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Write a quick write using the Frederick Douglass prompt below.

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HW: Watch 1.2 Videos and Complete the Chapter 1 Week 2 Quiz on AP Classroom. Previous HW from Tuesday.

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What do you notice?

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The attacks of September 11th, 2001 came as a huge surprise, shocking the world and immediately dominating the news around the world. Ten years later, the reverberations from that shock and the varying reactions to it continue to affect nearly everyone in ways large and small. While most people remember where they were on that day, it can be difficult to recall what else was happening in the days just before. I thought it would be interesting to go through the newswires and find photos of events taking place around the world during the week of September 3 to September 10, 2001. Some of the photos are directly related to the upcoming attacks, or the fallout that resulted, many have nothing at all to do with the attacks, but simply show glimpses of what was happening at that time. Gathered here is a time capsule of images taken during this week of September, one decade ago, before everything changed. This entry is part one of a three-part series on the 10th Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks -- (see also Part 2: The Day of the Attacks and Part 3: The Decade Since).

View this page Hints: full screen. Skip to the next and previous photo by typing j/k or ←/→.

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The attacks of September 11th, 2001 came as a huge surprise, shocking the world and immediately dominating the news around the world. Ten years later, the reverberations from that shock and the varying reactions to it continue to affect nearly everyone in ways large and small.

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How do you balance power between the government and individual rights?

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How do you balance power between the government and individual rights?

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Identify how the Federalists and Anti-Federalists both influenced the Constitution. 

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Identify how the Federalists and Anti-Federalists both influenced the Constitution. 

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I will be able to identify the influences of both Federalists and Anti-Federalists.

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Fair Tax Illinois-Example of Minority v. Majority Rule?

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Fair Tax Illinois-Example of Minority v. Majority Rule?

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When Illinois voters head to the polls on Nov. 3, 2020, they will vote on an amendment to the Illinois Constitution which would allow state lawmakers to impose a graduated income tax.

Currently, the state constitution mandates that income tax be levied at a flat rate across all incomes.

Voting 'yes' means support for changing to a graduated income tax, and voting 'no' signals opposition to a graduated income tax.

But what exactly is a graduated income tax? And how will it affect your taxes? Sun-Times politics reporters Tina Sfondeles and Rachel Hinton put together a guide of everything you need to know before voting on the issue.

What is a graduated income tax?

The specific progressive income tax Gov. J.B. Pritzker has proposed, and which will come before voters in November, would raise taxes only on people who earn $250,000 or more a year - incomes between $250,000 and $500,000 would be taxed at 7.75 percent. It would maintain the current tax rate of 4.95% on incomes between $100,000 and $250,000. And it would reduce the rate on incomes of $100,000 or less.

Income from $500,000 to $1 million would be taxed 7.85 percent and income over $1 million would be taxed 7.99 percent. The corporate tax rate within the package would also be raised to 7.99 percent.

Democrats have said the new personal income tax rates would bring in $3.57 billion, and the new corporate tax rate would bring in $350 million.

The current income tax levied on all taxpayers is 4.95%. The flat tax rate, which has fluctuated over the years, has been part of the Illinois constitution since 1970, a year after income tax was first enacted in Illinois. With a constitutional change, the Pritzker administration estimates that 97% of Illinois residents will see at least a modest decrease in their income taxes.

Why is there a referendum? Why is this coming up for a vote?

The Illinois Constitution lays out the rules for how an amendment introduced in the Legislature can be adopted. To become part of the constitution, a proposed amendment must be approved by either 60 percent of those voting on the question or a majority of those voting in the election.

How do I figure out how much I might pay under a graduated income tax?

Use the state's calculator linked below to see how much your income taxes might change.

How many states have it?

Thirty-four states have a graduated income tax.

When would the new rates take effect?

The new income tax rates are currently set to go into effect Jan. 1, 2021.

Who stands to benefit?

The money generated from the tax will help pay off the state's bill backlog which stood at $6.29 billion on Jan. 3 and some middle and low-income taxpayers will see some savings.

Find out how much your income taxes might change under the proposed legislation using the state's graduated income tax calculator.

History of Income Tax in Illinois

Illinois has collected individual income tax since 1969, when the tax rate was 2.5%.

Graphic not displaying correctly? Click here.

Read our previous coverage of the proposed graduated income tax:

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Everything you need to know about the proposed graduated income tax

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When Illinois voters head to the polls on Nov. 3, 2020, they will vote on an amendment to the Illinois Constitution which would allow state lawmakers to impose a graduated income tax. Currently, the state constitution mandates that income tax be levied at a flat rate across all incomes.

