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Normally, breaking the law isn't a good idea. You were probably taught this nugget of wisdom the first time you tried to snatch a Snickers bar off the checkout stand display with your adorable, chubby little toddler hands. And you were probably taught this lesson repeatedly throughout your childhood: don't break windows, don't "borrow" your neighbor's bike, don't try to dye the cat green for St. Patty's day. (Maybe not that last one.) But every once in a while, laws are implemented that were made to be broken. And we're not just feeding you John Bender's immortal wisdom that "Being bad feels pretty good." We're talking about breaking laws for the good of humanity (like Harriet Tubman freeing slaves before emancipation), breaking laws in the name of equality (like Rosa Parks not moving to the back of a bus), or breaking obscenity laws in the name of medical advancement (like Margaret Sanger giving an illegal lecture on birth control). Or like Eugene Debs speaking out against the draft for WWI, a war that he believed was insane. (History would back him up on this point, btw.) Eugene V. Debs wasn't afraid to lay everything on the table. He says it loud and says it proud in this speech—he's a Socialist, he opposes World War I, and he's willing to go to jail to help prove that the war is an attack on the little guy by rich fat cats. Debs had gained national fame as a labor leader during the Pullman Strike of 1894 and was one of the founders of the Socialist Party of the United States. But that's not all: dude ran for president on the Socialist ticket four times and from 1914 onward was a consistent critic of the war in Europe. He was a brilliant orator and traveled throughout the country making speeches on behalf of striking workers, urging for a worker's movement to combat the excesses of the capitalist class that, in the Socialist view, controlled society. Seriously, this guy lived and breathed Socialism.    The Not-So-Great War When World War I broke out in 1914, Debs led the Socialists in decrying the war, seeing it as a manifestation of the greed and imperialism of the ruling elites (a.k.a. the man) of Europe. Most of America shared this anti-war sentiment for the first year of the war; but beginning with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, American popular opinion began gradually to shift toward greater U.S. involvement in the conflict. When in April of 1917 President Woodrow Wilson asked the Congress for a declaration of war, public opinion and government policy now demanded patriotism, loyalty, and fighting men. American Socialists were confronted with a dilemma: now that America was fighting, should their opposition to the war continue? The Socialist leadership was super divided on this question and many of them looked to the grand old man of their party, Eugene V. Debs, to guide them. Socialists wanted to know: how should their party respond to the nationalist spirit that was moving through the country? By the spring of 1918, with the first U.S. troops now fighting on the Western front, Debs felt it was time to present the Socialist stand, risky though this would be. Here's why it was risky. The U.S. had passed two sweeping laws that severely curtailed free speech during wartime: the Espionage Act of 1917 and (its extension) the Sedition Act of 1918. Both of these Congressional Acts came under intense criticism by many Americans who saw them as violations of free speech rights. Lawmakers argued that they had no desire to stifle speech and that the goal of the laws was to protect national defense secrets. The key portion of both the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act was the part that stated that: […] no person shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military […] or shall willfully obstruct the recruitment or enlistment services of the United States. (Source) Yeah. That sounds great, but it effectively means mass censorship. I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Eugene Throughout fall and winter, while Debs was ill, he wrote several pamphlets and newspaper articles condemning the war. But the Espionage Act gave the post office the power to refuse to deliver such items and so his voice was not being heard. This led him to deliver a speech in Canton, Ohio, on June 10, 1918, that severely criticized what he called the capitalist class, the big businessmen and powerful people who led the government. The moral of this story? Much like nobody puts Baby in a corner, nobody stifles Eugene Debs when he wants to make a point. Debs said that the ruling class was benefiting from the war; he proclaimed that it was always the poor who fought and died in war, without having a voice in deciding to fight. It was this speech that led to his trial and arrest because the speech was seen as discouraging American men from fighting. Debs was convicted for intending to obstruct enlistment and intending to cause disloyalty. When he was offered a chance to address the court at his sentencing (he received a ten-year prison sentence), he seized the opportunity as a chance to present his dreams for a just society to the American public. The oration he delivered to the judge, which is sometimes called the "Bending Cross Speech," really wowed many Americans of his day—as well as later historians—because of its passion and eloquence. Way to go, Mr. Debs.

