general assembly and for freedom of worship, decreeing “That all persons living in this province, who confess and acknowledge the one Almighty and eternal God, to be the Creator, Upholder and Ruler of the world; and that hold themselves obliged in conscience to live peaceably and justly in civil society, shall, in no ways, be molested or prejudiced for their religious persuasion or practice, in matters of faith and worship, nor shall they be compelled, at any time, to frequent or maintain any religious worship, place or ministry whatever.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1676: Bacon’s Rebellion; an armed rebellion led by Nathanial Bacon against Colonial Governor William Berkeley occurs after Berkeley refuses Bacon’s request to drive Native Americans out of VA (Wiki).

• 1675-1676: King Phillips War (‘First Indian War’, ‘Metacom’s War’) is fought between indigenous inhabitants of New England and New England colonists and their indigenous allies. By the end of the war, the Wampanoags and their Narragansett allies were almost completely destroyed. The war was the greatest calamity in 17c New England and considered to be the deadliest war in Colonial American history- a tenth of all men available for military service were lost. The war began the developments of an independent American identity as the colonists faced their native enemies without support from any European government or military (Wiki).

  • Jun, 1675: A federation of New England Algonquians, led by a sachem named Metacom (the English called him “King Philip”), attempt to oust the foreigners from their lands, attacking town after town. The Indians, one Englishman wrote, had “risen round the country.” Before it was over, more than half of all the English towns in New England had been either destroyed or abandoned. Metacom was shot, drawn, quartered, and beheaded, his severed head placed on a pike in Plymouth, a king’s punishment. His 9yo son was sold as a slave and shipped to the Caribbean, where a slave rebellion had just broken out in Barbados. The English in Barbados believed that the Africans there “intended to Murther all the White People”; their “grand design was to choose them a King.” (Panicked, the legislature on the island swiftly passed a law banning the buying of any Indian slaves carried from New England, for fear that they would only add to the rebellion.) New England and Barbados, one New Englander remarked, had “tasted of the same cup.” Natives began attacking English towns in Maryland and Virginia, leading Virginia governor William Berkeley to declare that “the Infection of the Indianes in New-England” had spread southward.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1663: Founding of the Company of Royal Adventurers of England, which trades with Africa.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1660-1685: Charles II is restored as English King, ruling England, Scotland, and Ireland; pledging “that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matter of religion.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1651: The English Barbados Colony insists that Parliament has no authority over its internal affairs (which chiefly concerns the law of slavery).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1649-1651: King Charles II rules Scotland (Wiki).