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The title of Alexander Keyssar's new book-Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?-is also, he says, the question Americans ask themselves every four years. The Stirling professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School recently spoke with Harvard Magazine about the book and about why the Electoral College, an institution that's been unpopular almost from the moment it was founded, has prevailed to this day.
Harvard Magazine: What's the origin story for your new book? How and why did this project start?
Alexander Keyssar: The book really began, I think, after the 2000 election, when the winner of the electoral vote received only a minority of the popular vote. I began to wonder why we still have the Electoral College, what had prevented its reform or abolition. After doing a bit of reading and research, it seemed that the most standard answer to that question-that small states prevented reform-simply was not accurate. As I read about past efforts at reform, I also came to realize that those efforts were very extensive and had been going on for a very long time, which made the question all the more compelling. The question that is the title of the book is both a scholarly, analytic question, and a question about public understandings. It's a question that several hundred million Americans ask themselves every four years.
What do you see as the connection between this book and your earlier work, much of it focused on voting rights?
There is no right to vote for president guaranteed in the United States Constitution.

Interestingly, when I wrote the first edition of The Right to Vote, I said very little about the Electoral College, which then troubled me because that book was published in 2000-just before the election, in which the Electoral College played a significant role. But the Electoral College just wasn't on my mind.
More than 1,000 constitutional amendments have been introduced to change the Electoral College. What are the defects in the system that have caused people to want to reform it for almost its entire existence?
But the 2000 election made me think about what voting rights meant, given the peculiarity of the presidential election system, of the Electoral College. There was also another very specific link, which was something that arose during the dispute over the 2000 election: it became clear that individual state legislatures retained the right to choose electors by themselves, without holding popular elections. One of the Supreme Court justices-I think it was Justice Scalia-in the Supreme Court case in 2000 pointed out there is no right to vote for president guaranteed in the United States Constitution. So that is the intellectual link between the two books.

The Electoral College began to be unpopular within a few years after it was adopted. There were a number of features of [its] design that were regarded as problematic, and the foci of concern changed over time. In the early years, the central concern was the fact that each state could decide how to choose electors, which meant that it could choose all its electors by "winner-take-all," it could have an election that allocated electors by [congressional] district, or it could have no election at all, and the state legislature would just choose electors. All of those things happened. Moreover, by the 1790s, different states started changing how they were going to choose electors from one election to the next, to game the system in a partisan fashion. By the time you get into the 1810s-1820s, you have a presidential electoral system in which there was no uniformity from state to state, and each state's processes could (and did) change from election to election. That was regarded by large numbers of people, including members of Congress, even James Madison, as no way to run a railroad. (Admittedly, there were no railroads at the time!) What resulted was a desire to create uniformity and stability. Most leading politicians also thought that there should be district elections for electors, and the Senate approved constitutional amendments for district elections four times between 1813 and 1826.
What would be the difference between district elections, which you mentioned a moment ago, and what we have now? Would electors be assigned on a district level rather than the state level?
One set of problems, thus, had to do with the variability in how each state chose electors. That variability comes to an end by the 1830s, when just about all states adopted a winner-take-all system. Since then, there have been repeated and insistent objections to the use of winner-take-all. People just don't think that it's appropriate or fair to have a system in which a candidate who gets 52 percent of the popular vote in a state receives all of the electoral votes. That feature is thought of as undemocratic; and it deforms election campaigns. Other critics believed that the presence of intermediaries, meaning the electors themselves, was profoundly undemocratic and hazardous, because the will of the people could be ignored or overridden. As American political values on the whole became more democratic, the presence of any kind of intermediaries and any weighting of votes so that not all votes counted equally began to seem more and more objectionable.

Exactly. Electors would be assigned according to who won the popular vote in each district, which meant that individual states would likely not wield large blocks of electoral votes. One worry about district elections, in the nineteenth century and now, is that they could readily import the problem of gerrymandering into presidential elections.

Let me go back to your larger question of what were the things people objected to in the early decades. There was also considerable concern, as there has been only occasionally since then, about a feature of the system that's called the contingent election system. The Constitution requires that the president receive a majority of electoral votes. If no candidate gets a majority, then the election gets turned over to the House of Representatives, using an odd formula in which every state delegation gets one vote. That part of the system greatly advantages small states because every state, no matter its size, had the same weight. This system was used in 1800, it was used in 1824, and a lot of people believed that it would be continue to be used very frequently. So that was another source of concern and desire for reform, to get rid of the contingent election system and if possible, to figure out some way to not have Congress involved at all in choosing a president.
How did we get the present-day winner-take-all system? Isn't that at odds with the reason the Electoral College was invented in the first place?
That particular problematic feature of the Electoral College is one that we do not pay much attention to now, because it hasn't been deployed in a long time. But there was a lot of attention focused on it as recently as 1992, when Ross Perot ran for president. It looked for a while as though he would get enough electoral votes to toss the election into the House.

