Doc of the Day
Doc of the Day: Homestead Act
On May 20, 1862, Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. president from the prairie state of Illinois, signed the Homestead Act into law. He enacted one of the most liberal land laws in history, a policy that theoretically gave free land to actual settlers. The act granted adult heads of families 160 acres of surveyed public land, [...]
20May2009 | mdblogger | 1 comment | Continued
Doc of the Day: Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson, argued on April 13, 1896, and decided on May 18, 1896, is probably best known for giving the United States the separate but equal doctrine. The case probably ranks close to Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) as one of the most influential and thoroughly repudiated cases the Supreme Court has ever decided. [...]
18May2009 | mdblogger | 0 comments | Continued
Doc of the Day: Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared that legally mandated segregation in public schools was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Issued on May 17, 1954, the landmark case was actually a combination of five cases that challenged school segregation in Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, [...]
17May2009 | mdblogger | 0 comments | Continued
Doc of the Day: Chinese Exclusion Act
On May 6, 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law by President Chester Arthur. The act suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the United States for ten years and put conditions on the reentry of Chinese laborers who left the United States.
The Chinese had come to the United States to work. Disembarking [...]
Doc of the Day: George Washington's first inaugural address
Believing that he would be elected the first president under the Constitution of 1787, George Washington asked his close friend David Humphreys to draft an inaugural address. Washington discarded Humphreys’s seventy-three-page draft, however, and asked James Madison to write a more appropriate address. Washington delivered his address on April 30, 1789, to a joint session [...]
30Apr2009 | mdblogger | 0 comments | Continued
Doc of the Day: Treaty of Fort Laramie
On April 29, 1868, twenty-five chiefs and headmen (including Spotted Tail) of the Brulé Lakota become the first Indians to sign the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The treaty was an agreement between the United States and various bands of Lakota Sioux, Yanktonai Sioux, Santee Sioux, and Arapaho. It ended Red Cloud’s War (1866-1867), established the [...]
29Apr2009 | mdblogger | 0 comments | Continued
Doc of the Day: George Washington's Proclamation of Neutrality
On April 22, 1793, George Washington issued his Proclamation of Neutrality. A response to the onset of war in Europe between the new French Republic and other European countries, the treaty kept the fledgling United States out of the war and sustained the still-fragile Union. Ultimately, the manner in which Washington asserted his presidential authority [...]
22Apr2009 | mdblogger | 1 comment | Continued
Doc of the Day: Woodrow Wilson's 1917 war message to Congress
On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson addressed a special session of Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany. World War I had begun in 1914, and by 1915 two major alliances were locked in deadly embrace: the Allies (the major powers being England, France, Russia, and Italy) and the Central powers [...]
2Apr2009 | mdblogger | 0 comments | Continued
Doc of the Day: Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech
On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech to a meeting of the Virginia House of Burgesses being held at St. John’s Church in Richmond. A renowned orator, Henry was speaking out of more than a decade of opposition to the British Crown, which he viewed [...]
23Mar2009 | mdblogger | 0 comments | Continued
Doc of the Day: Civil Rights Act of 1866
On March 13, 1866, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, its first civil rights measure, to establish the citizenship of blacks and to confer equality before the law with respect to the protection of the fundamental rights of person and property. Designed to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery, which was undermined by the [...]
13Mar2009 | mdblogger | 1 comment | Continued