Browsing: Politics

A Brief History On February 13, 1633, Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to stand trial before the Catholic Inquisition for heresy. The main point of the Church was that Galileo espoused the Copernican theory of Heliocentrism, that is, the Sun is the center of the solar system and the Earth orbits the Sun. According to the Church, such an idea was “foolish and absurd… formally heretical.” Forced to recant, Galileo was spared, but lived the remainder of his life under house arrest. Several times throughout History a trial has been described as “The Trial of the Century” or other such…

A Brief History On February 11, 1812, Elbridge Gerry, the Governor of Massachusetts, was accused of manipulating voting districts in a bizarre, uneven way in order to tailor voting demographics to suit his own political benefit. The resultant agonizingly ridiculously shaped voting districts resembled a dragon or salamander, giving rise to the term we know of today as “gerrymandering” when drawing voting districts. On March 26, 1812, the term “gerrymander” first made it to print in the Boston Globe. Digging Deeper The efforts of Governor Gerry were somewhat successful, and a new form of political chicanery was born. Ever since,…

A Brief History On February 7, 1795, the 12th state needed to ratify the 11th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (North Carolina) voted to ratify the Amendment, thus making it part of the law of the land. The 11th Amendment was the first Amendment to be ratified since the adoption of the Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10). Digging Deeper The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of our nation, and all other laws and court decisions must be in accordance with the Constitution. It is the job of the Supreme Court of the US…

A Brief History On February 5, 1917, the Congress of the United States overrode a veto by President Woodrow Wilson and enacted the Immigration Act of 1917, a law that targeted Asians to prevent their immigration to the US. Today, while immigration reform remains a hotly debated and racially charged topic, we are reminded that the subject of immigration policies based on race or national origin is not unique to this particular point in time. Digging Deeper Sometimes referred to as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, or even the Literacy Act, the point of the Immigration Act of 1917 (we…

A Brief History On February 3, 1953, one of the worst atrocities of the second half of the 20th Century in a tiny nation occurred when the Portuguese colonial administration and the planters on the island of São Tomé in the tiny island nation of São Tomé and Principe massacred 2,000 “creole” peasants (known as forros) when the peasants hesitated to agree to work the sugar cane, coffee, and cacao fields. Digging Deeper Portugal had colonized the small islands off the Equatorial Atlantic coast of Africa in 1493, and as was the fashion of the time, enslaved the native African…