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A Spotlight on a Primary Source by George III

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The Stamp Act, 1765 | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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The Stamp Act, 1765 | | On March 22, 1765, the British Parliament passed the “Stamp Act” to help pay for British troops stationed in the colonies during the Seven Years’ War. The act required the colonists to pay a tax, represented by a stamp, on various forms of papers, documents, and playing cards. It was a direct tax imposed by the British government without the approval of the colonial legislatures and was payable in hard-to-obtain British sterling, rather than colonial currency. Further, those accused of violating the Stamp Act could be prosecuted in Vice-Admiralty Courts, which had no juries and could be held anywhere in the British Empire. Important dates in the Stamp Act Crisis March 22, 1765: British Parliament passes the “Stamp Act.” October 1765: Delegates from nine colonies meet in New York City in what has become known as the Stamp Act Congress, the first united action by the colonies; the congress acknowledges that while Parliament has a right to regulate colonial trade, it does not have the power to tax the colonies since they were unrepresented in Parliament. November 1, 1765: The Stamp Act goes into effect in the colonies. March 1766: Colonial resistance to the Stamp Act and pressure from London merchants prompt Parliament to abolish the Stamp Act. March 1766: Parliament issues the Declaratory Act, which states that the king and Parliament have full legislative power over the colonies. Excerpts King George III, An Act for granting and applying certain stamp duties, 1765 An act for granting and applying certain stamp duties, and other duties, in the British colonies and plantations in America, towards further defraying the expences of defending, protecting, and securing the same; and for amending such parts of the several acts of parliament relating to the trade and revenues of the said colonies and plantations, as direct the manner of determining and recovering the penalties and forfeitures therein mentioned. WHEREAS by an act made in the last session of parliament, several duties were granted, continued, and appropriated, towards defraying the expences of defending, protecting, and securing, the British colonies and plantations in America: and whereas it is just and necessary, that provision be made for raising a further revenue within your Majesty’s dominions in America, towards defraying the said expences: we, your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the commons of Great Britain in parliament assembled, have therefore resolved to give and grant unto your Majesty the several rates and duties herein after mentioned; and do most humbly beseech your Majesty that it may be enacted, and be it enacted by the King’s most excellent majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, in this present parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, That from and after the first day of November, one thousand seven hundred and sixty five, there shall be raised, levied, collected, and paid unto his Majesty, his heirs, and successors, throughout the colonies and plantations in America which now are, or hereafter may be, under the dominion of his Majesty, his heirs and successors, For every skin or piece of vellum or parchment, or sheet or piece of paper, on which shall be ingrossed, written, or printed, any licence, appointment, or admission of any counsellor, solicitor, attorney, advocate, or proctor, to practice in any court, or of any notary within the said colonies and plantations, a stamp duty of ten pounds. For every skin or piece of vellum or parchment, or sheet or piece of paper, on which shall be ingrossed, written, or printed, any note or bill of lading, which shall be signed for any kind of goods, wares, or merchandize, to be exported from . . . within the said colonies and plantations, a stamp duty of four pence. For every skin or piece of vellum or parchment, or sheet or piece of paper, on which shall be ingrossed, written, or printed, any licence for retailing of wine, to be granted to any person who shall take out a licence for retailing of spirituous liquors, within the said colonies and plantations, a stamp duty of three pounds, For every skin or piece of vellum or parchment, or sheet or piece of paper, on which shall be ingrossed, written, or printed, any notarial act, bond, deed, letter, of attorney, procuration, mortgage, release, or other obligatory instrument, not herein before charged, within the said colonies and plantations, a stamp duty of two shillings and three pence. And for and upon every pack of playing cards, and all dice, which shall be sold or used within the said colonies and plantations, the several stamp duties following (that is to say) For every pack of such cards, the sum of one shilling. And for every pair of such dice, the sum of ten shillings. And for and upon every paper, commonly called a pamphlet, and upon every newspaper, containing publick news, intelligence, or occurrences, which shall be printed, dispersed, and made publick, within any of the said colonies and plantations, and for and upon such advertisements as are herein after mentioned, the respective duties following (that is to say) For every other almanack or calendar for any one particular year, which shall be written or printed within the said colonies or plantations, a stamp duty of four pence. . . . A copy of the excerpts is available.

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Quartering Act. The British further angered American colonists with the Quartering Act, which required the colonies to provide barracks and supplies to British troops.

Stamp Act. Parliament's first direct tax on the American colonies, this act, like those passed in 1764, was enacted to raise money for Britain. It taxed newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, broadsides, legal documents, dice, and playing cards. Issued by Britain, the stamps were affixed to documents or packages to show that the tax had been paid.

Organized Colonial Protest. American colonists responded to Parliament's acts with organized protest. Throughout the colonies, a network of secret organizations known as the Sons of Liberty was created, aimed at intimidating the stamp agents who collected Parliament's taxes. Before the Stamp Act could even take effect, all the appointed stamp agents in the colonies had resigned. The Massachusetts Assembly suggested a meeting of all the colonies to work for the repeal of the Stamp Act. All but four colonies were represented. The Stamp Act Congress passed a "Declaration of Rights and Grievances," which claimed that American colonists were equal to all other British citizens, protested taxation without representation, and stated that, without colonial representation in Parliament, Parliament could not tax colonists. In addition, the colonists increased their nonimportation efforts.

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1764 to 1765 | Timeline | Articles and Essays | Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789 | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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Timeline 1764 Sugar Act. Parliament, desiring revenue from its North American colonies, passed the first law specifically aimed at raising colonial money for the Crown. The act increased duties on non-British goods shipped to the colonies.Currency Act. This act prohibited American colonies from issuing their own currency, angering many American colonists.Beginnings of Colonial Opposition.

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On November 1, 1765, the hated Stamp Act authorized by King George III went into effect in the colonies, despite months of protests. The act would be quickly repealed, but it started a series of events that led to the American Revolution.

The British government sought ways to raise money to support a standing army in the American colonies after the French and Indian War concluded. Nearly 10,000 British troops remained stationed on American soil after the conflict ended in 1763.

In 1764, Parliament had passed the Sugar Act, which cut import taxes in half on molasses (which was used to make rum) but also contained strict measures to collect taxes that most colonists had avoided paying. There was also a draft measure circulating about a second tax that could be coming from Parliament.

The debate over the Stamp Tax in early 1765 in Parliament was contentious. On the floor of Parliament, an Irishman, John Barre, deeply opposed the proposed tax on the American colonies and questioned Parliament's motives.

"As soon as you began to care about them, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule over them, in one department and another... sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon them; men whose behavior on many occasions has caused the blood of these sons of liberty to recoil within them," Barre said, coining the phrase that would be used back in the Colonies by a group of protesters.

The Sons of Liberty were formed in early 1765 in Boston and New York as concerns grew among colonists about more taxes and more control by the British government. On March 22, 1765, British Parliament finally passed the Stamp Act or Duties in American Colonies Act. It required colonists to pay taxes on every page of printed paper they used. The tax also included fees for playing cards, dice, and newspapers.

The reaction in the colonies was immediate. The protests were based on the legal principle that the colonial legislatures only had the power to tax residents who had representatives in those legislatures. That summer, Massachusetts called for a meeting of all the colonies - a Stamp Act Congress - to be held in New York in October 1765. Committees of Correspondence were also formed in the colonies to coordinate protests against the Stamp Act.

And on August 14, 1765, outrage boiled over in Boston. Protesters organized as the "Sons of Liberty" took to the streets in a defiant act against British rule. The Sons of Liberty met under what was known as the Liberty Tree near Boston Common. Hoisted on the tree was an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the city's stamp tax agent. Soon, a mob of several thousand people attacked Oliver's office and his home, and the effigy was stomped, decapitated, and burned.

News of the protests, the actions of the Stamp Congress, and the publication of Patrick Henry's Virginia Resolves fueled anger across the colonies, and many colonies created their own versions of the Sons of Liberty.

The Sons of Liberty would eventually include Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Benedict Arnold, Benjamin Edes, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, James Otis, Benjamin Rush, and Oliver Wolcott.

The tax did go into effect on November 1 with a general boycott underway in the Colonies against British goods. The Parliament repealed the Stamp Act the following year, facing additional pressure from British merchants who saw their sales to the Colonies plummet. But Parliament then passed the Declaratory Act, which stated its right in principle to tax the colonies as it saw fit.

The conflict with the British government continued to heat up, with the Tea Party protests of 1773, the passage of the Coercive Acts in 1774, and, finally, the outbreak of fighting in Massachusetts the following year.

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On This Day: The Stamp Act plants seeds of the Revolution

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On November 1, 1765, the hated Stamp Act authorized by King George III went into effect in the colonies, despite months of protests. The act would be quickly repealed, but it started a series of events that led to the American Revolution.

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Introduction

Early in 1766, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, of Philadelphia is one of many called to testify in London as the Members of Parliament struggle to understand why Americans had so forcibly resisted the Stamp Act. These British legislators hope to avoid a repeat of the furious reaction across the Atlantic as they ponder how to generate revenue from the colonies and remind those colonies of Parliament's right to tax-and control-them.

A year after the repeal of the Stamp Act and less than two months before Parliament passes the new Townshend Revenue Acts, a sense of what is to come is conveyed by Member of Parliament Thomas Whately as he hints to his correspondent (who will become a new customs commissioner) that "you will have much to do." This time the tax will come in the form of a duty on imports into the colonies, and the collection of those duties will be fully enforced.

On 29 June 1767 Parliament passes the Townshend Acts. They bear the name of Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is-as the chief treasurer of the British Empire-in charge of economic and financial matters. With the repeal of the Stamp Act, money is needed for "defraying the expenses" of administering the colonies in America. The Acts create a new Customs Commission and punish New York for refusing to abide by the Quartering Act of 1765.

Bostonians meet in Faneuil Hall the next October to consider a petition brought by fellow townsmen. It addresses a key issue raised by the Act-"the excessive use of foreign superfluities" -and the extent to which this has increased the colonists' reliance on and subjugation to Britain.

From Philadelphia come a series of twelve letters from "a Farmer in Pennsylvania." They are first printed in The Philadelphia Chronicle and circulated to nearly all the other colonial newspapers and appear in pamphlet form in both America and England. They are among the most widely read publications of the period. The "Farmer" is John Dickinson, a London-educated lawyer who has been a member of Pennsylvania's assembly. As New York is being punished by the Townshend Acts, Dickinson warns that "the cause of one is the cause of all." In a subsequent letter, he examines the constitutionality of the Townshend Acts and declares the new import duties "a dangerous innovation." The colonists are being taxed by Parliament without being represented in Parliament. And they are Englishmen and deserve the rights of Englishmen!

Resistance to the Townshend Acts takes many forms, and involves an expanding network of individuals, families, neighbors, communities, and colonies from New England to Georgia. "Ladies of the first quality" do their share and newspaper reports use their example to inform and inspire readers to take action. The Massachusetts House of Representatives (part of the General Court) addresses a circulatory (or circular) letter "to a sister colony" and sends it to all the other legislative assemblies "on this continent" in February 1768. British administrators order the Massachusetts House to stop the circulation of the letter and forbid the other colonies to support it, but the damage is done.

Of the 120 members of the Massachusetts House, 92 refuse to rescind this circular letter and their action inspires John Dickinson to once again take up his pen-this time to write a new song to the words of an old British military tune. The Liberty Song is printed on ballad sheets and sung throughout the colonies in a show of mutual support for resistance.

Massachusetts' royal governor Francis Bernard dissolves the colonial assembly of Massachusetts-the General Court. "Deprived of the Councils of a General Assembly," angry Bostonians call for a convention of Massachusetts towns in September 1768 to decide on next steps. And in far away Charlestown, South Carolina, support for this aggrieved sister colony to the north comes in a most dramatic fashion by means of "45 candles ... and

And then on 1 October, British troops begin to arrive in Boston.

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Early in 1766, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, of Philadelphia is one of many called to testify in London as the Members of Parliament struggle to understand why Americans had so forcibly resisted the Stamp Act.

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Repeal of the Stamp Act. Although some in Parliament thought the army should be used to enforce the Stamp Act (1765), others commended the colonists for resisting a tax passed by a legislative body in which they were not represented. The act was repealed, and the colonies abandoned their ban on imported British goods.

Declaratory Act. The repeal of the Stamp Act did not mean that Great Britain was surrendering any control over its colonies. The Declaratory Act, passed by Parliament on the same day the Stamp Act was repealed, stated that Parliament could make laws binding the American colonies "in all cases whatsoever."