• 1649-1660: England is ruled as a commonwealth, and has no King.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1649: Beheading of English King Charles I after being tried for treason.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1644: Puritan poet John Milton publishes a pamphlet in which he argues against a law passed by Parliament requiring printers to secure licenses from the government for everything they printed. No book should be censored before publication, Milton argued (though it might be condemned after printing), because truth could only be established if allowed to do battle with lies. “Let her and falsehood grapple,” he urged, since, “whoever knew Truth to be put to the worst in a free and open encounter?”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1641: Establishment of Liberties; needing to provide some legal support for trading Indians for Africans, the Massachussets legislature introduces a bill, or list, of 100 rights, many taken from Magna Carta. (7 would later appear in the US Bill of Rights.) The Body of Liberties included this prohibition: “There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or Captivitie amongst us unles it be lawfull Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us.” Drawing on Roman law, the provision about slavery offered specific legal cover for selling into slavery Pequot and other Algonquians captured by the colonists during the Pequot War in 1637 and for the sale and purchase of Africans—described under the language of “strangers,” that is, foreigners who “are sold to us”—so that there would be no legal question to debate.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1640s: English settlers in Barbados begin planting sugar using Africans purchased from the Spanish, Dutch, and English to grow the difficult but wildly profitable new crop.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1640: English King Charles summons a meeting of Parliament in hopes of raising money to suppress a rebellion in Scotland. The newly summoned Parliament, striking back, passes a law abridging the king’s authority, including requiring that Parliament meet at least once every three years, with or without a royal summons. War between supporters of the king and backers of Parliament breaks out in 1642. During this battle, the legal fiction of the divine right of kings was replaced by another legal fiction: the sovereignty of the people.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • English Parliaments had first met in the 13c, when the king began summoning noblemen to court to parler, demanding that they pledge to obey his laws and pay his taxes. After a while, those noblemen began pretending they weren’t making these pledges for themselves alone but that, instead, in some meaningful way, they “represented” the interests of other people, their vassals. In the 1640s, those parleying noblemen, now called Parliament, challenged the king, countering his claim to sovereignty with a claim of their own: they argued that they represented the people and that the people were sovereign.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1639: The first printing press’ brought to Britain’s colonies arrive in Boston.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1639: New Hampshire is founded.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1638: The first African slaves in New England arrive in Salem on board a ship called the Desire that had carried captured Pequots to the West Indies, where they’d been traded, as Winthrop noted in his diary, for “some cotton and tobacco, and negroes.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1638: Swedish colonists settled New Sweden, a colony that straddled parts of latter-day NJ, PA, and DE.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1638: New Haven is founded.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1637: Pequot War;’ CT colonists fight Pequot Indians, later selling captured Indians as slaves to the English in the Caribbean.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1636: Connecticut is founded.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1636: Harvard is founded by Puritans to educate “English and Indian youth.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1636: Roger Williams founds Rhode Island after being banished from Massachusetts Bay in 1635 for his commitment to religious toleration.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1634: Maryland, named after Charles I’s Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, is founded as a sanctuary for Catholics.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1630-1640: English King Charles rules without Parliament. ~20K dissenters flee England to settle in New England. Among them is John Winthrop, who joins a new expedition in 1630 to found a colony in Massachusetts Bay. Unlike Bradford’s pilgrims, who wanted to separate from the Church of England, Winthrop was one of a band of dissenters known as Puritans—because they wanted to purify the Church of England—who lost their positions in court after the dissolution of Parliament.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1628-1629: Coke, now in Parliament, objects to English King Charles exerting his royal prerogative to billet soldiers in his subjects’ homes and to confine men to jail, without trial, for refusing to pay taxes. Coke claimed that the king’s authority was constrained by Magna Carta. King Charles forbids Coke from publishing his Magna Carta study and dissolves the English Parliament, leading tens of thousands of Englishmen to flee the country and cross the ocean.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1627: Barbados is settled by the English.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1625: Death of English King James; his son, Charles ascends the English throne.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1624: The Dutch settle New Amsterdam (later NY).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1622: The Virginia Massacre; 4 years after Powhatan’s death, the natives rise in rebellion and try to oust the English from their land, killing hundreds.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Summer, 1620: The 180-ton Mayflower, a three-masted, square-rigged merchant vessel, lays anchor in the harbor of the English town of Plymouth, at the mouth of the river Plym. It takes on ~60 adventurers and 41 men-dissenters from the Church of England who brought their wives, children, and servants. The dissenters (‘Pilgrims’) were led by William Bradford. The Mayflower, blown severely off course, sails across the Atlantic on a 66d journey, dropping anchor not in VA, but off Cape Cod.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • The day they arrived, they signed a document in which they pledged to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.” They named their agreement after their ship. They called it the Mayflower Compact. The Pilgrims settlement was named Plymouth.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Aug, 1619: 20 Africans (Kimbundu speakers from the Kingdom of Ndongo, captured in raids ordered by the Gov. of Angola) arrive in VA, the first slaves in British America. They had been marched to the coast and boarded the São João Bautista, a Portuguese slave ship headed for New Spain. At sea, an English privateer, the White Lion, sailing from New Netherlands, attacked the São João Bautista, seized all 20, and brought them to Virginia to be sold.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Jul, 1619: 22 English colonists, two men from each of eleven parts of the colony, met in a legislative body, the House of Burgesses, the first self-governing body in the colonies.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1618: Beheading of Sir Walter Raleigh.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Winter, 1609–1610: The original 500 colonists, having failed to farm or fish or hunt and having succeeded at little except making their neighbors into enemies, are reduced to sixty.-These Truths by Lepore.

