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First political party in the United States
The U.S. Constitution never expressly barred Muslims from holding federal office; and was adopted to prevent exactly that kind of exclusion . Historical records show debates in the 1780s acknowledged ...
Elbridge Gerry is the historical figure most directly tied to the origin of the word after he signed a Massachusetts redistricting bill in 1812 that produced an irregularly shaped district and sparked...
The War of 1812 resulted from a rather than a single cause: American protests against British maritime policies including impressment and trade restrictions, British backing of Indigenous resistance o...
Across U.S. history the party that has dominated Senate seats by state has shifted dramatically: in the 19th and early 20th centuries party labels and regional blocs (Federalists, Democratic‑Republica...
Article VI’s “No Religious Test” clause, adopted by the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and operative with the new federal government in 1789, barred any *formal* religious test as a qualification f...
Comparing contemporary U.S. polarization to Weimar Germany misleads more than it illuminates: better American analogues are internal crises that share partisan realignment, institutional strain, and m...
Sedition prosecutions in U.S. history have sometimes carried steep penalties: under the Sedition Act of 1798 defendants faced fines and imprisonment — courts recorded sentences like nine months for so...
The word “gerrymander” and the political cartoon that popularized it date to Massachusetts in 1812, after Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a redistricting law on February 11, 1812 that produced an oddly...