Resistance to the Quartering Act in New York. New York served as headquarters for British troops in America, so the Quartering Act (1765) had a great impact on New York City. When the New York Assembly refused to assist in quartering troops, a skirmish occurred in which one colonist was wounded. Parliament suspended the Assembly's powers but never carried out the suspension, since the Assembly soon agreed to contribute money toward the quartering of troops.

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1766 to 1767 | Timeline | Articles and Essays | Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789 | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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Timeline 1766 Repeal of the Stamp Act. Although some in Parliament thought the army should be used to enforce the Stamp Act (1765), others commended the colonists for resisting a tax passed by a legislative body in which they were not represented. The act was repealed, and the colonies abandoned their ban on imported British goods.

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Boston King and the Black Loyalists of the American Revolution

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In the eighteenth century, black soldiers played a crucial role in the British military. During the American Revolutionary Wars (1776-1783), British commanders offered freedom to enslaved people willing to turn against their ‘masters’.

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EBSCO Information Services, Inc. | www.ebsco.com

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Boston King was born around 1760 on a plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, and is notable for his journey from enslavement to freedom and ultimately becoming a missionary in Africa. His father was kidnapped from Africa and his mother worked as a nurse and seamstress. King began his life in servitude at a young age, experiencing severe violence and punishment. During the American Revolution, he sought freedom by joining British forces, ultimately serving as a carpenter and participating in key military actions. After the war, King was recognized as a free man among the Black loyalists and relocated to Nova Scotia, where he became a prominent Methodist leader. In 1791, he emigrated to Sierra Leone, where he became the first Methodist missionary in Africa. King’s memoir, published in 1798, provides valuable insights into the experiences of Black individuals during the Revolutionary War and the challenges faced by Black communities in Nova Scotia. His life reflects themes of struggle, resilience, and the search for freedom and identity.

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Boston King was one of the many enslaved African Americans -- perhaps as many as 100,000 -- who risked punishment and even death in order to reach the British lines and a chance at freedom.Image Credit: British Crown copyright: Public Record Office, London. This document may be copied and downloaded for personal and research use only. You must apply to the Public Record Office for any other use.

King was born around 1760 near Charles Town (Charleston), South Carolina. His father, who had been kidnapped from Africa as child, was a driver on the plantation and knew how to read and write. His mother was a nurse and seamstress.

When he was sixteen, King was apprenticed to a carpenter, who treated him cruelly and once punished him so harshly that he was unable to work for three weeks. As the war moved closer to Charles Town, his master moved further inland. One day, King borrowed the master's horse to visit his parents, but another servant took the horse and stayed several days longer than permitted. King knew that he would be punished severely, and so he decided to join the British in Charles Town.

Soon after his arrival, a smallpox epidemic swept the region. The fugitive slaves, consigned to crowded and unsanitary living conditions, were especially vulnerable. King was stricken with smallpox; he and the other sick African Americans were carried away from the camp and abandoned by the British. Unlike most, King recovered.

Twice again King had to escape captivity, once from a British deserter, and later when the pilot boat on which he served was captured by an American whaleboat. King made his way up to New York, where he and thousands of other Loyalist refugees sought safety behind British lines at the close of the war, and where he met and married Violet, who had been a slave in North Carolina.

New York was the last American port to be evacuated by the British. While Washington negotiated with the British-commander-in-chief over the fate of the Loyalist fugative slave refugees, the rumor that they would be returned to their former masters filled them with "inexpressible anguish and terror." Boston King recalled that "For days, we lost our appetite for food and sleep departed from our eyes."

Within a year, the British had compiled a register of 3,000 former slaves who had joined them prior to the signing of the 1782 provisional treaty; all others were to be returned. Boston and Violet King were among those listed in the "Book of Negroes;" they were issued certificates of freedom, which "dispelled all our fears, and filled us with joy and gratitude." Most important, it allowed them to board the military transport ships bound for the free black settlement in Nova Scotia where most of the black Loyalists were to be relocated.

Violet and Boston, along with other passengers aboard the L'Abondance, formed a black community in Burch Town (Birchtown, named for the British commander of New York City), six miles outside of Shelburne, Nova Scotia.

The provisions supplied by the British were inadequate, housing was nonexistent, and the land was barren and rocky. When delivery of supplies ended in 1786, free blacks were reduced to starvation, forcing them to sell their possessions or to indenture themselves to whites. King worked as a carpenter, making and selling chests and taking whatever jobs he could find to support himself and Violet through the ensuing famine.

After his conversion to Methodism in 1786, Boston began to preach in Birchtown and Shelburne, eventually moving to Preston at the request of Bishop William Black. There he met Lieutenant John Clarkson, the Halifax agent for the Sierra Leone Company. Boston and Violet were among the nearly twelve hundred blacks who sailed for Sierra Leone, West Africa, in January, 1792. After a difficult voyage in which sixty settlers died en route, rainy weather, malaria, and plagues of insects killed many of the new arrivals, including Violet.

At first Boston was employed by the company to preach to the native Africans in Sierra Leone, despite the fact that he could not understand their language. Soon he opened a school, later traveling to England to be schooled himself as a teacher.

In England, Boston preached to a white congregation, writing, "I found a more cordial love to the White People than I had ever experienced before. In the former part of my life I had suffered greatly from the cruelty and injustice of the Whites, which induced me to look upon them, in general, as our enmies: And even after the Lord had manifested his forgiving mercy to me, I still felt at times an uneasy distrust and shyness toward them; but on that day the Lord removed all my prejudices."

After two years of study at the Kingswood School, Boston returned to Sierra Leone and his work as a schoolmaster, determined to teach his African-born students the English language and "some knowledge of the way of salvation thro' faith in the Lord Jesus Christ." In 1798, he published his memoirs, one of the few first-hand accounts of the lives of Black Loyalist emigrés.

(PRO 30/55/100)

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Africans in America/Part 2/Leaving America

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Boston King was one of the many enslaved African Americans -- perhaps as many as 100,000 -- who risked punishment and even death in order to reach the British lines and a chance at freedom.Image Credit: British Crown copyright: Public Record Office, London. This document may be copied and downloaded for personal and research use only.

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George Rogers Clark (19 November 1752-13 February 1818), member-elect of the Convention of 1776 and Revolutionary War officer, was the son of John Clark and Ann Rogers Clark. He was born near Charlottesville in Albemarle County and grew up on the family's small farm in Caroline County. Little is known about his early life or education, but in the 1760s he may have briefly attended Donald Robertson's well-known school in King and Queen County. Clark was not studious, but he possessed an aptitude for mathematics and by age nineteen had become a surveyor. He developed an interest in history, geography, and natural phenomena and acquired a large library. He never married. His much-younger brother William Clark was also born in Virginia but lived his eventful life in the West, where he became governor of the Missouri Territory after he and Meriwether Lewis led a successful expedition of discovery across North America.

Between the summer of 1772 and the spring of 1774 Clark explored the upper Ohio River Valley and claimed land about 130 miles downriver from Fort Pitt. The plans in which he participated to establish a settlement in Kentucky were delayed when fighting broke out between settlers and western Indian tribes. On 2 May 1774 Clark became a militia captain and in October of that year took part in the campaign that defeated Cornstalk at Point Pleasant. By the treaty that terminated Dunmore's War the Indians relinquished hunting grounds south of the Ohio River, thus leaving Kentucky open to settlement. The following spring Clark joined other surveyors working for the Ohio Company of Virginia, one of several competing western land companies that claimed rights to Kentucky land. Chief among its rivals was the Transylvania Company of Richard Henderson, of North Carolina. In June 1776 Clark was one of two men whom western settlers elected to represent them in the last of the Revolutionary Conventions then meeting in Williamsburg, but the convention adjourned long before they reached the capital. The district had not been authorized to elect representatives, and in October the House of Delegates declined to seat them, but the General Assembly created Kentucky County and thus scotched Henderson's proposed western colony.

During the winter of 1776-1777 Clark returned to Kentucky with a supply of gunpowder and a major's commission, which made him the ranking militia officer of the new county. Seeking to curb enemy Indian raids by striking at British-controlled outposts in the West, he dispatched spies to Vincennes and Kaskaskia, on the Mississippi River, and prepared a report for Virginia's governor. In December 1777, with the governor's cooperation, the assembly provided resources for a western expedition but carefully concealed Clark's plans. Clark, in Williamsburg at the time, was promoted to lieutenant colonel and on 2 January 1778 received the governor's confidential orders to organize the expedition.

Operating in secrecy made recruiting difficult, and when Clark's flatboats departed down the Ohio River on 12 May 1778 only about 150 men were on board. His Illinois Regiment, augmented to about 175 men by the latter part of June, began the 120-mile march to Kaskaskia, where on 4 July they slipped across the river, broke into the fort, and seized the commander. After reassuring the French inhabitants of their safety and securing their loyalty, Clark dispatched troops to occupy Cahokia and Vincennes and by 20 July had secured their allegiance as well. He also established cordial relations with Spanish officials at Saint Louis, who offered him military aid. Clark's dramatic expedition reinforced Virginia's claim, and hence the claim of the United States, to the region north of the Ohio River.

The British reacted quickly. On 17 December 1778 a British force seized the fort at Vincennes. Clark counterattacked two months later with a force estimated at from 127 to 200 men. They marched 180 miles to Vincennes under exceptionally harsh winter conditions, forded a flooded plain five miles wide, with shallows three feet deep, and seized Fort Sackville on 25 February 1779. Following Clark's daring victory the General Assembly created Illinois County north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi.

Clark repeatedly planned to attack the British at Detroit, but even with the support of Virginia's governor he had too few men and supplies and had to postpone planned expeditions in 1779 and 1780. Instead, he defended against British attempts to recapture the Illinois country. The British made wide-ranging raids on key American positions and, after Spain declared war on Great Britain, attacked outposts at Saint Louis and elsewhere. Clark quickly moved to repulse British forces and led a punishing campaign against the Shawnee at Chillicothe. He became a brigadier general of Virginia troops on 22 January 1781 but was still not able to recruit and equip a force adequate to attack Detroit. As he wrote later that year, "I have lost the object that was one of the principal inducements to my fatigues & transactions for several years past-my chain appears to have run out."

Fighting in the East largely ceased late in 1781, but military disasters in the West in 1782 so demoralized Kentuckians that Clark undertook a retaliatory expedition, in part at his own expense, and destroyed six Shawnee towns. His militia commission was rescinded after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, but the treaty acknowledged American ownership of the vast region north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. The Northwest Territory, as it came to be known, belonged to the United States by virtue of Clark's military leadership.

Clark spent much of the remainder of his life attempting to put his military accounts in order and to secure compensation for expenses he had incurred or money that he had paid out of his own pocket. Virginia owed him nearly £3,400 in back pay and out-of-pocket expenses, which was to be paid with military certificates and warrants instead of cash, but he was held liable for unpaid wartime debts made in the state's name. Auditors in Richmond lost many of his vouchers, which complicated his personal finances for years. Several thousand of his unpaid vouchers were discovered in the State Capitol in 1913.

In 1783 Clark was named a trustee for Transylvania Seminary (later part of Transylvania University) and was certified as a surveyor by the College of William and Mary. The following year he became the principal surveyor of bounty lands that the state had set aside to compensate Virginia officers and soldiers. Clark also served on a board that supervised the distribution of lands in the Illinois grant. After Virginia ceded to the United States its claim to the Northwest Territory in March 1784, Congress appointed him one of the commissioners to manage negotiations with the Indians. He was present at Fort Macintosh in January 1785 when the tribes signed over most of their lands north of the Ohio River, and a year later he concluded a treaty with the Shawnee that granted the United States sovereignty over all lands ceded by Great Britain. Despite rumors of excessive drinking, Clark in 1786 was chosen to lead an expedition against the Wabash Indians. His inadequately supplied troops mutinied, and he returned to Vincennes, where he established a garrison outfitted with provisions seized from Spanish merchants. The United States and Spain were then locked in a dispute about use of the Mississippi River, and Clark's enemies used this incident against him. Accused of drunkenness, he found himself repudiated by the state government and his reputation in tatters. Believing that the facts spoke for themselves, Clark declined to defend himself. He lived with his father in Louisville, where he devoted much of his time to writing his memoirs.

Virginia still owed Clark nearly &dollar;12,000. He was not able to sell the large tracts of land that he owned in the West, and in 1791 the assembly rejected his claim for reimbursement for money that he had borrowed on his own credit and spent during the war in support of his military operations. To Spanish officials he offered his services in founding a colony in the Mississippi Valley, but unable to agree on conditions, he became involved in an abortive attempt to establish an independent colony between the American and Spanish settlements. In 1792 Clark proposed to help France wrest Louisiana from Spain and received a military commission. During a visit to Philadelphia in 1798 he was threatened with arrest and warned to resign as brigadier general in the French army or give up his American citizenship. He eventually escaped to Saint Louis.