  • Fall, 1609: The colonists’ revolt against Smith, sending him back to England, declaring that he had made Virginia, under his leadership, “a misery, a ruine, a death, a hell.”-These Truths by Lepore

  • 1608: Smith, elected the colony’s governor, made a rule: “he who does not worke, shall not eat.”-These Truths by Lepore

• 1609: The Dutch achieve independence from Spain.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1608: The French began building the city of Quebec.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 13 May, 1607: Jamestown is settled by the Virginia Company after landing on the banks of the brackish James River (named for the English King). Smith, although a prisoner, was appointed as one of several colony governors. Unclapped came his chains.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Dec, 1606: 105 Englishmen (no women) board 3 ships, carrying a box containing a list of the men appointed by the Virginia Company to govern the colony, “not to be opened, nor the governours knowne until they arrived in Virginia.” During the voyage, Smith was confined belowdecks, shackled and in chains, accused of plotting a mutiny to “make himselfe king.”-These Truths by Lepore

• 1606: King James issues a charter, granting to a body of men permission to settle on “that parte of America commonly called Virginia.” Virginia, at the time, stretched from what is now SC to Canada: all of this, England claimed. The charter decreed that the king would appoint a 13-man council in England to oversee the colonies, but, as for local affairs, the settlers would establish their own 13-man council to “govern and order all Matters and Causes.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1603: Sir Walter Raleigh is imprisoned in the Tower of London by King James for “plotting against the King.” His conviction by Coke frees the right to settle VA—a right Elizabeth had granted to Raleigh.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1603: Death of English Queen Elizabeth; succeeded by her cousin, Scottish King James, who is crowned King of England.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1587: A second English expedition arrives at Roanoke. John White, an artist and mapmaker who had carefully studied the reports of the first expedition, aimed to establish a permanent colony not on the island but in nearby Chesapeake Bay, in a city to be called ‘Ralegh’. Instead, one blunder followed another. White sailed back to England that fall, in hopes of securing supplies and support. His timing could hardly have been less propitious. In 1588, a fleet of 150 Spanish ships attempted to invade England. Eventually, the armada was defeated. But with a naval war with Spain raging, White had no success in scaring up more ships to sail to Roanoke, leaving the settlement marooned.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1580’s: Native American Chief Powhatan inherits rule over six neighboring peoples; in the 1590s, he begins expanding his reign.-These Truths by Lepore.

• June, 1586: English Captain Sir Francis Drake arrives N. of the Original English Roanoke settlement, carrying a cargo of 300 Africans, bound in chains. Drake told the colonists that either he could leave them with food, and with a ship to look for a safer harbor, or else he could bring them home. Every colonist opted to leave.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1584: English Queen Elizabeth expels the Spanish ambassador after discovering a Spanish plot to invade England by way of Scotland.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1584: Sir Walter Raleigh, newly knighted, launches an expedition to the Americas. He did not sail himself but sent out a fleet of 7 ships and 600 men.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1577-1580: English Captain Sir Francis Drake becomes the first person to circumnavigate the globe.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1567-1625: King James VI rules Scotland, rising to power at the age of 1, on the death of his mother.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1565: The Spanish settle Saint Augustine, FL.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1558: Death of English Queen Mary; Elizabeth, a protestant, assumes the throne.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1552: Death of English King Edward, who hoping to avoid the ascension of his Catholic half-sister Mary, names his cousin Lady Jane Grey as successor. Mary seizes power, has Jane beheaded, and becomes the first ruling queen of England. She attempts to restore Catholicism and persecutes religious dissenters, burning ~300 at the stake.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1550s: The word “colony” first enters the English language.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1547: Death of English King Henry VIII who is succeeded by his son, Edward.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1540: Nobleman Francisco Vásquez de Coronado leads an army of Spaniards in search of a fabled city of gold in modern NM. They locate pueblos, a hive of baked-clay apartment houses. Coronado had the ‘Requerimiento’ read to the Zuni, who could not possibly understand. “They wore coats of iron, and warbonnets of metal, and carried for weapons short canes that spit fire and made thunder,” the Zuni later said about Coronado’s men. Zuni warriors poured cornmeal on the ground, and motioned to the Spanish they dare not cross that line. The Zuni, fighting with arrows, were routed by the Spaniards, who fought with guns.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1534: The French make their first voyages to the Americas.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1526: British King Henry VIII establishes the Church of England, defiantly separate from the Church of Rome.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1519: Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés, mayor of Santiago, Cuba, leads 600 Spaniards and >1000 native allies across Mexico with 15 cannons, capturing Tenochtitlán.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1516: Thomas More pens “Utopia”, writing that taking land from a people that “does not use its soil but keeps it idle and waste” was a “most just cause for war.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1513: Spanish conquistadors first set foot on the North American mainland. The conquistadors would be required to read aloud to anyone they proposed to conquer and enslave a document called the Requerimiento. If the natives accepted the story of Genesis and the claim that distant Spanish rulers had a right to rule them, the Spanish promised, “We in their name shall receive you in all love and charity, and shall leave you your wives, and your children, and your lands, free without servitude.” But if the natives rejected these truths, the Spanish warned, “we shall forcibly enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1507: “America” first appears on a map when German Cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who had a French translation of Mundus Novus, carves onto 12 woodblocks a new map of the world, a Universalis Cosmographia, and prints >1000 copies (only a single copy survives). With a nod to Vespucci, Waldseemüller names the fourth part of the world, “America.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1504: The king of Spain assembles a group of scholars and lawyers that determine the American natives lacked sovereignty and dominion, thus the conquest of the America’s “was in agreement with human and divine law.”-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1503: Florentine Explorer Amerigo Vespucci crosses the Atlantic and writes about the lands he finds “These we may rightly call a new world.” His report is published as the book Mundus Novus- “I have found a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa,” he wrote.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1500-1800: ~2.5M Europeans move to the Americas; they carry 12M Africans there by force; as many as 50M Native Americans die, chiefly of disease.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1497: English explorer John Cabot crosses the Atlantic but disappears on his return.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1494: The Treaty of Tordesillas; the Spanish borne pope grants all of the lands W of a line of longitude some 500 km W of Cape Verde, to Spain, and everything E of that line, W Africa, to Portugal, the pope claiming the authority to divvy up lands inhabited by tens of millions of people as if he were the god of Genesis. Unsurprisingly, the heads of England, France, and the Netherlands found this papal pronouncement absurd.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1493: Columbus 2nd Voyage to the America’s; commanding a fleet of 17 ships and 1200 men, seeds and cuttings of wheat, chickpeas, melons, onions, radishes, greens, grapevines, and sugar cane, and horses, pigs, cattle, chickens, sheep, and goats, male and female, two by two. Hidden were stowaways, the seeds of plants Europeans considered to be weeds, like bluegrass, daisies, thistle, nettles, ferns, and dandelions.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Oct, 1492: Columbus lands in Hispaniola, believing he’d found a new route to the old world and naming the people he’d met ‘Indians’, thinking that he was in the Indies. Two months later, Columbus prepared to head back to Spain but, off the coast, his three-masted flagship ran aground. Before the ship sank, Columbus’s men salvaged the timbers to build a fort; the sunken wreckage has never been found.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1492: ~75M people live in the Americas.-These Truths by Lepore.

