Historians estimate that approximately 472,000 Africans were kidnapped and brought to the North American mainland between 1619 and 1860. Of these, nearly 18 percent died during the transatlantic voyage from Africa to the New World. Known as the "middle passage," this sea voyage could range from one to six months, depending on the weather. On large ships, several hundred slaves could be packed below decks. Branded and chained together, they endured conditions of squalor, and disease and starvation claimed many lives. Olaudah Equiano, who had been enslaved and emancipated,...

Emma Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Kovno, Russia (present-day Lithuania). In 1885, at the age of sixteen, she emigrated to the United States, becoming a well-known author and lecturer promoting anarchism, workers’ rights, birth control, and other political and social movements. Anarchists believed that people could naturally govern themselves without systematic controls. They openly rejected US involvement in World War I, and their anti-government activities concerned many in authority. During World War I, Goldman actively protested the war and encouraged men not to...

By the beginning of 1770, there were 4,000 British soldiers in Boston, a city with 15,000 inhabitants, and tensions were running high. On the evening of March 5, crowds of day laborers, apprentices, and merchant sailors began to pelt British soldiers with snowballs and rocks. A shot rang out, and then several soldiers fired their weapons. When it was over, five civilians lay dead or dying, including Crispus Attucks, an African American merchant sailor who had escaped from slavery more than twenty years earlier. Produced just three weeks after the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere’s...

Even though the Sedition Act of 1798 had expired in 1801, individuals could still be charged with sedition. On January 20, 1815, Thomas Rowe and Joshua Hooper, publishers of the Massachusetts newspaper The Yankee , printed an article criticizing the governor and state legislature for failing to follow through on threats to secede from the United States during the War of 1812. Within days they were arrested for sedition and brought before the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The War of 1812 between England and the United States was unpopular in New...

On August 14, 1798, the Columbian Centinel , a Boston newspaper aligned with the Federalist Party, printed this copy of the Sedition Act. It was the last in a series of legislation known as the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by President John Adams in July. These acts were written to silence Democratic-Republicans’ criticism of Federalist policies during the Quasi-War with France. The Sedition Act, which was the only one in the series that applied to citizens of the United States, made it illegal to “write, print, utter or...

In September 1970, J. Edgar Hoover composed an open letter to American students detailing his view on civil unrest at the nation’s colleges and universities and warning against the elements he believed responsible. Hoover opened with the empathetic assertion that “[t]here’s nothing wrong with student dissent or student demands for changes in society or the display of student unhappiness over aspects of our national policy.” Hoover drew a line, however, between “legitimate” student dissent and “extremism.” Extremists “ridicule the flag, poke fun at American institutions, seek to...

President James Monroe’s 1823 annual message to Congress included a warning to European powers not to interfere in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. This portion of the address is known as the Monroe Doctrine. The United States was wary of European intervention in Florida, the Pacific Northwest, and Latin America. In 1821, Russia claimed control of the entire Pacific coast from Alaska to Oregon and closed the area to foreign shipping. This development coincided with rumors that Spain, with the help of European allies, was planning to reconquer its former Latin American...

Fernando de Rivera y Moncada, military commander of Alta California, wrote this letter from Mission San Gabriel. Rivera y Moncada was instrumental in the development of missions in California and was in a sometimes-contentious relationship with Father Junipero Serra, the Father President mentioned in the letter. When Rivera y Moncada wrote this letter, he was returning to his headquarters at the Presidio of Monterey after a nine-month stay at the Presidio of San Diego. There he had supervised the hunt for the leaders of an Indian uprising that had destroyed Mission San Diego in...

This letter, written on behalf of the king of Spain by Francisco Garcia de Loaysa, the president of the Council of the Indies, acknowledges Francisco Coronado’s report of the famous Niza expedition of the previous year and authorizes Coronado to explore the northern lands, in the search for wealth and resources, and in the hope that “through your excellent efforts you will bring the natives of that province under our sway and dominion and will bring them into the knowledge of the holy catholic faith.” This letter is possibly the earliest surviving official authorization by any...

Responding to fears of Japanese spies within the United States, President Roosevelt signed an order authorizing the forced relocation and confinement of more than 110,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans living in the West. This broadside, distributed in Los Angeles, ordered “all persons of Japanese ancestry” to assemble for transport to detention camps. The document gives specific directions to families about what they could take with them—household and personal items limited to “that which can be carried by the individual or family group.” Although some Japanese...