In 1799 Clark returned to Louisville, where he depended on one of his brothers for support. He moved to a small cabin across the Ohio River from Louisville in 1803 and ran a gristmill. Impoverished and increasingly frail, he unsuccessfully petitioned Congress for financial relief. Clark had a stroke in 1809 and, after his infected right leg was amputated, lived with a sister at nearby Locust Grove, in Jefferson County, Kentucky. In 1812 the Virginia General Assembly finally granted him an annual pension of &dollar;400 and awarded him a sword. George Rogers Clark suffered a debilitating stroke the next year and died at Locust Grove on 13 February 1818 following another stroke. He was buried at Locust Grove, but in 1869 his remains were moved to Cave Hill Cemetery, later renamed Cave Hill National Cemetery, in Louisville. The George Rogers Clark National Historical Park, established in 1966 in Vincennes, Indiana, commemorates Clark's capture of Fort Sackville in 1779.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies include James Alton James, The Life of George Rogers Clark (1928), John Bakeless, Background to Glory: The Life of George Rogers Clark (1957), Lowell H. Harrison, George Rogers Clark and the War in the West (1976), and Kenneth C. Carstens and Nancy Son Carstens, eds., The Life of George Rogers Clark, 1752-1818: Triumphs and Tragedies (2004), with several portraits; birth date of 19 Nov. 1752 in Lyman C. Draper Papers 1J40, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wis. (Draper MSS); miscalculated Old Style birth date of 9 Nov. 1752 on modern gravestone; family history documents, military records, and memoirs in George Rogers Clark Papers in Draper MSS J Series; many essential documents from British Library, Library of Congress, and Library of Virginia (LVA) printed in James, ed., George Rogers Clark Papers, 1771-1781 (1912), with quotation from Clark to Thomas Nelson, 1 Oct. 1781, on 608, and George Rogers Clark Papers, 1781-1784 (1926); William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence: A Documentary Record (1973–1983), 7:518-520, 565-567; financial records in Auditor of Public Accounts, Record Group 48, and correspondence in Office of the Governor, Record Group 3, both LVA; Virginia State Library Annual Report, 1912-1913 (1914), 14; obituaries in Lexington Kentucky Gazette, 21 Feb. 1818, and Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 12 Mar. 1818.

Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Donald W. Gunter.

How to cite this page:
>Donald W. Gunter,"George Rogers Clark (1752-1818)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998- ), published 2006 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Clark_George_Rogers, accessed [today's date]).

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Dictionary of Virginia Biography - George Rogers Clark (19 November 1752-13 February 1818) Biography

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George Rogers Clark (19 November 1752-13 February 1818), member-elect of the Convention of 1776 and Revolutionary War officer, was the son of John Clark and Ann Rogers Clark. He was born near Charlottesville in Albemarle County and grew up on the family's small farm in Caroline County.

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Painting of George Rogers Clark
Smithsonian

Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted. Perhaps we may be fortunate. We have this consolation that our case is just, and that our country will be grateful and not condemn our conduct, in case we fall through; if so, this country as well as Kentucky, I believe, is lost.
-Letter to Virginia Governor Patrick Henry from George Rogers Clark

George Rogers Clark was born in Albemarle County, Virginia in 1752. Clark was not a good student preferring to spend his time outdoors exploring instead of in the classroom. Recognizing his son's potential as an outdoorsman, his father secured him an apprenticeship with a surveyor. From there he spent his time exploring the outdoors and learning how to read the land. By the age of 19 he had begun to travel into western Virginia and in 1772 he ventured into eastern Kentucky, quickly developing a love for the area.

This love for Kentucky and his fellow frontiersmen, pushed him to act when the American Revolution broke out, knowing that the frontier would be vulnerable to both attacks by the British at Fort Detroit and the Native Americans. On May 13, 1778, having been given permission from Patrick Henry to take a small force of men to assure that the British were dispelled from the frontier, Clark and his men began their journey from Redstone, PA westward. We have learned more about the Illinois Campaign through the journals Captain Joseph Bowman and Clark himself.

Clark's initial campaign was swift, efficient and above all else successful. The men drilled and trained at Corn Island, near present day Louisville, KY. On June 24, 1778, the time had come to move further west to thwart British in the Northwest and gain control of the frontier, namely the Mississippi River for the colonies. Using flat boats the men made their way down the Ohio River, before disembarking and marching the rest of the way to Kaskaskia on the Mississippi River, arriving in the evening on July 4, 1778, without firing a single shot. Fort Sackville had already capitulated to Clark and his men in August of 1778, however, by December the British had retaken the Fort. Clark knowing that the British would make an advance toward Kaskaskia in the spring, he made the decision to complete a winter march and retake the fort.

Clark and his men left Kaskaskia on February 6, 1779 and began their march to Vincennes. Despite unseasonably warm weather the journey was harsh, encountering snow melt, ice and rain all which led to flooding. Never-the-less, the small militia reached Vincennes on February 23. After a brief siege, during which Clark ordered the execution of 5 Native Americans, to intimidate the British, Lt. Gov. Henry Hamilton surrendered the fort. Nine months after capturing Fort Sackville, Clark wrote a Letter to his Friend George Mason chronicling his adventures against the British and the daring mid-winter march. In the years following Clark continue to the war efforts in the West, but ultimately would never surpass his accomplishments at Vincennes.

During September 1783, the Revolutionary War officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris and Clark returned to private life. Following the war, Clark served as chairman to the board of commissioners that allotted lands across the Ohio River from Louisville to those individuals who had taken part in his 1778 and 1779 campaigns. He also was appointed a commissioner to make treaties with tribes north of the Ohio River who were continuing their raids into Kentucky. During 1786, after it became apparent that the treaties were ineffective, Clark was requested by Kentucky and Virginia authorities to lead an expedition against the tribes along the Wabash River. From the beginning, however, Clark was plagued by questions of his authority and the unruly behavior of his troops. After proceeding along the Wabash River north of Vincennes, a large portion of the men mutinied. Clark returned to Vincennes and established a garrison to protect this outpost before returning to Kentucky.

In the later years of Clark's life, he was left with declining health and immense debt. Having never been reimbursed for the money he personally spent to fund the campaigns. This crippling debt forced Clark to look elsewhere to recoup his fortune. Unfortunately, it seemed he was defeated at each turn.

In 1809, at the age of 57, Clark suffered a stroke and subsequently fell into a fire, resulting in the amputation of his leg. After which he moved to live with his sister, Lucy Crogan, at Locust Grove just outside of Louisville, KY.

n 1812, in belated recognition of Revolutionary War services, the General Assembly of Virginia granted Clark a sword and half pay of $400 a year, though many believed this to be 'too little too late.'

His health continued to deteriorate, and he died on February 13, 1818, at the age of 65. On February 15, a cold and stormy day, Clark's body was laid to rest in a ceremony attended by a large crowd. In his funeral oration, Judge John Rowan succinctly summed up the stature and importance of George Rogers Clark during the critical years on the Trans-Appalachian frontier: "The mighty oak of the forest has fallen, and now the scrub oaks sprout all around."

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George Rogers Clark (U.S. National Park Service)

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Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted.   Perhaps we may be fortunate. We have this consolation that our case is just, and that our country will be grateful and not condemn our conduct, in case we fall through; if so, this country as well as Kentucky, I believe, is lost.

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George Rogers Clark, (born November 19, 1752, Albemarle county, Virginia [U.S.]-died February 13, 1818, near Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.), frontier military leader in the American Revolution, whose successes were factors in the award of the Old Northwest to the United States in the Treaty of Paris, concluding the war.

Trained by his grandfather, Clark engaged in surveying along the Ohio River in the mid-1770s. He became interested in the Kentucky country around Harrodsburg and opposed those who sought to establish an independent colony of Transylvania there. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Clark persuaded the Virginia government to make Kentucky a separate county and to authorize him to enlist troops for its defense against the British and Indians along the frontier.

In May 1778 Clark, with an expedition of about 175 men, took two Mississippi River settlements-Kaskaskia and Cahokia, both in present-day Illinois. At Kaskaskia, Clark gained the friendship of Pierre Gibault, who induced the French at Vincennes on the Wabash River to change their allegiance. When reinforcements promised from Virginia failed to arrive, Clark withdrew to Fort Nelson (now Louisville) on the Ohio River and made that his base for the rest of the war. In 1780 he helped defeat a British expedition sent against the Spanish settlement at St. Louis. That same year, in what is now Ohio, he destroyed the Shawnee Indian towns of Chillicothe and Piqua; in 1782 he razed Shawnee villages and destroyed crops in the Miami River valley.

Throughout the war Clark and his men received no pay for their services. Furthermore, Clark was held responsible for debts incurred for supplies, since Virginia, despite its promises, never reimbursed him.

Clark was appointed an Indian commissioner after the war, and in 1786 he helped negotiate a treaty with the Shawnees. The same year, he led an expedition against the Wabash tribes and seized goods taken to Vincennes by Spanish traders.

James Wilkinson, a double agent in the pay of Spain, coveted Clark's command and his post of Indian commissioner. After a deliberate campaign to discredit Clark, Wilkinson was appointed Indian commissioner and Clark was relieved of his military command. Thereafter Clark became involved in a scheme to found a Spanish colony west of the Mississippi River. In 1793 he accepted a French major general's commission in connection with French emissary Edmond-Charles Genêt 's mission to involve the United States in hostilities between France and England. Clark returned to Louisville in 1799 and resided there until his death.

Amy Tikkanen.

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George Rogers Clark | American military leader and explorer

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George Rogers Clark, (born November 19, 1752, Albemarle county, Virginia [U.S.]-died February 13, 1818, near Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.), frontier military leader in the American Revolution, whose successes were factors in the award of the Old Northwest to the United States in the Treaty of Paris, concluding the war.

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The Continental Congress was the governing body by which the American colonial governments coordinated their resistance to British rule during the first two years of the American Revolution. The Congress balanced the interests of the different colonies and also established itself as the official colonial liaison to Great Britain. As the war progressed, the Congress became the effective national government of the country, and, as such, conducted diplomacy on behalf of the new United States.

In 1774, the British Parliament passed a series of laws collectively known as the Intolerable Acts, with the intent to suppress unrest in colonial Boston by closing the port and placing it under martial law. In response, colonial protestors led by a group called the Sons of Liberty issued a call for a boycott. Merchant communities were reluctant to participate in such a boycott unless there were mutually agreed upon terms and a means to enforce the boycott's provisions. Spurred by local pressure groups, colonial legislatures empowered delegates to attend a Continental Congress which would set terms for a boycott. The colony of Connecticut was the first to respond.

The Congress first met in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, with delegates from each of the 13 colonies except Georgia. On October 20, the Congress adopted the Articles of Association, which stated that if the Intolerable Acts were not repealed by December 1, 1774, a boycott of British goods would begin in the colonies. The Articles also outlined plans for an embargo on exports if the Intolerable Acts were not repealed before September 10, 1775.

On October 21, the delegates approved separate statements for the people of Great Britain and the North American colonies, explaining the colonial position, and on October 26 a similar address was approved for the people of Quebec.

Furthermore, on October 26, the delegates drafted a formal petition outlining the colonists' grievances for British King George III. Many delegates were skeptical about changing the king's attitude towards the colonies, but believed that every opportunity should be exhausted to de-escalate the conflict before taking more radical action. They did not draft such a letter to the British Parliament as the colonists viewed the Parliament as the aggressor behind the recent Intolerable Acts. Lastly, not fully expecting the standoff in Massachusetts to explode into full-scale war, the Congress agreed to reconvene in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775.

By the time Congress met again, war was already underway, and thus the delegates to the Second Continental Congress formed the Continental Army and dispatched George Washington to Massachusetts as its commander. Meanwhile, Congress drafted the Olive Branch Petition, which attempted to suggest means of resolving disputes between the colonies and Great Britain. Congress sent the petition to King George III on July 8, but he refused to receive it.

As British authority crumbled in the colonies, the Continental Congress effectively took over as the de facto national government, thereby exceeding the initial authority granted to it by the individual colonial governments. However, the local groups that had formed to enforce the colonial boycott continued to support the Congress. The Second Congress continued to meet until March 1, 1781, when the Articles of Confederation that established a new national government for the United States took effect.

