A Brief History On May 28, 1830, US President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, a law allowing the President to negotiate with tribes still located in the Southern United States to be moved West of the Mississippi River. This act and the actions that followed were tantamount to a genocide of Southeastern Native American people, leading to the infamous “Trail of Tears” migration of the Cherokee people in which as many as half of the 16,000+ relocated Cherokee died enroute to reservations in the West. (Note: The Native Americans so relocated took their African American slaves along with…
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A Brief History On May 22, 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina had had it! After hearing an anti-slavery speech delivered by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, including invective against Brooks’ cousin, the Senator from South Carolina, Andrew Butler, Brooks met up with Sumner in the hallway outside of the Senate and proceeded to beat the hapless Senator with the congressman’s cane. Brooks beat Sumner so severely, the injured legislator nearly died. Digging Deeper Brooks, a Democrat, as were most Southerners at the time, had pounded Sumner, a Republican, the party that seemed to represent the greatest threat to the…
A Brief History On May 20, 1521, the man that would become Saint Ignatius of Loyola was seriously wounded at Pamplona in a battle between the Spanish and the French supported Navarrese during the Spanish Conquest of Navarre, the region of land on the Iberian Peninsula between France and Spain. Spanish soldier Inigo Lopez de Loyola, later known as St. Ignatius of Loyola and the principal founder of the Society of Jesus (better known as the Jesuits), had suffered a cannonball injury to his leg, but bore his injury with such courage that his Navarrese foes acknowledged his bravery by…
A Brief History On May 19, 1921, the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 became effective, a law also called The Emergency Quota Act, a law specifically designed to limit the immigration of certain people to the United States. The goal of this legislation and previous legislation was to attempt to keep the ethnic and national origin percentages existing in the American demography the same, without allowing new influxes of immigrants to change the complexion of the American population. Digging Deeper Using the 1910 Census, the law required that no more than 3% of the same nationality already existing in the…
A Brief History On May 15, 1848, Serfdom was abolished in the Habsburg Austrian region of Galicia, ending the slavery of peasants in an area now occupied by Poland and the Ukraine. The freedom of the Serfs came about as a result of the Revolutions of 1848, a widespread revolt across Feudal Europe, a so called “Bourgeois revolution” against the monarchies that controlled lands not native to the rulers. The upheaval was part of what Karl Marx was referring to when he predicted the people would rise up to overthrow the elites. Serfdom was a form of slavery practiced in…