Winner-take-all was not really envisioned by the framers. When the Constitution was written, there were no political parties. It was written in the belief that there really would not be political parties and that that there should not be. If you think about the design of the Electoral College and the need to have a majority to win an election, a lot of people thought that what would happen would be that states would cast their electoral votes for four or five or six different people. Nobody would get a majority, and then it would go to the House of Representatives and they would sort it out.
Can you think of any society whose election system works in a way remotely comparable to ours?
Winner-take-all emerges out of the dynamics of partisan competition. There was a famous incident in 1800, following in the wake of the previous election in 1796, when Thomas Jefferson had lost the presidency to John Adams very narrowly. Virginia's electors were chosen through a district system, and there had been one or two Virginia electors who voted for Adams. The votes that Adams received from Virginia helped him to win the election. When the 1800 election was approaching-a replay between the same two candidates-Virginia changed its system to winner-take-all, to ensure that Jefferson would get all of [its] electoral votes. Massachusetts retaliated by doing something similar, and that same partisan logic begins to take over, extending to all states by the 1830s. The dominant political party in each state preferred having winner-take-all. Everybody at the time said that they would be happy to go to a district system if everybody else would. But they weren't going to do it by themselves. That stance has reappeared often in more recent history.
You've talked and written elsewhere about the possibility of enacting a federal law or even a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to vote. If we had such a law, could that then be the basis for challenges to the Electoral College in some way?
I can't say that there isn't one or that there hasn't ever been. But our electoral system is just absurdly complex and distanced from its original design and the political world that it was designed for. I don't know of any system now that is even remotely as complicated. The complexity of the system, we don't often think about-we often tend to think that the problematic features of it are winner-take-all, and the fact that the small states get a slight advantage in the number of electoral votes. In fact, there are other problematic features as well, such as the ability of the state legislatures to change the process and the contingent election system. To some extent these different features were designed to offset or counterbalance one another. The very complexity of the system has meant that it's extremely difficult to change any one piece of it without changing something else.
The number of electoral votes a state gets is not entirely in proportion to its population relative to other states. Is that a modern problem?
A federal law would not have any impact on a constitutional provision. A constitutional amendment that guarantees every American citizen of voting age the right to vote for president would in effect create a conflict between two features of the Constitution. It would create a conflict between that amendment and the current design of the Electoral College, as outlined in Article II and the Twelfth Amendment. So a national right-to-vote amendment would-at the least-compel modification of at least one piece of the Electoral College, which is the piece that says that each state legislature can decide by itself the manner in which electors will be chosen.

That's in the Constitution. The number of electoral votes a state gets is proportional to its number of representatives and senators. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, they had a lot of trouble figuring out how to choose the president. They didn't have any models. They really just could not agree. The default position was that Congress would choose the president. And in a series of straw votes in the course of the summer, that was the position that had the most backing. But then within a day or two or three of these straw votes, they realized that that was actually not a good idea. Because then you don't have separation of powers. And then the president would be beholden to Congress and that arrangement would set up all sorts of corruption.

The framers floated a whole lot of other ideas, including having the governors choose or having a national popular vote, which James Madison supported. But they couldn't reach agreement. It was a long hot summer in Philadelphia, everybody was tired, and at the end of the summer the convention went on vacation for a week. They left a small set of knotty, unresolved issues to a committee, the Committee on Unfinished Parts. It's that committee which comes up with the design of the Electoral College, which, with modifications, is then adopted by the entire convention. One way to understand what the Electoral College is, by the way, is that it's a replica of Congress in its composition. The same number of representatives and senators from each state. It's a replica of Congress, but it does not legislate. It only meets once and only has one order of business to do, and thus the problems of corruption and lack of separation of powers are solved. What that institutional design did from the outset was give a slight advantage to small states.
You mentioned just now the idea of a national popular vote. Your book discusses how, before the Civil War, a national popular vote was a nonstarter for slaveholding states because, obviously, slaves wouldn't be allowed to vote, and the voting power of southern states relative to other states would be diminished. What about after the Civil War? Why and how did race continue to play a role in opposition to a national popular vote?
The perversity of the design of the Electoral College is that a state gets the same number of electoral votes regardless of turnout in elections and regardless of how much voter suppression it engages in.