As the de facto national government, the Continental Congress assumed the role of negotiating diplomatic agreements with foreign nations. The British Parliament banned trade with the colonies and authorized the seizure of colonial vessels on December 23. These actions served to further erode the positions of anti-independence moderates in Congress and bolster those of pro-independence leaders. On April 6, 1776, Congress responded to Parliament's actions by opening American ports to all foreign ships except British vessels. Reports from American agent Arthur Lee in London also served to support the revolutionary cause. Lee's reports suggested that France was interested in assisting the colonies in their fight against Great Britain.

With a peaceful resolution increasingly unlikely in 1775, Congress began to explore other diplomatic channels and dispatched congressional delegate Silas Deane to France in April of 1776.

Deane succeeded in securing informal French support by May. By then, Congress was increasingly conducting international diplomacy and had drafted the Model Treaty with which it hoped to seek alliances with Spain and France. On July 4, 1776 the Congress took the important step of formally declaring the colonies' independence from Great Britain. In September, Congress adopted the Model Treaty, and then sent commissioners to France to negotiate a formal alliance. They entered into a a formal alliance with France in 1778. Congress eventually sent diplomats to other European powers to encourage support for the American cause and to secure loans for the money-strapped war effort.

Congress and the British government made further attempts to reconcile, but negotiations failed when Congress refused to revoke the Declaration of Independence, both in a meeting on September 11, 1776, with British Admiral Richard Howe, and when a peace delegation from Parliament arrived in Philadelphia in 1778. Instead, Congress spelled out terms for peace on August 14, 1779, which demanded British withdrawal, American independence, and navigation rights on the Mississippi River. The next month Congress appointed John Adams to negotiate such terms with England, but British officials were evasive.

Formal peace negotiations would have to wait until after the Confederation Congress took over the reins of government on March 1, 1781, following American victories at Yorktown that resulted in British willingness to end the war.

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Milestones: 1776-1783 - Office of the Historian

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The Continental Congress was the governing body by which the American colonial governments coordinated their resistance to British rule during the first two years of the American Revolution. The Congress balanced the interests of the different colonies and also established itself as the official colonial liaison to Great Britain.

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Continental Congress, in the period of the American Revolution, the body of delegates who spoke and acted collectively for the people of the colony-states that later became the United States of America. The term most specifically refers to the bodies that met in 1774 and 1775-81 and respectively designated as the First Continental Congress and the Second Continental Congress.

In the spring of 1774 the British Parliament's passage of the Intolerable (Coercive) Acts, including the closing of the port of Boston, provoked keen resentment in the colonies. The First Continental Congress, convened in response to the Acts by the colonial Committees of Correspondence, met in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774. Fifty-six deputies represented all the colonies except Georgia. Peyton Randolph of Virginia was unanimously elected president, thus establishing usage of that term as well as "Congress." Charles Thomson of Pennsylvania was elected secretary and served in that office during the 15-year life of the Congress.

To provide unity, delegates gave one vote to each state regardless of its size. The First Continental Congress included Patrick Henry, George Washington, John and Samuel Adams, John Jay, and John Dickinson. Meeting in secret session, the body rejected a plan for reconciling British authority with colonial freedom. Instead, it adopted a declaration of personal rights, including life, liberty, property, assembly, and trial by jury. The declaration also denounced taxation without representation and the maintenance of the British army in the colonies without their consent. Parliamentary regulation of American commerce, however, was willingly accepted.

In October 1774 the Congress petitioned the crown for a redress of grievances accumulated since 1763. In an effort to force compliance, it called for a general boycott of British goods and eventual nonexportation of American products, except rice, to Britain or the British West Indies. Its last act was to set a date for another Congress to meet on May 10, 1775, to consider further steps.

Before that Second Continental Congress assembled in the Pennsylvania State House, hostilities had already broken out between Americans and British troops at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. New members of the Second Congress included Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. John Hancock and John Jay were among those who served as president. The Congress "adopted" the New England military forces that had converged upon Boston and appointed Washington commander in chief of the American army on June 15, 1775. It also acted as the provisional government of the 13 colony-states, issuing and borrowing money, establishing a postal service, and creating a navy. Although the Congress for some months maintained that the Americans were struggling for their rights within the British Empire, it gradually cut tie after tie with Britain until separation was complete. On July 2, 1776, with New York abstaining, the Congress "unanimously" resolved that "these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states." Two days later it solemnly approved this Declaration of Independence. The Congress also prepared the Articles of Confederation, which, after being sanctioned by all the states, became the first U.S. constitution in March 1781.

The Articles placed Congress on a constitutional basis, legalizing the powers it had exercised since 1775. To underline this distinction, the Congress that met under the Articles of Confederation is often referred to as the Congress of the Confederation, or the Confederation Congress. This Congress continued to function until the new Congress, elected under the present Constitution, met in 1789.

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Continental Congress | History, Members, & Significance

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Continental Congress, in the period of the American Revolution, the body of delegates who spoke and acted collectively for the people of the colony-states that later became the United States of America. The term most specifically refers to the bodies that met in 1774 and 1775-81 and respectively designated as the First Continental Congress and the Second Continental Congress.

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Journals of the Continental Congress | Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention | Articles and Essays | A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1875 | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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The Journals of the Continental Congress (1774-1789) contain the records of the daily proceedings of the Continental Congress, and include the text of ordinances, such as the Northwest Ordinance, reports to Congress, and correspondence with the colonies, states, foreign powers, and others.

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1789 is one of the most significant dates in history - famous for the revolution in France with its cries of 'Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!' that led to the removal of the French upper classes. The French Revolution didn't just take place in 1789. It actually lasted for another six years, with far more violent and momentous events taking place in the years after 1789. However, here we examine the British reaction to the events in France during this famous year - were the British government extremely worried or did they see it as merely a few minor disturbances?

Looking at primary source material from 1789, including a London newspaper report, together with both official and personal letters sent from Paris, you will be asked to assess and investigate the reaction. The significance of 1789 is now well known, but did anybody at the time even dare to suggest how important it was?

Let's look at the evidence to find out. Use this lesson to find out from contemporary sources how the British government reacted to news of the French revolution.

Tasks

1. Look at Source 1. This is an extract from the London Gazette from Saturday 18 July to Tuesday 21 July, 1789.

What evidence is there that the population of Paris were worried?

What was wrong with the official police force?

2. Look at Source 2. This is an extract from the London Gazette from Saturday 18 July to Tuesday 21 July, 1789.

Why were the people outside the Bastille so outraged when the Governor gave the order to fire on them?

Some were then allowed in - on what condition?

What happened to the 40 who went into the Bastille?

What happened to the Governor?

3. Look at Source 3.This is an extract from the London Gazette from Saturday 18 July to Tuesday 21 July, 1789.

According to the source, people lined the streets - how does the source describe their behaviour?

How pleased were people with the King's promises? How were people behaving?

What evidence in the source suggests further trouble could easily break out?

4. Look at Source 4. This is a letter from a Mr Jenkinson from Paris, dated 15 July 1789.

Examine Mr. Jenkinson's description of the storming of the Bastille - is there any reason to doubt his claims? Give your reasons

Why, according to this source, did the King 'recant all his former words' and agree to the people's demands?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of this evidence?

5. Look at Source 5. This is an extract from a confidential report from the British Ambassador.

How have the recent events affected newspapers?

Why does the ambassador have little to report?

6. Look at Source 6. This is another extract from the report seen in Source 5.

What is wrong with the account of the storming of the Bastille?

What reasons does the ambassador suggest for the quick and easy take over of the Bastille?

What reasons are given to 'lament' the death of the Marquis de Launay?

What does the small number of prisoners actually inside the Bastille suggest about the reign of King Louis XVI?

7. Look at Source 7. This is a further extract from the report seen in Source 5 and 6.

How many members of the royal family have fled?

What does the ambassador say is 'scarcely possible to imagine'?

What main reason is suggested for wanting these people to return?

8. Look again at Sources 1-7. Using all the available sources, decide which of these descriptions best fit each source:

Serious revolution, leading to real danger for Britain

A Paris-based revolt that the King was forced to agree to

Minor disturbances, of no real consequence at all

Explain the reasons for your decisions.

9. Using all your previous work, write a detailed paragraph explaining how seriously the British took the events of July 1789.

Use your source evidence effectively and think about the following issues:

What had been the reaction to the King's promises following the storming of the Bastille?

How serious and long lasting did the ambassador suggest the problems were?

Background

The French Revolution began in 1789 and lasted until 1794. King Louis XVI needed more money, but had failed to raise more taxes when he had called a meeting of the Estates General. This instead turned into a protest about conditions in France. On July 14 1789 the Paris mob, hungry due to a lack of food from poor harvests, upset at the conditions of their lives and annoyed with their King and Government, stormed the Bastille fortress (a prison). This turned out to be more symbolic than anything else as only four or five prisoners were found.

In October 1789, King Louis and his family were moved from Versailles (the Royal palace) to Paris. He tried to flee in 1791, but was stopped and forced to agree to a new form of government. Replacing the power of the King, a 'legislative assembly' governed from October 1791 to September 1792, and was then replaced by the 'National Convention'. The Republic of France was declared, and soon the King was put on trial. The Revolution became more and more radical and violent. King Louis XVI was executed on January 21 1793. In the six weeks that followed some 1,400 people who were considered potential enemies to the Republic were executed in Paris.

Many historians now regard the French Revolution as a turning point in the history of Europe, but also in North America where many of the same ideas influenced the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. The famous slogan 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' called for every person's right to freedom and equal treatment. Across France and the rest of Europe the consequences of the Revolution were huge. There were many new developments including the fall of the monarchy, changes in society with the rise of the middle class, and the growth of nationalism.

Teachers' notes

This lesson encourages students to investigate the British reaction to the outbreak of the French Revolution. To begin with, students consider three extracts from the contemporary newspaper, the London Gazette. They are subsequently compare these extracts to some private correspondence from the time and a three extracts from a confidential report from the British Ambassador. In the light of all of the evidence students, are asked to decide how seriously the British government took the events of 1789. They should be encouraged to evaluate the tone, attitude and perspective contained in all these extracts as they work through the questions. Why were these accounts produced? Who would have seen them? What is their value to the historian?

All documents are provided with transcripts. Students can work through the questions individually or in pairs and report back to the class.

Sources

Image : La Prise de la Bastille - Jean Pierre Hovell 1789

Sources 1-3 : The London Gazette - ZJ 1/85

Sources 4-6 : Extracts from a confidential report from the British Ambassador, 30th July 1789 FO 27/32

External links

Locating privilege and inequality in pre-Revolutionary France
Take a look at this clip from the BBC Learning Zone.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/obl4he/frenchrevolution/26_chronology_of_the_french_revolution.html
UCL Art Museum: Explore a huge range of visual sources on the French Revolution

Connections to curriculum

AQA History A level:
France in Revolution, 1774-1815

Edexcel History A level:
France in Revolution 1774-1799

OCR History A level:
The French Revolution and the rule of Napoleon 1774-1815

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French Revolution - The National Archives

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1789 is one of the most significant dates in history - famous for the revolution in France with its cries of 'Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!' that led to the removal of the French upper classes. The French Revolution didn't just take...

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The French Revolution (1789-1799) was a period of major societal and political upheaval in France. It witnessed the collapse of the monarchy, the establishment of the First French Republic, and culminated in the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and the start of the Napoleonic era. The French Revolution is considered one of the defining events of Western history.

The Revolution of 1789, as it is sometimes called to distinguish it from later French revolutions, originated from deep-rooted problems that the government of King Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-1792) proved incapable of fixing; such problems were primarily related to France's financial troubles as well as the systemic social inequality embedded within the Ancien Régime. The Estates-General of 1789, summoned to address these issues, resulted in the formation of a National Constituent Assembly, a body of elected representatives from the three societal orders who swore never to disband until they had written a new constitution. Over the next decade, the revolutionaries attempted to dismantle the oppressive old society and build a new one based on the principles of the Age of Enlightenment exemplified in the motto: " Liberté, égalité, fraternité."

Causes

Most of the causes of the French Revolution can be traced to economic & social inequalities.

Most of the causes of the French Revolution can be traced to economic and social inequalities that were exacerbated by the brokenness of the Ancien Régime ("old regime"), the name retroactively given to the political and social system of the Kingdom of France in the last few centuries of its initial existence. The Ancien Régime was divided into three estates, or social orders: the clergy, nobility, and commoners. The first two estates enjoyed many social privileges, including tax exemptions, that were not granted to the commoners, a class that made up well over 90% of the population. The Third Estate was burdened with manual labor as well as paying most of the taxes.