This piece of parchment is the reason Americans sit outdoors grilling burgers and veggie dogs every 4th of July. It's the reason we chant USA! USA! USA! during the Olympics. It's the reason we get all teary-eyed when we hear Whitney Huston's rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner" (and wince when other singers flub it). Oh, yeah—and the Declaration of Independence is the reason America as a country exists. At all. It was written to tell England: "We're done with your nonsense, stay over there and we're going to make our own thing over here, okay? Deal with it." Lo and behold, the United States of America was born. Not only did the Declaration, for lack of better words, declare independence from England and King George III, but also Thomas Jefferson's words embody the founding ideas of the United States, which is why they're still often referenced today when discussing legal and social issues in the U.S. Yeah. This document is a big, huge, red, white, and blue deal. You've definitely heard or seen the phrase, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" in some variation or other in your lifetime. Probably so many times that it has become just one those phrases you see on commemorative plates in generic gift stores, along with "Home Sweet Home" and "May the Force be with you." How It Went Down The Declaration was presented and approved (and signed by two people) on July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson (yup—the Thomas Jefferson) took about a month to draft it, as part of the appointed Committee of Five, which included big-deal names like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and lesser-known-big-deal names Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman. The Committee of Five was formed following a resolution in the Second Continental Congress that the time had come for the colonies to make the case for their independence. After decades of increasingly strict legislation, forced conscription into the British Army, and a war that only benefited Great Britain the leadership of the colonies felt like it was time to peace out of the whole being-a-colony-of-the-British-Empire deal. Once the Declaration was signed by almost every member of the Congress the American Revolution had truly begun. King George III had considered the American colonies to be in open rebellion since August of 1775, but now the battle was really on. (Source)    The Declaration of Independence was a new and radical way to a) start a country and b) establish that country with very definite principles about the relationship between government and the people. (Get it, Thomas Jefferson.) We take for granted now the idea that government is supposed to represent and serve the people, and to be as helpful as possible, but this text is where that whole idea was first explicitly stated by Jefferson and the Continental Congress. Basically, Jefferson and the delegates are saying that a government cannot take advantage of its people, and if they do, those people are totally justified to pull a Katniss Everdeen and overthrow them (raises hand in a three-fingered salute). And it's not like the idea of a government created by and for the people stopped with good ol' 'Murica. These ideas were adopted quickly around the world following the success of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. It contributed to other revolutions, like the French Revolution in 1789 (more on that later) and Venezuelan independence in 1811. So the next time you don your star-spangled tank top, maybe you'll remember that Independence Day is the result of this single page of text…and that you're barbequing to commemorate the fact that America was born out of the conviction that government is responsible to its people. But hey—maybe you'll forget all about the Declaration of Independence because you're too busy watching the fireworks display with your jaw open in amazement. That's cool too—after all, you're entitled to a little (or a lot) of the pursuit of happiness.

The Rolling Stones were right: You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need. Historians unanimously agree that the famous Stones track was a cryptic reference to the Compromise of 1850, where nobody got what they wanted but the nation got what it needed. Kind of. One thing's for sure: there just can't be any compromises when it comes to slavery. It's immoral, brutal, and—since 1865— illegal in the U.S. But rewind back to mid-19th-century America, and Congress was scrambling to do just that: put together a compromise that would satisfy both the free states of the North and the slave states of the South. The threat of secession over the issue of slavery was always on everyone's mind, and it was up to Congress to find a way to hold the Union together. Every time the U.S. acquired new territory, even way back in 1803 with the ginormous Louisiana Purchase, the same question came up: would any new states carved out of that territory be slave states or free states? Since the founding of the nation, the government had seen to it that, for every slave state admitted to the Union, a free state would be admitted to keep things balanced. Then in 1850, oops, it happened again, when California, having been ceded to the U.S. by Mexico in 1848, petitioned to be admitted as a free state, potentially upsetting the delicate balance because there were no new slave states on the horizon. We can't over-emphasize just how big of an issue this was in the antebellum (pre-Civil War) period. Every time the question came up, it was like the Montagues and Capulets. Or Pawnee and Eagleton. So when it became clear that the U.S. was going to get another big chunk of land as a result of the Mexican War, the slave vs. free showdown began. It lasted about four years. There were numerous attempts to solve