• Early, 1492: Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella order all Jews expelled from their realm and, confident that their Inquisition had rid their kingdom of Muslims and Jews, heretics and pagans. They order Columbus to sail, to trade, and to spread the Christian faith.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1487: Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese nobleman rounds the southernmost tip of Africa, proving that it is possible to sail from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean (until then, it was presumed that Africa connected with a massive Southern Continent).-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1440: The Printing Press is invented by Gutenberg, a German blacksmith.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1325: Founding of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1215: The pope bans trial by ordeal in Europe, replacing it with a new system of divine judgement: judicial torture. But in England, where there existed a tradition of convening juries to judge civil disputes—like disagreements over boundaries between neighboring freeholds—trial by ordeal was replaced not by judicial torture but by trial by jury with a judge deciding the law and a jury deciding the facts.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1215: Magna Carta; British King John signs the Magna Carta after his baron’s rebel and capture the Tower of London. King John met with them at Runnymede, a meadow by the Thames, to negotiate a peace. The barons presented him with a very long list of demands, which were rewritten as a charter, in which the king granted “to all free men” in his realm (the noblemen, not the people)- “all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs,” including the right to a trial by jury.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1210s: British King John levies taxes higher than any previous King, keeping so much in his castle that it was difficult for anyone to pay him. When his noblemen fell into his debt, he took their sons hostage, even having one noblewoman and her son starved to death in a dungeon and a clerk crushed to death.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 11c: The Compass is invented in China.-These Truths by Lepore.  

• Early 7c: Archbishop Isidore of Seville, pens the “Etymologiae,” an encyclopedia that circulates widely showing the world as a circle surrounded by oceans and divided by seas into three bodies of land, Asia, Europe, and Africa, inhabited by the descendants of the three sons of Noah: Shem, Japheth, and Ham.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 600: Mesoamerican’s begin writing.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 1100 BCE: Writing is invented in China.-These Truths by Lepore.

• 3200 BCE: Writing is invented in Mesopotamia.-These Truths by Lepore.