After the Civil War, after a period of contestation and Reconstruction, white supremacist governments returned to power in the South, and they disenfranchised African Americans who had been voting and wielding some political power. Thereafter the South, in terms of representation, benefits not from the [Constitution's] three-fifths clause, but effectively from a five-fifths clause. In other words, southern states get electoral votes in proportion to their entire black populations, but that population is not allowed to vote. Given that situation, the white South is fiercely resistant to a national popular vote, because it would do one of two things or perhaps both. It would put pressure on a state to try to maintain its political weight by enfranchising African Americans, which they did not want to do, or those states would lose influence in presidential elections, significant influence, because they would have many fewer voters. Under a national popular vote, the influence of a state is determined by the number of voters who cast ballots; under the Electoral College, it is determined by the state's population.
I don't think most people know that we almost got rid of the Electoral College in the late '60s.
The perversity of the design of the Electoral College is that a state gets the same number of electoral votes regardless of turnout in elections and regardless of how much voter suppression it engages in. There was only one southerner from 1890 to the 1960s who introduced an amendment calling for a national popular vote, and he ends up being pilloried for it. By the late 1940s, it's become a common view that the Electoral College is key to protecting the "southern way of life." In the end, at the moment at which the United States comes closest to adopting a national popular vote, which is in 1969-70, a constitutional amendment passes the House by an 82 percent vote, but when it gets to the Senate it is defeated by a filibuster by southern segregationist senators. The amendment's sponsors needed a two-thirds vote to end the filibuster, which meant that all it took was 34 senators to stop the national popular vote amendment.

I agree.

Do you have a point of view about whether and how we ought to reform the Electoral College?

My view is that our electoral system should embody certain key values. One is that all votes should count equally. No matter where you live, no matter who you are, all votes should count the same. The system should also be stable in the sense of not changing, not varying from one election to the next. And it should be transparent. The principles on which it's constructed should be transparent and widely regarded as fair by the public. Based on those values, I certainly think that the ideal system would be to have a national popular vote.
Do you think that if we continue seeing "wrong winner" elections, it will eventually force a full-blown legitimacy crisis? How long can that keep happening without something breaking?
Until the 2000 election, it was widely believed that if there was a "wrong winner" election, we'd get rid of the Electoral College.
To bring current events back full circle to some of the earlier history from your book, I was struck by some rhetoric of segregationist southern politicians about what would happen if there were a national popular vote. They'd say that their votes were going to be "debauched" by the votes of undesirables (i.e., black voters). It's impossible not to connect that to present-day rhetoric about voter fraud.
Very well said. Until the 2000 election, it was widely believed that if there was a "wrong winner" election, we'd get rid of the Electoral College. That's what everybody was saying in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. Well, we didn't get rid of it after 2000, and then, of course, we got 2016-when the gap between the popular and electoral votes was much larger than in 2000. I think that with the election of President Trump, and in part because of the nature of his presidency, we already have the beginnings of a legitimacy crisis. I think it would be intensified if it were to happen again. In the last few pages of the book I ruminate about this a bit. In an era of very sharp political polarization, you want to have an electoral system that is understood to be principled and fair. A lot of people doubt that now.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Yes, I think there is a direct line that goes from those kinds of sentiments to some of the support for Trump.

I want to emphasize that one of the discoveries that propelled me forward in [writing] the book, and that I think is very important, is that-contrary to conventional wisdom-the primary obstacle to reforming the Electoral College has not been the small states. The "small state" explanation has been conventional wisdom for about 40 years, and it was widely believed in the 1940s and 1950s as well. This view that the small states have prevented reform because of the additional electoral vote weight that they get is simply not true. It's not true in terms of who the leaders in the movements for change were, and it's not true in terms of the roll call votes when proposals for a national popular vote came to a vote in Congress.

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Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

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The title of Alexander Keyssar's new book-Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? -is also, he says, the question Americans ask themselves every four years. The Stirling professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School recently spoke with Harvard Magazine about the book and about why the Electoral College, an institution that's been unpopular almost from the moment it was founded, has prevailed to this day.

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If Government shares power, why do voters in the modern era show up more for Presidential elections?

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If Government shares power, why do voters in the modern era show up more for Presidential elections?