the problem in one way or another, chopping up the territories this way and that, but they were all defeated. Finally, veteran senator Henry Clay came up with a complicated compromise bill. It was debated in Congress from early February to August of 1850, when it was defeated in the Senate. Clay tried to include something for everyone, and he ended up with nothing. Wait, it was defeated? Then what are we doing here? Does this mean we can go back to hate-watching Gossip Girls? Not yet. Stephen Douglas, the young senator from Illinois, took the reins after the bill's defeat. He split Clay's omnibus (all-in-one) bill up into its different parts, and got them passed individually instead of in one giant gulp. The five bills, all part of Clay's original biggie, were passed in this order: Texas boundaries were set, with Texas agreeing to give up claims to some territory in New Mexico in exchange for $10 million bucks and lifetime HBO for all its residents. California was admitted as a free state. A territorial government was created in Utah. The Fugitive Slave Act 2.0 was passed, including a provision that even northerners had to agree to chase down runaway slaves or pay a fine. Buying and selling slaves was outlawed in Washington, D.C. Turns out politicians are fine helping a compromise pass so long as they aren't seen voting for things they don't believe in. The Compromise of 1850 kept the peace (relatively) for a decade, but at the same time, it fanned the flames of sectionalism. The new Fugitive Slave Act was especially shocking to the North. The Compromise encompassed all the hot-button issues of the antebellum period that would eventually lead to the Civil War, all in one rather complicated package.   

From Washington, D.C. To Gastown And the Bullet Farm Imagine this situation: there's no oil. There are no jobs, no hope, and no confidence that things can get better. Yeah, we know: it sounds like something out of Mad Max. But before you call Imperator Furiosa or reach for a pair of leather chaps and a flamethrower, you should know that this is not a Hollywood screenplay, but an actual historical crisis that threatened the U.S. in the late 1970s. That's almost as bad as Immortan Joe. The year is 1979, and President Jimmy Carter is facing a crisis. OPEC, or the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has increased the price of oil yet again. Soaring prices lead to crippling shortages as Americans find themselves waiting in long lines to fill up their tanks. And people get angry. Very angry. Just think how much you hate waiting…and now imagine waiting hours for something as essential as gasoline. And remember, this is 1979—well before the age of smartphones and tablets, so desperate drivers couldn't even kill time by playing Candy Crush or refreshing their Twitter feeds. These gasoline shortages weaken an already feeble U.S. economy. Feeling the singe of public frustration, Jimmy Carter invites citizens from all walks of life to speak their minds about life in an America burdened by recession, inflation and unemployment. The result of these meetings forms the basis of what is perhaps the defining speech of the president's administration.    Bootstraps, Y'all The "Crisis of Confidence" speech functions as something of a departure from Carter's usual rhetoric. (Source) Although it outlines the need to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil—something he'd done whopping four times before—it also included something else, something which the President felt to be at the core of the country's problems. Before launching into specific policy proposals, Carter explained what he saw as a more pressing issue confronting the nation, more pressing than long lines at the gas pump, more pressing even than unemployment or recession: confidence. Carter expressed his frustration over what he felt to be a lack of confidence among the American people, a lack of commitment to hard work and perseverance, over what he saw as an overall decline in American values. He summarized this sense of overriding pessimism by declaring that: […] for the first time in the history of our country a majority of people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. (35) He concluded the speech with an attempt to instill this missing confidence into the American people, urging them, whenever they have the chance, "to say something good about our country" (75). Rousing Speechmaker, Or Debbie Downer? The effectiveness of this presidential cheerleading was mixed at best. And much like much like a cheerleader, his approval ratings took a tumble. Unlike with cheerleaders, however, the kind of tumbling we're talking about here drew far fewer cheers. In fact, the speech drew considerable jeers from many Americans short on cash and down on their luck. To many, the speech sounded like the President was pointing the finger at them for not working hard enough or not conserving gasoline enough. In fact, the speech sounded a lot like blame. Lasting anger over these words, coupled with the Iranian hostage crisis a few months later, would oust Jimmy Carter from the presidency, replacing the Georgian with a charismatic former-actor from California, Ronald Reagan. (Source) In short, the speech backfired. Carter was trying to inspire and trying to rally a people behind what he saw as the great moral crisis of a generation. But instead of playing the role of starting quarterback, leading his team to victory, Carter may as well have been a substitute teacher giving a math test on differential equations. His points, according to the American people, just didn't add up. The speech was branded as a buzz-kill, an exercise in navel-gazing—it was even dubbed the "Malaise Speech." And like those leftovers living in the back of your fridge, Carter's relationship with the American people went bad.

