legal cases, acts, and laws

Question 1

Scopes trial

Answer 1

• William Jennings Bryan
• 1925
• high school teacher, John T. Scopes, accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act -> illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school
• theological contest and as a trial on whether evolution should be taught in schools
• fundementalist-modernist controversy

Question 2

Jim Crow laws

Answer 2

• state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States
• late 19th and early 20th centuries
• enforced racial segregation
• “Jim Crow” = pejorative term for an African American
• formal and informal racial segregation policies
• white and black people couldn’t be in the same public spaces together - couldn’t be patients in many hospitals, hardly any social and economical gains
• overturned in 1965

Question 3

Madbury v Madison

Answer 3

• American courts have the power to strike down laws and statutes they find to violate the Constitution of the United States
• laws can be upheld or invalidated - power to veto

Madison refused to hand over commission, supreme court gave itself power to uphold or invalidate federal laws

Question 4

The Homestead Act

Answer 4

• enacted during the Civil War in 1862
• provided that any adult citizen, or intended citizen, who had never borne arms against the U.S. government could claim 160 acres of surveyed government land

Question 5

Emancipation Proclamation

Answer 5

• provisional proclamation published on 9/22/1862
• after the battle of Antietam in Maryland
• slaves free but not “freed” by Lincoln
  -> encouraged to escape from owners (restriction, not immediate abolition)
  1863 - changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in Confederate states from enslaved to free
• slavery officially ends with the adoption of the 13th Amendment

Question 6

Nullification

Answer 6

• authority for individual states to nullify federal laws they find unconstitutional within their borders
• Nullification Crisis, Andrew Jackson saw nullification as a threat to the Union
• result of southern states resistance to imposed, protective tariffs

Question 7

Prohibition

Answer 7

• moderation abstinence
• temperance movement; organized crime as a result, underground distribution of alcohol -> Great Depression effect
• 18th Amendment adopted 1919

Question 8

FIRST New Deal

Answer 8

• 1933-1934
• set of domestic policies enacted under President Franklin D. Roosevelt that dramatically expanded the federal government’s role in the economy in response to the Great Depression
• the “alphabet soup” of relief, recovery, and reform agencies it created

Question 9

SECOND New Deal

Answer 9

• 1935-1938
• offered further legislative reforms and created the groundwork for today’s modern social welfare system
• massive military expenditures of World War II, not the New Deal, that eventually pulled the United States out of the Great Depression

Question 10

The Bonus March

Answer 10

• war veterans requiring immediate payment instead of certificates redeemable in 1945
• Herbert Hoover x the Bonus army

Question 11

Scott v Sandford (The Dred Scott decision)

Answer 11

• US Supreme Court ruled that a slave (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory was not thereby entitled to his freedom
• 1857
• SCOTUS ruled that the Missouri Compromise (1820) was unconstitutional -> US Congress didn’t have the authority to prohibit slavery in the territories

-> it stated that African Americans were not and could never be US citizens

Question 12

Plessy v Ferguson

Answer 12

• U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for African-Americans were equal in quality to those of white people
• separate but equal

Question 13

Loving v Virginia

Answer 13

• civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Question 14

Cumming vs Country Board of Education

Answer 14

• it sanctioned de jure segregation of races in American schools
• possibility to establish white school even if there are no comparable african-american schools around
• the decision was overruled by Brown v. Board of Education

Question 15

Civil rights Act (1964)

Answer 15

• no discrimination and segregation

Question 16

Voting rights Act (1965)

Answer 16

• no citizen should be denied the right to vote based on race (similar to 15th amendment)

Question 17

Sugar Act

Answer 17

• 1764
• placed tax on sugar and molasses, disrupting the economy, rum was a huge part of export

Question 18

Stamp Act

Answer 18

• 1765 (1766 reappealed)
• direct tax on British colonies, prints on stamped paper, paid in British currency

Question 19

Tea Act

Answer 19

• 1773
• The colonists had never accepted the constitutionality of the duty on tea, and the Tea Act rekindled their opposition to it
• Their resistance culminated in the BOSTON TEA PARTY on December 16, 1773, in which colonists boarded East India Company ships and dumped their loads of tea overboard

Question 20

Volstead Act

Answer 20

1920
- 18th amendment implemented by the act
PROHIBITION
- upper classes flaunted the law
- a boost to organised crime, underground distribution of alcohol
- 21st amendment overruled it