Rapid population growth contributed to the general suffering; by 1789, France was the most populous European state with over 28 million people. Job growth had not kept up with the swelling population, leaving 8- 12 million impoverished. Backwards agricultural techniques and a steady string of terrible harvests led to starvation. Meanwhile, a rising class of wealthy commoners, the bourgeoisie, threatened the privileged position of the aristocracy, increasing tensions between social classes. Ideas of the Age of Enlightenment also contributed to national unrest; people began to view the Ancien Régime as corrupt, mismanaged, and tyrannical. Hatred was especially directed toward Queen Marie Antoinette, who was seen to personify everything wrong with the government.

A final significant cause was France's monumental state debt, accumulated by its attempts to maintain its status as a global power. Expensive wars and other projects had put the French treasury billions of livres into debt, as it had been forced to take out loans at enormously high interest rates. The country's irregular systems of taxation were ineffective, and as creditors began to call for repayment in the 1780s, the government finally realized something had to be done.

The Gathering Storm: 1774-1788

On 10 May 1774, King Louis XV of France died after a reign of nearly 60 years, leaving his grandson to inherit a troubled and broken kingdom. Only 19 years old, Louis XVI was an impressionable ruler who adhered to the advice of his ministers and involved France in the American War of Independence. Although French involvement in the American Revolution succeeded in weakening Great Britain, it also added substantially to France's debt while the success of the Americans encouraged anti-despotic sentiments at home.

In 1786, Louis XVI was convinced by his finance minister, Charles-Alexandre Calonne, that the issue of state debt could no longer be ignored. Calonne presented a list of financial reforms and convened the Assembly of Notables of 1787 to rubberstamp them. The Notables, a mostly aristocratic assembly, refused and told Calonne that only an Estates-General could approve such radical reforms. This referred to an assembly of the three estates of pre-revolutionary France, a body that had not been summoned in 175 years. Louis XVI refused, realizing that an Estates-General could undermine his authority. Instead, he fired Calonne and took the reforms to the parlements.

The parlements were the 13 judicial courts that were responsible for registering royal decrees before they went into effect. Consisting of aristocrats, the parlements had long struggled against royal authority, still bitter that their class had been subjugated by the "sun king" Louis XIV of France a century before. Spotting a chance to recover some power, they refused to register the royal reforms and joined the Notables in advocating for an Estates-General. When the crown responded by exiling the courts, riots erupted across the country; the parlements had presented themselves as champions of the people, thereby winning the commoners' support. One of these riots erupted in Grenoble on 7 June 1788 and led the three estates of Dauphiné to gather without the king's consent. Known as the Day of Tiles, this is credited by some historians as the start of the Revolution. Realizing he had been bested, Louis XVI appointed the popular Jacques Necker as his new finance minister and scheduled an Estates-General to convene in May 1789.

Rise of the Third Estate: February-September 1789

Across France, 6 million people participated in the electoral process for the Estates-General, and a total 25,000 cahiers de doléances, or lists of grievances, were drawn up for discussion. When the Estates-General of 1789 finally convened on 5 May in Versailles, there were 578 deputies representing the Third Estate, 282 for the nobility, and 303 for the clergy. Yet the double representation of the Third Estate was meaningless, as votes would still be counted by estate rather than by head. As the upper classes were sure to vote together, the Third Estate was at a disadvantage.

Subsequently, the Third Estate refused to verify its own elections, a process needed to begin proceedings. It demanded votes to be counted by head, a condition the nobility staunchly refused. Meanwhile, Louis XVI's attention was drawn away by the death of his son, paralyzing royal authority. On 13 June, having reached an impasse, the Third Estate commenced roll call, breaking protocol by beginning proceedings without the consent of the king or the other orders. On 17 June, following a motion proposed by Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, the Third Estate officially proclaimed itself a National Constituent Assembly. Two days later, the clergy formally voted to join it, and the nobility begrudgingly followed suit. On 20 June, after finding themselves locked out of the assembly hall, the deputies of the National Assembly met in the royal tennis court. There, they swore the Tennis Court Oath, promising never to disband until they had given France a new constitution. The French Revolution had begun.

Louis XVI realized he needed to regain control. In early July, he called over 30,000 soldiers into the Paris Basin, and on 11 July, he dismissed Necker and other ministers considered too friendly to the insolent revolutionaries. Fearing the king meant to crush the Revolution, the people of Paris rioted on 12 July. Their uprising climaxed on 14 July with the Storming of the Bastille, when hundreds of citizens successfully attacked the Bastille fortress to loot it for ammunition. The king backed down, sending away his soldiers and reinstating Necker. Unnerved by these events, the king's youngest brother, Comte d'Artois, fled France with an entourage of royalists on the night of 16 July; they were the first of thousands of émigrés to flee.

In the coming weeks, the French countryside broke out into scattered riots, as rumors spread of aristocratic plots to deprive citizens of their liberties. These riots resulted in mini-Bastilles as peasants raided the feudal estates of local seigneurs, forcing nobles to renounce their feudal rights. Later known as the Great Fear, this wave of panic forced the National Assembly to confront the issue of feudalism. On the night of 4 August, in a wave of patriotic fervor, the Assembly announced that the feudal regime was "entirely destroyed" and ended the privileges of the upper classes. Later that month, it accepted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a landmark human rights document that championed the general will of the people, separation of powers, and the idea that human rights were universal. These two achievements are considered the most important and longest-lasting accomplishments of the Revolution.

A People's Monarchy: 1789-1791

As the National Assembly slowly drafted its constitution, Louis XVI was sulking in Versailles. He refused to consent to the August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, demanding instead that the deputies include his right to an absolute veto in the new constitution. This enraged the people of Paris, and on 5 October 1789, a crowd of 7,000 people, mostly market women, marched from Paris to Versailles in the pouring rain, demanding bread and that the king accept the Assembly's reforms. Louis XVI had no choice but to accept and was forced to leave his isolation at Versailles and accompany the women back to Paris, where he was installed in the Tuileries Palace. Known as the Women's March on Versailles, or the October Days, this insurrection led to the end of the Ancien Régime and the beginning of France's short-lived constitutional monarchy.

The next year and a half marked a relatively calm phase of the Revolution; indeed, many people believed the Revolution was over. Louis XVI agreed to adopt the Assembly's reforms and even appeared reconciled to the Revolution by accepting a tricolor cockade. The Assembly, meanwhile, began to rule France, adopting its own ill-fated currency, the , to help tackle the outstanding debt. Having declawed the nobility, it now turned its attentions toward the Catholic Church. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, issued on 12 July 1790, forced all clerics to swear oaths to the new constitution and put their loyalty to the state before their loyalty to the Pope in Rome. At the same time, church lands were confiscated by the Assembly, and the papal city of Avignon was reintegrated into France. These attacks on the church alienated many from the Revolution, including the pious Louis XVI himself.

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On 17 July 1791, a crowd of demonstrators gathered on the Champ de Mars to demand the king's deposition. They were fired on by the Paris National Guard, commanded by Lafayette, resulting in 50 deaths. The Champ de Mars Massacre sent republicans on the run, giving the Feuillants enough time to push through their constitution, which centered around a weakened, liberal monarchy. On 30 September 1791, the new Legislative Assembly met, but despite the long-awaited constitution, the Revolution was more divided than ever.

Birth of a Republic: 1792-1793

Many deputies of the Legislative Assembly formed themselves into two factions: the more conservative Feuillants sat on the right of the Assembly president, while the radical Jacobins sat to his left, giving rise to the left/right political spectrum still used today. After the monarchs of Austria and Prussia threatened to destroy the Revolution in the Declaration of Pillnitz, a third faction split off from the Jacobins, demanding war as the only way to preserve the Revolution. This war party, later known as the Girondins, quickly dominated the Legislative Assembly, which voted to declare war on Austria on 20 April 1792. This began the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), as the old regimes of Europe, feeling threatened by the radical revolutionaries, joined together in a coalition against France.

Initially, the war went disastrously for the French. The summer of 1792 saw a Prussian army accompanied by French royalist émigrés slowly march toward Paris. In August, the invaders issued the Brunswick Manifesto, threatening to destroy Paris should any harm come to the French royal family. This threat sent the people of Paris into a hysterical panic that led to the Storming of the Tuileries Palace on 10 August 1792, the insurrection that finally toppled the monarchy. Still fearful of counter-revolutionary enemies who might aid the Prussians, Paris mobs then invaded the city's prisons and murdered over 1,100 people in the September Massacres.

Reign of Terror: 1793-1794

After the decline of the Feuillants, the Girondins became the Revolution's moderate faction. In early 1793, they were opposed by a group of radical Jacobins called the Mountain, primarily led by Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, and Jean- Paul Marat. The Girondins and the Mountain maintained a bitter rivalry until the fall of the Girondins on 2 June 1793, when roughly 80,000 sans-culottes, or lower-class revolutionaries, and National Guards surrounded the Tuileries Palace, demanding the arrests of leading Girondins. This was accomplished, and the Girondin leaders were later executed.

Robespierre accumulated almost dictatorial powers during this period. Attempting to curtail the Revolution's rampant dechristianization, he implemented the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being to ease France into his vision of a morally pure society. His enemies saw this as an attempt to claim total power and, fearing for their lives, decided to overthrow him; the fall of Maximilien Robespierre and his allies on 28 July 1794 brought the Terror to an end, and is considered by some historians to mark the decline of the Revolution itself.

Thermidorians & the Directory: 1794-1799

Robespierre's execution was followed by the Thermidorian Reaction, a period of conservative counter-revolution in which the vestiges of Jacobin rule were erased. The Jacobin Club itself was permanently closed in November 1794, and a Jacobin attempt to retake power in the Prairial Uprising of 1795 was crushed. The Thermidorians defeated a royalist uprising on 13 Vendémiaire (5 October 1795) before adopting the Constitution of Year III (1795) and transitioning into the French Directory, the government that led the Republic in the final years of the Revolution.

Meanwhile, French armies had succeeded in pushing back the coalition's forces, defeating most coalition nations by 1797. The star of the war was undoubtedly General Napoleon Bonaparte, whose brilliant Italian campaign of 1796-97 catapulted him to fame. On 9 November 1799, Bonaparte took control of the government in the Coup of 18 Brumaire, bringing an end to the unpopular Directory. His ascendency marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era.

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The French Revolution (1789-1799) was a period of major societal and political upheaval in France. It witnessed the collapse of the monarchy, the establishment of the First French Republic, and culminated...

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What was the French Revolution?

Why did the French Revolution happen?

Why did the French Revolution lead to war with other nations?

How did the French Revolution succeed?

French Revolution, revolutionary movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and reached its first climax there in 1789-hence the conventional term "Revolution of 1789," denoting the end of the ancien régime in France and serving also to distinguish that event from the later French revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

Origins of the Revolution

The French Revolution had general causes common to all the revolutions of the West at the end of the 18th century and particular causes that explain why it was by far the most violent and the most universally significant of these revolutions. The first of the general causes was the social structure of the West. The feudal regime had been weakened step-by-step and had already disappeared in parts of Europe. The increasingly numerous and prosperous elite of wealthy commoners-merchants, manufacturers, and professionals, often called the bourgeoisie-aspired to political power in those countries where it did not already possess it. The peasants, many of whom owned land, had attained an improved standard of living and education and wanted to get rid of the last vestiges of feudalism so as to acquire the full rights of landowners and to be free to increase their holdings. Furthermore, from about 1730, higher standards of living had reduced the mortality rate among adults considerably. This, together with other factors, had led to an increase in the population of Europe unprecedented for several centuries: it doubled between 1715 and 1800. For France, which with 26 million inhabitants in 1789 was the most populated country of Europe, the problem was most acute.

A larger population created a greater demand for food and consumer goods. The discovery of new gold mines in Brazil had led to a general rise in prices throughout the West from about 1730, indicating a prosperous economic situation. From about 1770, this trend slackened, and economic crises, provoking alarm and even revolt, became frequent. Arguments for social reform began to be advanced. The philosophes-intellectuals whose writings inspired these arguments-were certainly influenced by 17th-century theorists such as René Descartes, Benedict de Spinoza and John Locke, but they came to very different conclusions about political, social, and economic matters. A revolution seemed necessary to apply the ideas of Montesquieu, Voltaire, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This Enlightenment was spread among the educated classes by the many "societies of thought" that were founded at that time: masonic lodges, agricultural societies, and reading rooms.