Complaining about Christians who land way off the Jesus-mark is a historical tradition that's gotten its share of pop culture limelight. Sure, it's not always an on-the-nose portrayal, but you can see the problem. On the one hand, you've got Jesus, preaching nonviolence and love for your neighbor; and on the other hand, you've got lots of Christians in history, trying to figure out a way to get around all that loving-your-neighbor stuff and, uh, still get to heaven. In the 19th century, whether or not women and people of color actually had souls to save was still up for debate. (Nauseating, we know.) After all, if God had wanted these people to be perfect—the argument went—God would have made them more like white men, who were obviously (in their own minds), the pinnacle of creation. Excuse us while we vom. But then along came a massive religious revival called the Second Great Awakening, and people started to think maybe the color of your skin didn't matter so much to God. Of course, even if skin color was NBD to God, it was still a big deal to people on Earth. And when the Second Great Awakening collided with the abolition movement, Frederick Douglass was born. Okay, not exactly. But that's right when his speech, "The Church and Prejudice"—one of his first anti-slavery speeches—came to be. Douglass delivered the speech on November 4th, 1841 to a meeting of the Plymouth County (Massachusetts) Anti-Slavery Society. Quick life recap: Douglass was born a slave in Maryland. He escaped slavery in 1838 and moved to the North—where slavery was outlawed—but Douglass found racial prejudice alive and well, including in the churches he attended. He expected better. In "The Church and Prejudice," Douglass talks about—you guessed it—the prejudice he experienced in those churches because of his race. He uses those examples as a springboard to talk about how much worse slavery is than any prejudice he's experienced, and how Southern churches use the Bible to support slavery. He closes with a stirring example of a very religious man who quotes scripture while beating his slaves bloody—Exhibit A in religious hypocrisy. Bottom line: It's a powerful indictment of how Christians were falling way short of their moral ideals and even mining scripture for passages to support their inhumanity. It's one of Douglass' earlier speeches, and while it doesn't quite reach the fiery poetic heights of his later ones, that classic Douglass side-eye and #sarcasmfont are still there.   

Not going to lie, hearing the words "The Children's Era" makes us feel like we're about to get cuddled up to listen to a bedtime story from one of those gigantic, old school fairy tale collections. What is this Children's Era of which you speak, Margaret Sanger? Do kids rule the world? Are we having mac and cheese with chocolate milk for dinner? Has bedtime been abolished? Well, take those bibs off, Shmoopers, because that's not what "The Children's Era" is about at all. Margaret Sanger, whom you might know as an advocate for birth control (she literally coined the term) and the founder of Planned Parenthood, gave this speech at the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City on March 30th, 1925. And to the best of our knowledge, there was no mac and cheese or chocolate milk involved. Anyway, "The Children's Era" is kind of an ironic title because Sanger's message is that we're not doing right by the kiddos. At the time, too many children were being born to parents who couldn't care for them, so well-intentioned reformers had set up all kinds of social services of questionable effectiveness. What they should have been doing instead, according to Sanger, was making sure parents didn't have kids they couldn't care for in the first place. By 1925, Margaret Sanger had been advocating for the rights of women to choose when and how many children they had for over a decade, and she would continue to do so for the rest of her life. This speech falls in the middle of dozens of speeches she gave on this topic over the years. While Sanger's main concern was always the right of women to control their reproductive lives, "The Children's Era" reflects other concerns too. In the early 20th century, governments didn't think the health and safety of women and children was a big enough deal to warrant major attention. So to get her message taken seriously, Sanger had to unite with other movements. So whose agendas are we looking at here? Check it out: Agenda #1: Population Control Let's look at the Neo-Malthusians. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was an economist. To summarize, Malthusian theory says that food production ultimately won't be able to keep up with population growth. This will cause all sorts of problems—obviously—so people should have fewer kids. However, Malthus thought it was wrong for married couples to take any action to avoid pregnancy. Neo-Malthusians, on the other hand, realized that Malthus' ideas for population control weren't very practical. They thought people should use birth control to limit family size. Agenda #2: Eugenics Sanger often gets criticized for being tight with the eugenics movement, which came to a disastrous climax in Nazi Germany's attempt to create a "Master Race." Hitler took it way beyond anybody's worst nightmares, but he wasn't the only one thinking along those lines in the 1920s. It was a new century! Science was king! Why shouldn't scientists (geneticists, specifically) be able to create the best, tallest, fastest, (ahem, whitest), people on earth? You got defective genes? Well, then, don't reproduce. We want only perfect people here, said the eugenics movement. Ugh. We just threw up in our mouth a teensy little bit.    Agenda #3: Class-Based Government Anxiety "You know who's having too many kids?" said governments worldwide. "Poor people. You know who's not having nearly enough kids to make up for all those poor kids? That comfy middle class we (allegedly) love so much. All those poor kids are going to cost society some serious cash. We're pretty sure their genes are defective anyway (See Agenda #2). Hey, we're trying to create a great nation here. And how are we supposed to do that with all these poor people hanging around wanting to eat?" (see Agenda #1). Margaret Sanger wanted women to control their own reproductive lives, but nobody in charge (ahem, men) thought that was really a big issue. So she got in bed (pun definitely intended) with these other agendas in an attempt to bring about the same result: accessible, affordable, legal birth control. Unfortunately, Margaret Sanger died before she could see her dream realized. But although Sanger may be long-gone, people are still fighting for what she believed in.

It's no secret that the U.S. of A is a country of immigrants. We're a country where Smiths work with Garcias, Wongs go to school with O'Malleys, Takahashis play basketball after work with Goldbergs, Nguyens get coffee with Patels, and Azikiwes have conferences with Yilmazs. We're a mosaic. We're a melting pot. We're a collage. We're the country where if you want to wash down a kimchi taco with a glass of Moroccan mint tea and then grab a khopra paak and an espresso…you can. The land of the free and the home of the brave has a long history of welcoming immigrants…and a history of turning around and saying "No. We don't want you. You're different" that's almost as long. But, unless you're Native American, everyone came to the U.S. at one point or other. And everyone came for the same reason: cold, hard, American cash. Because historically, America's been where the jobs lived. In the 19th century, which saw the largest wave of immigration, the U.S. was building tons of infrastructure. And that needed labor. When the West Coast was in the process of blowing up due to the Gold Rush, it found that it really needed to get connected to the east coast. Gold's heavy, horses are slow, ships sink, and wagons tend to get robbed—the answer was a trans-continental railroad. Because of this, a ton of Chinese men came over to work on the railroad system. When they were finished with the railroad business, they moved onto mining that sweet, sweet gold. But there was less mining work available, and other groups of (mostly white) laborers started to get upset at Chinese people for simply being there. The Chinese people, in response, backed off the mining and instead started settling down in big cities. (Ever wonder why there are Chinatowns in most cities? Most of them date back to around this time.) They wanted to stick together for a number of reasons: they liked being around people who spoke their language and shared their values, and they also like not having to deal with racism all the time. Makes sense, right? But this wasn't enough for some people, and a political movement out of California (where most of the Chinese immigrants had settled) tried to get immigration from China made completely illegal. The first attempt got vetoed by President Hayes (the unsung hero in this whole thing), but the second attempt in 1882 got signed. The Chinese Exclusion Act outlawed any immigration from China for the next ten years. It also placed severe restrictions on anyone coming to work, and created these weird, Big Brother-type monitors for Chinese people coming into the country. The thing stuck around for years, too. It wasn't repealed until 1943, which is an embarrassingly long time. It was the first time any specific ethnic group was singled out in terms of immigration with the justification that they were bad news. The craziest part, though? It's not even unconstitutional.   