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With three-and-a-half months to the midterm elections, it's still unclear the extent to which Republicans' advantage in voter engagement will translate into more actual House and Senate seats. But we'll go out on a limb on two predictions: A lot fewer people will vote this year than did in 2012, and Democrats are likely to suffer accordingly.

Voter turnout regularly drops in midterm elections, and has done so since the 1840s. In 2008, for instance, 57.1% of the voting-age population cast ballots - the highest level in four decades - as Barack Obama became the first African American elected president. But two years later only 36.9% voted in the midterm election that put the House back in Republican hands. For Obama's re-election in 2012, turnout rebounded to 53.7%.

Who turns out to vote and why is of much more than academic interest. In an era of increasingly polarized politics, campaign strategists must decide how much effort to put into persuading independent-minded voters to come out and support their candidate without antagonizing their party's core supporters, who are more likely to vote anyway. Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were largely due to his campaign's success in expanding the electorate - inspiring new voters and increasing turnout among blacks.

Turnout calculations can vary somewhat depending on which population estimate is used as a base and which vote measure is compared against it. For our chart, we used Census estimates of the voting-age population each year since 1948 and vote totals as compiled by the Clerk of the House.

Some researchers, though, argue that focusing on the voting-age population, rather than the people actually eligible to vote, distorts the picture. For instance, Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist, estimates that in 2012 roughly 20.5 million U.S. residents aged 18 and up, or 8.5% of the voting-age population, were non-citizens and, hence, ineligible to vote. Another 3.2 million couldn't vote because they were in prison or had been convicted of a felony.

By subtracting those people, and adding in the 4.7 million American citizens living overseas but still eligible to vote, McDonald estimates the "voting-eligible population," or VEP, in 2012 was 222.3 million. Based on that adjusted base, turnout in recent elections was rather higher: 61.6% in 2008, 39.9% in 2010 and 58.2% in 2012.

History break: As McDonald's chart shows, in the early decades of the republic, midterm elections typically drew more voters than presidential contests. Back then, most states only gave voting rights to property owners, and Congress - not the presidency - tended to be the federal government's main power center and focus of electoral campaigns. Those conditions changed in the 1820s during the Second Party System, when most states repealed property qualifications, interest in politics soared as politicians increasingly appealed to ordinary people, and the parties directed much of their energy on capturing the White House after the disputed 1824 election (which John Quincy Adams won even though Andrew Jackson received the most votes). By 1840, turnout among the white, male electorate topped 80%; the total number of votes cast that year was 60% higher than in 1836. (Blacks received the right to vote in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment, women in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment.)

Though political scientists long have noted the midterm dropoff, they don't agree on precisely what it means. In an influential 1987 article, James E. Campbell theorized that "the surge of interest and information in presidential elections" typically works to the advantage of one party or the other; that party's partisans become more likely to vote, while those of the disadvantaged party are more likely to stay home during presidential elections. Independents, "lacking a standing partisan commitment...should divide disproportionately in favor of the advantaged party." Midterm elections lack that "wow" factor, according to Campbell, and turnout among both partisans and independents return to more normal levels and patterns.

A recent paper by Brown University researcher Brian Knight seeks to evaluate that surge-and-decline theory, as well as two competing explanations of why the president's party nearly always loses seats at the midterms: a "presidential penalty," or general preference among midterm voters for expressing dissatisfaction with the president's performance or ensuring that his party doesn't control all the levers of government, and recurring shifts in voter ideology between presidential and midterm elections. Knight concluded that while all three factors contribute to what he calls the "midterm gap," the presidential penalty has the most impact.

In any event, if 2014 follows the trend Democrats are almost certain to lose seats in the House and Senate this November, and many pollsters predict as much. As Knight notes, since 1842 the President's party has lost seats in 40 of 43 midterms - the exceptions being 1934, 1998 and 2002. (Whether Republicans will pick up enough Senate seats to take control of that chamber is a much closer question.) And as Campbell concluded in his paper, "For the congressional candidates of the president's party, the return to normalcy at the midterm represents a loss."

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Voter turnout always drops off for midterm elections, but why?

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With three-and-a-half months to the midterm elections, it's still unclear the extent to which Republicans' advantage in voter engagement will translate into more actual House and Senate seats. But we'll go out on a limb on two predictions: A lot fewer people will vote this year than did in 2012, and Democrats are likely to suffer accordingly.

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Does slavery still affect the Constitution today?

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Does slavery still affect the Constitution today?

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Yes, Virginia, the Constitution Was Pro-Slavery

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Unlike Sean Wilentz suggests in “The New York Times,” the Constitution was not originally anti-slavery.