It is uncertain, however, whether revolution would have come without the added presence of a political crisis. Faced with the heavy expenditure that the wars of the 18th century entailed, the rulers of Europe sought to raise money by taxing the nobles and clergy, who in most countries had hitherto been exempt, To justify this, the rulers likewise invoked the arguments of advanced thinkers by adopting the role of " enlightened despots." This provoked reaction throughout Europe from the privileged bodies, diets. and estates. In North America this backlash caused the American Revolution, which began with the refusal to pay a tax imposed by the king of Great Britain. Monarchs tried to stop this reaction of the aristocracy, and both rulers and the privileged classes sought allies among the nonprivileged bourgeois and the peasants.

Plots and Revolutions Quiz

Although scholarly debate continues about the exact causes of the Revolution, the following reasons are commonly adduced: (1) the bourgeoisie resented its exclusion from political power and positions of honour; (2) the peasants were acutely aware of their situation and were less and less willing to support the anachronistic and burdensome feudal system; (3) the philosophes had been read more widely in France than anywhere else; (4) French participation in the American Revolution had driven the government to the brink of bankruptcy; (5) France was the most populous country in Europe, and crop failures in much of the country in 1788, coming on top of a long period of economic difficulties, compounded existing restlessness; and (6) the French monarchy, no longer seen as divinely ordained, was unable to adapt to the political and societal pressures that were being exerted on it.

Aristocratic revolt, 1787-89

The Revolution took shape in France when the controller general of finances, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, arranged the summoning of an assembly of "notables" (prelates, great noblemen, and a few representatives of the bourgeoisie) in February 1787 to propose reforms designed to eliminate the budget deficit by increasing the taxation of the privileged classes. The assembly refused to take responsibility for the reforms and suggested the calling of the Estates-General, which represented the clergy, the aristocracy, and the Third Estate (the commoners) and which had not met since 1614. The efforts made by Calonne's successors to enforce fiscal reforms in spite of resistance by the privileged classes led to the so-called revolt of the "aristocratic bodies," notably that of the parlements (the most important courts of justice), whose powers were curtailed by the edict of May 1788.

During the spring and summer of 1788, there was unrest among the populace in Paris, Grenoble, Dijon, Toulouse, Pau, and Rennes. The king, Louis XVI, had to yield. He reappointed reform-minded Jacques Necker as the finance minister and promised to convene the Estates-General on May 5, 1789. He also, in practice, granted freedom of the press, and France was flooded with pamphlets addressing the reconstruction of the state. The elections to the Estates-General, held between January and April 1789, coincided with further disturbances, as the harvest of 1788 had been a bad one. There were practically no exclusions from the voting; and the electors drew up cahiers de doléances, which listed their grievances and hopes. They elected 600 deputies for the Third Estate, 300 for the nobility, and 300 for the clergy.

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French Revolution | History, Summary, Timeline, Causes, & Facts

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French Revolution, revolutionary movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and reached its first climax there in 1789-hence the conventional term 'Revolution of 1789,' denoting the end of the ancien regime in France and serving also to distinguish that event from the later French revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

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Date:

November 6, 1917 - November 7, 1917 October 24, 1917 - October 25, 1917(Anniversary in 3 days)

What caused the Russian Revolution of 1917?

Why is it called the October Revolution if it took place in November?

How did the revolution lead to the Russian Civil War?

What happened to the tsar and his family?

Russian Revolution, also called Russian Revolution of 1917, two revolutions in 1917, the first of which, in February (March, New Style), overthrew the imperial government and the second of which, in October (November), placed the Bolsheviks in power.
(Read Leon Trotsky's 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.)

World War I and the decline of the Russian Empire

Centuries of virtually unchecked Russian expansion in Asia ended with an embarrassing defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). This military reverse shattered Russia's dreams of establishing hegemony over the whole of Asia, but it also contributed to a wave of domestic unrest. The Revolution of 1905 compelled Nicholas II to issue the October Manifesto, which ostensibly transformed Russia from an unlimited autocracy into a constitutional monarchy. The tsar's reactionary policies, including the occasional dissolution of the Duma, or Russian parliament, the chief fruit of the 1905 revolution, had spread dissatisfaction even to moderate elements of the nobility. The Russian Empire 's many ethnic minorities grew increasingly restive under Russian domination.

Despite some reforms that followed the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian army in 1914 was ill-equipped to fight a major war, and neither the political nor the military leadership was up to the standard required. Nevertheless the army fought bravely in World War I, and both soldiers and junior officers showed remarkable qualities. The Russian invasion of East Prussia in August 1914 was defeated by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff at Tannenberg, but it required the Germans to send reinforcements from the Western Front and so saved France from defeat and made possible the victory on the Marne. The campaigns of 1915 and 1916 on the Eastern Front brought terrible casualties to the Russian forces, which at times did not even have sufficient rifles. As late as July 1916, however, the Russian army was capable of making a successful offensive under Gen. Aleksey Brusilov in Volhynia and Bukovina.

Plots and Revolutions Quiz

The Russian people did not respond to the war with real enthusiasm. The government could not overcome its traditional distrust of any public initiative, even in the organization of medical supplies or munitions for the forces at the front. In the Fourth Duma a majority of the centre and moderate right formed a Progressive bloc and proposed the creation of a national coalition government "possessing the confidence of the country" and a program of reforms which could be carried out even in wartime. The emperor rejected the proposal and prorogued the Duma on September 3 (September 16, New Style), 1915. Eleven days earlier Nicholas had decided to assume personal command of the armies in the field. The result was that in Petrograd (as the capital had been renamed at the beginning of the war, in place of the German-sounding St. Petersburg) the empress Alexandra was in fact in control. She herself was under the influence of the self-styled "holy man" Grigori Rasputin, whose hold over her was because of his ability to arrest the bleeding of the hemophiliac tsarevich, Alexis. Thus to the massive casualties at the front, the retreat of the armies, and the growing economic hardships was added the knowledge, widespread in the capital and among the upper classes, that the government was in the hands of incompetents. Rumours of treason in high places were widely believed, though the historical evidence does not suggest that they were true. On the night of December 16-17 (December 29-30, New Style), 1916, Rasputin was murdered by a group of conservative nobles, but by then the system was beyond salvation. There was no hand at the helm, and the ship was drifting onto the rocks.

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Russian Revolution | Definition, Causes, Summary, History, & Facts

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Russian Revolution, two revolutions in 1917, the first of which, in February (March, New Style), overthrew the imperial government and the second of which, in October (November), placed the Bolsheviks in power, leading to the creation of the Soviet Union. Learn more about the Russian Revolution in this article.

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Literature, reportage, correspondence, and images from Russia’s revolutionary period 1905-1917.

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EBSCO Information Services, Inc. | www.ebsco.com

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Date March-November, 1917
The deprivation and turmoil caused by World War I made revolution almost inevitable in Russia, the only country in Europe without any form of representative government.
Locale Russia

Key Figures

Vladimir Ilich Lenin (Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov; 1870-1924), Bolshevik leader

Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein; 1879-1940), Bolshevik leader

Nicholas II (1868-1918), czar of Russia, r. 1894-1917

Alexandra (1872-1918), German wife of Nicholas II

Summary of Event

Prior to 1900, Imperial Russia was largely a land of illiterate peasants controlled by the wealthy nobility. Life in the countryside was much like that of the sixteenth century feudal period in central Europe. On the large estates and in the cities, the aristocracy lived rich, wasteful lives. The beginning of the twentieth century saw a slow, subtle change in the conditions of the Russian people as industrialization developed, later than it had in the rest of Europe. In every country it had reached, industrialization had created changes in class structures; this had forced changes in government policies, usually in the form of creation of representative governments.

In Russia, modernization in the industrial sense created an urban working class that was politically unrepresented and economically exploited. This new working class was a forced, artificial creation of the czar and had not evolved slowly, as it had elsewhere. No artisan or guild community had existed on which to draw, and one had to be created. Peasants were forced from the land into the cities to fill the positions created by new factories and service organizations. The Russian worker, in contrast with the conservative union member who evolved in other countries, was an illiterate, violent protester, given to revolutionary types of protest and rebellion that by their nature bordered on anarchy.

A revolution in 1905 led Czar Nicholas II to promise reform. The distrust that many workers held for him and his government, however, led to the establishment of secret revolutionary societies. It was during this time that several new types of leaders emerged. These men were professional revolutionists. Scholars as well as trained Marxists, they believed in the need to unite the world under socialism and that the violent overthrow of nations was the way to accomplish this. After the revolution in 1905, many new converts to revolutionary socialism developed in Russia.

One of these revolutionary leaders was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, more commonly known by his revolutionary pen name, Lenin. He became the head of an arm of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks gained their name, which can be translated as "those of the majority," at the Congress of Brussels in 1903. The opponents of Lenin's party, the Mensheviks (or minority party), were also present at the congress. Together, the parties planned changes in the Russian government. The Mensheviks favored strengthening the weak parliamentary arm of government, the Duma. The Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Lenin, called for revolutionary overthrow of the government.

In 1914, with the beginning of World War I, the talk of revolution died down. When the Austrian government declared war on Russia, the people rallied to the needs of the country and to their czar. The revolutionaries, with the exception of the Bolsheviks, vowed to put aside their demands for the duration of the conflict. Brave and patriotic peasants, under the guidance of often inferior generals and with outdated, often defective, weapons and other materials, were at first decidedly effective, advancing deep into Austrian territory. Germany changed the outcome, however, by coming to the assistance of Austria. Under the pressures of war, the Russian government began to fail miserably. Not only were the weapons inferior, but also ammunition was in short supply. Transportation was inadequate and at times nonexistent.

Between fourteen and fifteen million men were mobilized for the army. One-third to one-half of all peasant households were left without their primary workers. The fuel shortage caused by the war affected agricultural production and delivery. The threat of invasion, the disruption of all services, and the food shortages that grew with each year of the war left the countryside in a state of deprivation and panic. The attitudes of the czar's court also fueled resentment among the people of Russia. Czarina Alexandra was German, and she and many of the court advisers and their families were often heard to make pro-German comments even as Russians died on the battlefields opposing German armies.

Trains were given over to support the war effort, but the strain was more than they could deal with adequately. Rumors began to circulate that speeding troop trains often shunted other trains onto sidetracks, where they stayed for days or forever in Russia's vast wastelands. According to the rumors, the trains shunted aside were often hospital trains, and wounded soldiers were being left to die. Food that was being sent from central Russia to the cities was left to spoil on other trains.

The early part of 1917 saw a series of more than thirteen hundred strikes by more than six hundred thousand workers. On March 8, 1917, a riot that lasted for three days broke out spontaneously in the capital city of Petrograd because of bread and coal shortages. On March 10, reserve army troops were sent in to quell the riot, but the troops mutinied and joined the rioters. By March 12, a revolution had occurred. Czar Nicholas II abdicated on March 15, and the Duma established a provisional government the same day.

Immediately, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies established a shadow government that rivaled the provisional government of Russia and forced a partnership on all decisions. The initial revolution had lasted only days, but the question remained as to what form of government would be established and which political group would control it.

In the outlying areas of Russia, where transportation and communication were extremely poor, many of the peasants did not know for years that a revolution had taken place. In other areas, chaos and terror reigned. The land-hungry peasants of Russia saw the revolution as an opportunity to acquire the land for which they had always yearned. Mass murder and torture were not unusual tactics. Some land changed hands several times. The food shortages that were crippling the cities worsened as peasants turned to rebellion instead of farming.

By June, 1917, the outlying areas of Russia were also suffering from growing ethnic and nationalistic movements. In areas such as Georgia and the Caucasus, where Muslims and non-Russian ethnic groups had always suffered as second-class citizens under the Russian nobility, movements to separate from the Russian government grew. There were rumors of appeals by some to Germany and Austria for citizenship in return for aid and assistance in overthrowing their Russian masters.

July 16-18, 1917, saw the Bolsheviks make their early and abortive attempts to take over the government. The provisional government had failed to accomplish the two major demands of the revolutionaries, the end of the war and land reform. Bolsheviks, soldiers, sailors, and mobs of civilians attempted to take Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), against Lenin's advice. Lenin knew that the time was not right and that the Bolsheviks were not organized enough to pull off a coup, so he joined forces with the popular Leon Trotsky to gain strength. The coup attempt failed, and Lenin and several other leaders fled to Finland to escape execution.