Call it puppy love. In 1952, Vice-President wannabe Richard M. Nixon was in deep trouble. Nixon, the mighty avenger of corruption in politics, had just been accused of a having a secret slush fund that kept his wife in fancy clothes and had the Nixons living way beyond their means. Yep, it's that same Richard Nixon who was elected President in 1968 and resigned in disgrace in 1974 (the only President to ever do so). But in 1952, Nixon was just a senator and veteran of modest means in the world of McCarthy-era politics, making his name in the Senate as an anti-corruption and anti-Communist crusader. But he had his sights set on higher office. Having secured the Republican Presidential nomination, Dwight D. Eisenhower was in need of a running mate. Nixon, a young and charismatic rising star in the Republican Party, was a natural choice due to his hardline stance against the Russkies and their global communist agenda. The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket promised an antidote to the corruption they saw running rampant in government and a replacement for the "soft on communism" Truman administration. Then came a bombshell. In the midst of the election campaign, The New York Post ran an article titled "Secret Rich Men's Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary." The article alleged that Nixon had access to a hidden fund of $18,000 that he was using to live large. Nixon did, in fact, have a fund provided by some wealthy buddies that he used to defray political expenses that weren't covered by his Senate allowance. It wasn't illegal, but it raised some ethical questions, especially considering that anti-corruption was the centerpiece of the Republican campaign. The "scandal" threatened to blow up the Republican party, generating outrage from voters and prompting party members to demand that Nixon be removed from the 1952 ticket. Even Eisenhower hoped he'd resign and stave off further damage to the party's chances to win back the White House. Nixon knew he had to do some major damage control before this thing ran away from him completely. He decided to take his case straight to the American people. The Republican party purchased some television time, and Nixon addressed the nation in a speech that he hoped would prove to the nation that he was an honest man—financially struggling just like them—who'd never think of cheating his constituents by accepting gifts or secret cash for personal use. Nixon spoke without a script, using just an outline and some notes for the speech. He wanted it to sound spontaneous and heartfelt. With his wife, Pat, gazing rapturously from the other side of the room, he opened up his entire financial history to his listeners, starting with his humble beginnings working at his parents' grocery store to put himself through college and law school. He discussed the so-called secret fund (which wasn't secret at all), explaining that it paid for political expenses that he didn't want to charge to the American taxpayers. He'd never think of accepting gifts or contributions in exchange for political favors. Nixon admitted to accepting one gift, though. One day, he told his listeners, he got a call from the train station in Baltimore to come pick up a package. When he got there, he found it was a cocker spaniel puppy, a gift from a man who'd heard him mention that his daughters always wanted a dog. Because the puppy was black and white, they named him Checkers. Nixon told the nation that little six-year-old Tricia loved that puppy, and he wasn't about to give him back. Yep. That was the clincher. Not many people today remember why Nixon even gave this speech, but boy do they remember the puppy. Nixon called it the "Fund Speech," but it lived on in American and Shmoop history as the "Checkers Speech." The American people lapped it up. They loved Nixon's emotional appeal to truth, justice, and the family dog, calling and writing in by the millions to beg Nixon to stay on the ticket. Eisenhower agreed, reluctantly at first, and the Republicans went on to win the general election that November. Harry S. Truman famously said, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog." Nixon may not have agreed with anything else Truman said, but we're sure he'd have seconded that. For Nixon, happiness—and political salvation—really was a warm puppy.

Here's American immigration in a nutshell: we're basically all immigrants. (Except, of course, for the approximately 1.7% of Americans that are Native American.) (Source) Yeah: pretty much all of our forefathers and foremommys started out somewhere else, thought about the allure of amber waves of grain and purple mountain's majesty and booked a one-way ticket to the US of A. And while we might think about anti-immigrant sentiment as a new thing, it ain't. It was around in WWI. It basically makes up the foundation of the plot of Gangs of New York. And, when the country was only ten years old, people were already making laws about who could live here and how much of their Constitutional rights they could really practice. The Alien and Sedition Acts were a group of four laws—yup, you get four for the price of one— written by a Federalist Congress and signed into law by John Adams, a Federalist president. He's the Founding Father you probably forget about…but he's also the only one whose son was also prez. So what are these acts, exactly? The Naturalization Act. This act made it more difficult for immigrants to become naturalized citizens—hence the name—as well as restricting any immigration to "free white people." (Yeah. They went there.) Incidentally, "naturalization" is the technical name for allowing a foreign-born person to become a citizen. It did this in a variety of ways, but that's the pertinent bit. It was signed into law June 18, 1798. The Alien Friends Act. We know this sounds awesome, like it would govern relations with E.T. and whatever Groot is, but it actually allowed the president to imprison or deport people from other countries ("aliens") he considered dangerous. That's an awful thing hiding under an innocuous name. (You do not want to hear about the Fluffy Kitten Act of 1876.) The Alien Friends Act became law on June 25, 1798. The Alien Enemies Act. No, this had nothing to do with Xenomorphs or the Kree Empire. Basically, anything covered under the Alien Friends Act required some kind of burden of proof. With the Alien Enemies Act, the president could imprison or deport someone from an enemy nation for any reason or no reason at all. Adams signed it into law on July 6, 1798 The Sedition Act. This fourth law clamped down on First Amendment rights, and is in fact entirely unconstitutional. It outlawed assembly, like protests, against the government, and it made it illegal to make a false or scandalous (whatever that means) statement against the government. It became a law on July 14, 1798. Sounds pretty bad, right? Luckily, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison agreed. They fought the Alien and Sedition Acts, and when Jefferson became president a few years later, he allowed them to expire. Well, three of them. The Sedition Act expired in 1800, the Alien Friends Act in 1801, and the Naturalization Act was repealed by the Naturalization Law of 1802. And that last one? The Alien Enemies Act? Oh, that's still around and kicking to this day.   