Lenin began to call for a second revolution, one of the proletariat, or workers. He stated that the original revolution had been one of the bourgeois or middle class and that it obviously was going to maintain the status quo of exploiting the workers. A trained Marxist, Lenin knew that Russia was not really ready for a proletariat revolution. Karl Marx had outlined a plan for socialist revolution that required a secure and effective capitalist economy to ensure success. Active, violent revolution was not a necessary ingredient in Marx's plan, but successful economics was. Russia did not have any of the necessary ingredients: The economy was not based on capitalism, it was not successful, and it did not possess an established, organized labor class. Lenin was determined to push through a revolution that would attain the ends he believed would lead Russia and, by example, the rest of the world into a Marxist socialistic utopia.

Lenin's attempt came on November 7, 1917. Trotsky helped to organize the Red Army, which was highly trained and in possession of military technology as advanced as Trotsky could obtain. The Bolsheviks took control of the provisional government, but the revolution was not over. From November 7, 1917, until 1921, civil war would rage in Russia. It took three years for Lenin and Trotsky to pull the country together under the leadership of the socialists.

Significance

The Russian people, particularly the peasants, had never known freedom. In 1917 they were ripe for any political idea that promised them a measure of input and self-determination. The revolutionary groups in Russia made these promises, and Bolshevism offered the most. Tired of working land that they could never own, going hungry while their masters ate unsparingly of the food they had produced, the peasants were the most exploited class. They would, however, continue to be exploited: Under the new regime of Communism, the land for which the peasants fought was taken from them and managed by the state.

Lenin viewed the peasants as a great body of uneducated, unthinking, animalistic creatures, much like the farm animals they raised. The proletariat, or urban labor class, was the group that was to be freed, trained, and utilized to create the new society that Russia was to become, and would set an example for the rest of the workers of the world.

Many socialists in other countries of Europe staged small uprisings in sympathy with the Russian Revolution. The country most affected was Germany. At one point there was fear that the German government was in danger of being overthrown, but nationalism prevailed. The industrialized nations of Europe had evolved a sense of self and identity that was lacking in Russia, an unindustrialized, feudalistic society. Lenin did not understand the impact that nationalism would have on the socialists of Europe. They were in most cases German, Italian, and French first, and socialists second.

Undaunted by the failure of the rest of Europe to follow Russia's lead, Lenin continued to consolidate his power and to reform Russia into the communist state that he was sure would eventually be emulated by the rest of Europe and then the world. In 1921, when the civil war in Russia finally ended, Lenin began an era of forced collectivization of land and dictatorial control of peasant labor. The peasants continued to be hungry as they toiled in their fields in an effort to produce the food needed in war-torn and devastated Russian cities.

The urban labor force was regimented into labor battalions. Laborers' dream of worker-owned factories ended with takeovers by the government. This was followed by a reign of terror ordered by Lenin to remove any dissent or opposition to the government. Minorities were killed when any discussion of nationalistic movements reached governmental agencies. Religious affiliation was outlawed, as Lenin perceived it as a source of antigovernment agitation.

When Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin, not Trotsky, took control after a brief power struggle. Trotsky remained head of the Red Army but was eventually discredited by Stalin, who saw him as a possible threat to his own power.

The Russian Revolution produced a global reaction as countries lined up to join with or to fight against the communists. The history of much of the twentieth century was influenced by opposition to communism as well as by nations' adoption of communist or socialist systems, as in the case of China and many parts of the developing world. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the final decades of the twentieth century, given communism's earlier successes, stands as one of the most important, and perhaps most unexpected, events of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Adams, Arthur E., ed. The Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Victory: Why and How. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1960. A collection of essays, mostly by Russian writers, that shed light on the causes and the personalities of the Russian Revolution.

Brown, Anthony Cave, and Charles B. MacDonald. On a Field of Red: The Communist International and the Coming of World War II. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1981. Provides information on Russian history from 1917 to 1939 and goes into great depth concerning the revolution itself and its impact on Russia's development. Gives very little consideration to earlier Russian history in explaining the conditions of the country or government. Includes index and excellent map showing the placement and areas of intervention of the British, German, Austrian, Japanese, and American troops after 1918.

Crankshaw, Edward. The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia's Drift to Revolution, 1825-1917. 1976. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Examines the czarist government's attitudes and concerns. Some mention of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin and the personalities of the court officials. Includes maps, bibliographic notes, and index.

Lindemann, Albert S. A History of European Socialism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983. Discusses the Russian Revolution only as an outcome of the socialist movement. Invaluable to an understanding of the political movements engendered by the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Includes reading guide, bibliography, and index.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., and Mark D. Steinberg. A History of Russia. 7th ed. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. A broad overview of Russian history from its beginnings through the end of the twentieth century. Includes maps, photographs, and index.

Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2000. Authoritative and well-rounded biography uses information recently available from Soviet archives to shed new light on Lenin. Includes illustrations, map, glossary of names, select bibliography, and index.

Wilkinson, James, and H. Stuart Hughes. Contemporary Europe: A History. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1997. An overview of European history from 1914 through the end of the twentieth century. Addresses the effects of the Russian Revolution on the rest of Europe. Good source of information on the political decisions made by European leaders in their dealings with the Russian governments. Includes excellent illustrations, maps, and index.

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The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a pivotal series of events that led to the overthrow of the czarist autocracy and the establishment of a provisional government, which was soon challenged by the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary faction led by Vladimir Lenin. Prior to the revolution, Imperial Russia was marked by stark class divisions, with a largely illiterate peasantry under the control of a wealthy nobility. The onset of World War I exacerbated existing tensions, as military failures and severe shortages of food and resources fueled public discontent. The revolution began in March 1917 with widespread strikes and riots, ultimately leading to the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. A provisional government was formed, but it struggled to address key issues such as land reform and the continuation of the war. This created a power vacuum that the Bolsheviks sought to exploit. Lenin’s call for a second revolution culminated in the October Revolution, where the Bolsheviks seized power and began implementing their vision of a socialist state. The revolution sparked a civil war that lasted until 1921, resulting in the consolidation of communist power and the establishment of the Soviet Union. While the revolution initially promised freedom and land to the peasantry, it ultimately led to further state control and repression. The aftermath significantly influenced global political dynamics, as the world responded to the rise of communism and its subsequent challenges throughout the 20th century.

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The Cultural Revolution - The National Archives

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The Cultural Revolution took place in China from 1966 to 1976. It was not a revolution to overthrow the government or people in power. Instead, it was a political movement initiated by Mao Zedong, who was Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and leader of China. It aimed to purge capitalist and traditional elements […]

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EBSCO Information Services, Inc. | www.ebsco.com

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The Chinese Cultural Revolution, initiated by Mao Zedong from 1966 to 1976, was a socio-political movement aimed at preserving Communist ideology by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. It followed a history of repression against intellectuals, dating back to the authoritarian practices of early Chinese emperors. The movement began with the encouragement of criticism against the Communist Party but quickly escalated as dissenters were labeled “bourgeois reactionaries,” leading to widespread persecution. The Red Guards, primarily composed of radical students, were mobilized to attack perceived enemies of the revolution, resulting in violence, public humiliation, and a campaign against cultural heritage, including the destruction of books and traditional art forms. As the movement progressed, internal power struggles emerged even within the Red Guards, leading to armed clashes that eventually required military intervention to restore order. The Cultural Revolution significantly disrupted education and cultural continuity, leaving a lasting impact on Chinese society. After Mao’s death in 1976, the Communist Party officially condemned the Cultural Revolution, placing the blame on Mao while still controlling public discourse on the topic. Today, discussions about this tumultuous period are limited, with historical narratives often shaped by political considerations, reflecting the complexity and sensitivity surrounding the legacy of the Cultural Revolution in China.

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Mao and the Cultural Revolution I FRONTLINE | PBS LearningMedia

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Learn about the origins of the Chinese Communist Revolution and the devastating consequences of leader Mao Zedong’s agricultural policies and the Cultural Revolution in these videos excerpted from FRONTLINE.

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Industrial Revolution | Definition, History, Dates, Summary, & Facts

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Industrial Revolution, in modern history, the process of change from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing. The process began in Britain in the 18th century and from there spread to other parts of the world, driving changes in energy use, socioecon…

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher's Guide

To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides

The Industrial Revolution took place over more than a century, as production of goods moved from home businesses, where products were generally crafted by hand, to machine-aided production in factories. This revolution, which involved major changes in transportation, manufacturing, and communications, transformed the daily lives of Americans as much as- and arguably more than-any single event in U.S. history.

Background

An early landmark moment in the Industrial Revolution came near the end of the eighteenth century, when Samuel Slater brought new manufacturing technologies from Britain to the United States and founded the first U.S. cotton mill in Beverly, Massachusetts. Slater's Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, like many of the mills and factories that sprang up in the next few decades, was powered by water, which confined industrial development to the northeast at first. The concentration of industry in the Northeast also facilitated the development of transportation systems such as railroads and canals, which encouraged commerce and trade.

The technological innovation that would come to mark the United States in the nineteenth century began to show itself with Robert Fulton's establishment of steamboat service on the Hudson River, Samuel F. B. Morse's invention of the telegraph, and Elias Howe's invention of the sewing machine, all before the Civil War. Following the Civil War, industrialization in the United States increased at a breakneck pace. This period, encompassing most of the second half of the nineteenth century, has been called the Second Industrial Revolution or the American Industrial Revolution. Over the first half of the century, the country expanded greatly, and the new territory was rich in natural resources. Completing the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 was a major milestone, making it easier to transport people, raw materials, and products. The United States also had vast human resources: between 1860 and 1900, fourteen million immigrants came to the country, providing workers for an array of industries.

The American industrialists overseeing this expansion were ready to take risks to make their businesses successful. Andrew Carnegie established the first steel mills in the U.S. to use the British "Bessemer process" for mass producing steel, becoming a titan of the steel industry in the process. He acquired business interests in the mines that produced the raw material for steel, the mills and ovens that created the final product and the railroads and shipping lines that transported the goods, thus controlling every aspect of the steelmaking process.

Other industrialists, including John D. Rockefeller, merged the operations of many large companies to form a trust. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust came to monopolize 90% of the industry, severely limiting competition. These monopolies were often accused of intimidating smaller businesses and competitors in order to maintain high prices and profits. Economic influence gave these industrial magnates significant political clout as well. The U.S. government adopted policies that supported industrial development such as providing land for the construction of railroads and maintaining high tariffs to protect American industry from foreign competition.

American inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison created a long list of new technologies that improved communication, transportation, and industrial production. Edison made improvements to existing technologies, including the telegraph while also creating revolutionary new technologies such as the light bulb, the phonograph, the kinetograph, and the electric dynamo. Bell, meanwhile, explored new speaking and hearing technologies, and became known as the inventor of the telephone.

For millions of working Americans, the industrial revolution changed the very nature of their daily work. Previously, they might have worked for themselves at home, in a small shop, or outdoors, crafting raw materials into products, or growing a crop from seed to table. When they took factory jobs, they were working for a large company. The repetitive work often involved only one small step in the manufacturing process, so the worker did not see or appreciate what was being made; the work was often dangerous and performed in unsanitary conditions. Some women entered the work force, as did many children. Child labor became a major issue. Dangerous working conditions, long hours, and concern over wages and child labor contributed to the growth of labor unions. In the decades after the Civil War, workers organized strikes and work stoppages that helped to publicize their problems. One especially significant labor upheaval was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Wage cuts in the railroad industry led to the strike, which began in West Virginia and spread to three additional states over a period of 45 days before being violently ended by a combination of vigilantes, National Guardsmen, and federal troops. Similar episodes occurred more frequently in the following decades as workers organized and asserted themselves against perceived injustices.

The new jobs for the working class were in the cities. Thus, the Industrial Revolution began the transition of the United States from a rural to an urban society. Young people raised on farms saw greater opportunities in the cities and moved there, as did millions of immigrants from Europe. Providing housing for all the new residents of cities was a problem, and many workers found themselves living in urban slums; open sewers ran alongside the streets, and the water supply was often tainted, causing disease. These deplorable urban conditions gave rise to the Progressive Movement in the early twentieth century; the result would be many new laws to protect and support people, eventually changing the relationship between government and the people.

The Industrial Revolution is a complex set of economic, technological, and social changes that occurred over a substantial period of time. Teachers should consider the documents in this collection as tools for stimulating student thinking about aspects of the Industrial Revolution.

Suggestions for Teachers

After providing a definition of the Industrial Revolution and explaining the time span across which it took place, teachers might supply small groups of students with a set of the documents in this primary source set. Students can categorize the documents by whether they provide information about what happened, why it happened, or its effects. Some documents may fit into more than one category. When small groups have completed their work, the teacher can facilitate creating a class list of events of the Industrial Revolution, causes (or supporting factors), and effects. Students may search the Library's online collections to find additional evidence to support the causes and effects on the class chart.