Nobody ever nails something on the first try (except for Django). Most great ideas—from gadgets to governments—had a trial-and-error stage before they were perfected. The United States was no exception. The national pride we celebrate today on the 4th of July wasn't always a thing. America didn't become America The Beautiful overnight. By now you've heard of a little event called the American Revolution, when a bunch of salty landowners, intellectuals and musketeers from the original thirteen American colonies got together and decided to kick the collective British butt off the continent. Even after the Declaration of Independence was signed (7/4/1776, hecky yes) there were some big, lingering questions. What was the new nation going to be? Was it going to be a unified nation at all, or would each colony have its own independent government? Who was in charge of bringing snacks? Did we feel like something salty or something sweet? How about drinks—was Dr. Pepper good for everyone, or did we need to throw some 7-Up into the mix? And oh yeah—how were we going to pay for this war we started? The colonies (now the independent states) needed some kind of government to keep them working together during the war. So a group of delegates, or representatives, from each state assembled in a rarefied gentlemen's club called the Second Continental Congress. At a meeting in Philadelphia these men (yes, they were indeed all men and white and mostly old) drafted the Articles of Confederation, a document outlining the basic laws of the new United States of America. But, pro-tip: don't get the Articles of Confederation confused with the Constitution. The Second Continental Congress finished the new document on November 15th, 1777. The current Constitution didn't exist until a few years later (it was framed, or written, between 1787 and 89). But hey, don't worry too much about the dates. Just think of the Articles of Confederation as Friendster and the Constitution as Facebook. One followed the other…and found a bit more success.    So why did this prototype United States only last a few years? Under the Articles of Confederation, the States were basically allowed to do whatever they wanted, except wage war or make alliances with other countries. The new national government didn't have much meat on its bones—it lacked a Supreme Court, a President, and an agency to collect taxes. In fact, the whole tax-collection method was basically the honor system: states were supposed to send money to the national Congress on their own time. That's kind of like letting someone grade their own test.Maybe they'll do it…or maybe they'll just give themselves an A and move on. Anyway, under the Articles of Confederation the recently liberated colonies didn't exactly thrive. The new national Congress couldn't pay off debts from the Revolutionary War, which meant it couldn't pay the soldiers who risked their lives to fight the British. It had to print money when states didn't send in their taxes, causing inflation. The national currency, the "Continental," became worthless. (Source) America couldn't even make trade agreements with other nations, because there was always the possibility that individual states might break the rules and back out of them. The result? The economy stunk like week-old unrefrigerated fish fingers, and veteran soldiers started to rebel against state governments, looking for their paychecks and a better deal. People were even afraid that Britain or some other European country might try to sneak back in and re-conquer the feeble new nation. (Source) Most historians consider the era of the Articles of Confederation as a kind of temporary lull in the history of the American government. After some rough and tumble years, this seed of the real 'Murica eventually grew up into something bigger and better. And that, Shmoopers, is why people don't usually shoot off fireworks on November 15th (although, frankly, there's no bad day of the year for a fireworks display).