Using the documents in this primary source set, students can create a timeline of important events in the Industrial Revolution. The last document in the set is dated 1919. Was the Industrial Revolution over by 1919? Challenge students to find evidence in the Library of Congress digital collections to support their answer (there are documents that suggest industrialization in the South was still taking place into the 1930s).

Understanding a historical event as it was experienced by those who lived through it is an important skill of historical thinking-and one that can be difficult to develop. Teachers may challenge students to study documents in the collection to identify varied perspectives on the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution, as experienced by people of the day. Would students classify the responses as mainly positive, mainly negative, or about equally divided? How did people respond to what they perceived as negative effects of the Industrial Revolution?

In 1893, Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, which highlighted achievements of the United States and other nations in a variety of fields, including manufacturing and technology. An entire building was devoted to electricity. Using the primary source set as a starting point, ask students to design an exhibit about the development of American industry for the World's Columbian Exposition.

Additional Resources

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The Industrial Revolution in the United States | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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Jump to: Background Suggestions for Teachers Additional Resources The Industrial Revolution took place over more than a century, as production of goods moved from home businesses, where products were generally crafted by hand, to machine-aided production in factories.

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Whether it was mechanical inventions or new ways of doing old things, innovations powered the Industrial Revolution.

Subjects

Social Studies, World History

Image

Steam Engine Queens Mill

The use of steam-powered machines in cotton production pushed Britain's economic development from 1750 to 1850. Built more than 100 years ago, this steam engine still powers the Queens Mill textile factory in Burnley, England, United Kingdom.

Photograph by Ashley Cooper

It has been said that the Industrial Revolution was the most profound revolution in human history, because of its sweeping impact on people's daily lives. The term "industrial revolution" is a succinct catchphrase to describe a historical period, starting in 18th-century Great Britain, where the pace of change appeared to speed up. This acceleration in the processes of technical innovation brought about an array of new tools and machines. It also involved more subtle practical improvements in various fields affecting labor, production, and resource use. The word "technology" (which derives from the Greek word techne, meaning art or craft) encompasses both of these dimensions of innovation.

The technological revolution, and that sense of ever-quickening change, began much earlier than the 18th century and has continued all the way to the present day. Perhaps what was most unique about the Industrial Revolution was its merger of technology with industry. Key inventions and innovations served to shape virtually every existing sector of human activity along industrial lines, while also creating many new industries. The following are some key examples of the forces driving change.

Agriculture

Western European farming methods had been improving gradually over the centuries. Several factors came together in 18th-century Britain to bring about a substantial increase in agricultural productivity. These included new types of equipment, such as the seed drill developed by Jethro Tull around 1701. Progress was also made in crop rotation and land use, soil health, development of new crop varieties, and animal husbandry. The result was a sustained increase in yields, capable of feeding a rapidly growing population with improved nutrition. The combination of factors also brought about a shift toward large-scale commercial farming, a trend that continued into the 19th century and later. Poorer peasants had a harder time making ends meet through traditional subsistence farming. The enclosure movement, which converted common-use pasture land into private property, contributed to this trend toward market-oriented agriculture. A great many rural workers and families were forced by circumstance to migrate to the cities to become industrial laborers.

Energy

Deforestation in England had led to a shortage of wood for lumber and fuel starting in the 16th century. The country's transition to coal as a principal energy source was more or less complete by the end of the 17th century. The mining and distribution of coal set in motion some of the dynamics that led to Britain's industrialization. The coal-fired steam engine was in many respects the decisive technology of the Industrial Revolution.

Steam power was first applied to pump water out of coal mines. For centuries, windmills had been employed in the Netherlands for the roughly similar operation of draining low-lying flood plains. Wind was, and is, a readily available and renewable energy source, but its irregularity was considered a drawback. Water power was a more popular energy source for grinding grain and other types of mill work in most of preindustrial Europe. By the last quarter of the 18th century, however, thanks to the work of the Scottish engineer James Watt and his business partner Matthew Boulton, steam engines achieved a high level of efficiency and versatility in their design. They swiftly became the standard power supply for British, and, later, European industry. The steam engine turned the wheels of mechanized factory production. Its emergence freed manufacturers from the need to locate their factories on or near sources of water power. Large enterprises began to concentrate in rapidly growing industrial cities.

In this time-honored craft, Britain's wood shortage necessitated a switch from wood charcoal to coke, a coal product, in the Metallurgy smelting process. The substitute fuel eventually proved highly beneficial for iron production. Experimentation led to some other advances in metallurgical methods during the 18th century. For example, a certain type of furnace that separated the coal and kept it from contaminating the metal, and a process of "puddling" or stirring the molten iron, both made it possible to produce larger amounts of wrought iron. Wrought iron is more malleable than cast iron and therefore more suitable for fabricating machinery and other heavy industrial applications.

Textiles

The production of fabrics, especially cotton, was fundamental to Britain's economic development between 1750 and 1850. Those are the years historians commonly use to bracket the Industrial Revolution. In this period, the organization of cotton production shifted from a small-scale cottage industry, in which rural families performed spinning and weaving tasks in their homes, to a large, mechanized, factory-based industry. The boom in productivity began with a few technical devices, including the spinning jenny, spinning mule, and power loom. First human, then water, and finally steam power were applied to operate power looms, carding machines, and other specialized equipment. Another well-known innovation was the cotton gin, invented in the United States in 1793. This device spurred an increase in cotton cultivation and export from U.S. slave states, a key British supplier.

Chemicals

This industry arose partly in response to the demand for improved bleaching solutions for cotton and other manufactured textiles. Other chemical research was motivated by the quest for artificial dyes, explosives, solvents, fertilizers, and medicines, including pharmaceuticals. In the second half of the 19th century, Germany became the world's leader in industrial chemistry.

Transportation

Concurrent with the increased output of agricultural produce and manufactured goods arose the need for more efficient means of delivering these products to market. The first efforts toward this end in Europe involved constructing improved overland roads. Canals were dug in both Europe and North America to create maritime corridors between existing waterways. Steam engines were recognized as useful in locomotion, resulting in the emergence of the steamboat in the early 19th century. High-pressure steam engines also powered railroad locomotives, which operated in Britain after 1825. Railways spread rapidly across Europe and North America, extending to Asia in the latter half of the 19th century. Railroads became one of the world's leading industries as they expanded the frontiers of industrial society.

Media Credits

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Director

Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society

Production Managers

Gina Borgia, National Geographic Society

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Program Specialists

Sarah Appleton, National Geographic Society, National Geographic Society

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Last Updated

October 19, 2023

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Whether it was mechanical inventions or new ways of doing old things, innovations powered the Industrial Revolution.

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MLA - Michals, Debra. "Madam C. J. Walker." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2015. Date accessed.

Chicago - Michals, Debra. "Madam C. J. Walker." National Women's History Museum. 2015. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/madam-cj-walker.

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Madam C.J. Walker was an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and activist. She rose from poverty in the South to become one of the wealthiest African American women of her time.

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See our catalog of published books available for purchase
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Photos from the Madam Walker Family Archives are available for licensing
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"
I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations....I have built my own factory on my own ground."
- Madam C.J. Walker

A'Lelia Walker

See some of the important locations that stand as a testament to Madam Walker's example of economic and political empowerment for African Americans and women

Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker

A'Lelia's Non-Fiction Biography On Her Own Ground is the "inspiration" for Self Made, the fictional 4-part Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer.

Want to know what's fact and what's fiction? Click here to learn what A'Lelia thinks about the series.

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Madam C.J. Walker | African-American Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, and Activist

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See our catalog of published books available for purchase Learn More Photos from the Madam Walker Family Archives are available for licensing Learn More Stay connected with updates about events and activities Learn More I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C.J. Walker were pioneers of the African American beauty industry and groundbreaking entrepreneurs. Each woman developed haircare and beauty products, created beauty schools and launched highly successful businesses that employed hundreds of African Americans (mainly women).

Annie Turnbo Malone
Annie Malone was born in 1869, in Metropolis, Illinois, to formerly enslaved parents and orphaned at a young age. From an early age, Malone understood that for African American women, appearance and grooming represented more than their personal style. It could also indicate a woman's class and social standing. She realized that improving hair health could also have a positive effect on the lives of African American's. This motivation, along with her early passion for styling her sisters' hair, inspired Malone to develop products to help women adapt to a society that judged them based on how they met the American standard of beauty (which excluded the natural appearance of most African Americans).

Malone not only faced the challenges of being a black woman in a segregated society but a businesswoman in a sexist society. Undeterred, she began experimenting with chemistry and established a successful business after developing a line of products that were advertised to help improve scalp health and promote hair growth. Some of these products included scalp preparations and her famous "Hair Grower." After early success in Illinois, she moved to Missouri in 1902 and founded Poro College Company.

Poro College was founded as a cosmetics school and named after the Poro society-a secret organization in West Africa that exemplified physicality and spirituality. Not only did Poro College act as a training center to nurture and style black hair, but it was also a significant source of employment for African Americans, especially women. Her "Poro agents," ranging in ages from 16 to 80, were trained to sell her custom products and use the "Poro system" of scalp cleaning and hair nourishing. Over the company's life span, there were tens of thousands of women and men sold Poro products around the the world.

Poro products included cold cream, lipstick, and face powders in a variety of shades like "Poro Brown," "White," and browns in multiple hues. Among the list of "Poro Hair Preparations" available for purchase were Hair Grower, Special Hair Grower and Tetter Relief.

Poro College also provided a meeting place for African Americans and major black organizations such as the National Negro Business League to meet since they were denied access to most public spaces.

During the 1920s, Annie Malone's Poro brand soared, increasing the value of her company and making her one of the wealthiest African American women. With her newfound fortune, Malone donated large sums of money to philanthropic efforts around the St. Louis area and beyond to institutions such as Howard University. However, by the end of the decade, the Poro Company fell upon difficult times, due to a bitter divorce settlement, a number of lawsuits and the hardships of the Great Depression. Although her business survived, it was reduced to a fraction of its original size.

Madam C.J. Walker (born Sarah Breedlove, 1867)
Like Malone, Madam C.J. Walker was also the daughter of formerly enslaved parents and orphaned at a young age. During the early part of her life, Walker lived in Delta, Louisiana, before moving to Vicksburg, Mississippi, following the death of her parents. Fleeing the economic, racial, and familial hardships present in Vicksburg, she moved to St. Louis. It was there where Walker found work as a laundress.

I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them! MADAM C.J. WALKER

Walker struggled with hair issues of her own and experimented with solutions. Walker enrolled at Malone's Poro College and later became a Poro agent. Given Walker's personal hair struggles and the training she received from Poro college, she was inspired to begin considering making and selling her own products.

After moving to Denver to sell Poro products, she changed her name to Madam C.J. Walker and started developing her own line of hair products. According to her biography, On Her Own: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, Walker received the formula for her own hair grower through a dream. Other hair products included her "Glossine and Pressing Oil," and the "Wonderful Hair Grower." Among other beauty supplies like creams and cosmetics, the most popular product was Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower, which consisted of petrolatum, coconut oil, beeswax, copper sulfate, carbolic acid, precipitated sulfur and perfume.

In 1908, Madam C.J. Walker relocated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and opened a factory and hair school called Lelia College. At Lelia College, she taught women to become "hair culturists." Through the vast growth and success of Walker's beauty empire, she became America's first recognized, self-made female millionaire.

Both Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C.J. Walker succeeded in developing specialized black hair care and beauty products for African Americans. More impressive, each was pioneering entrepreneurs, creating highly successful companies - extraordinary accomplishments given they were black women competing in a segregated and highly sexist society.

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Annie Malone and Madam C.J. Walker: Pioneers of the African American Beauty Industry

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Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C.J. Walker were pioneers of the African American beauty industry and successful businesswomen. Each developed haircare and beauty products, launched highly successful businesses and employed hundreds of African Americans (mainly women).

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Mary Kay Ash - Leadership - Harvard Business School

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Mary Kay, Incorporated, often called Mary Kay Cosmetics, a fully integrated manufacturer and global distributor of more than 700 personal care and beauty products, is a privately held corporation headquartered in Addison, Dallas County, Texas, with multiple nationwide distribution centers and sales in more than thirty-five countries worldwide. In 2012 Mary Kay recorded $3 billion in sales and was one of the largest direct sellers of skincare products in the world. As of 2021, the firm employed approximately 5,000 employees and had a sales force of at least 2.4 million independent beauty consultants, and in 1984 claimed more women earning over $50,000 in annual commissions than any other United States company. Its 453,000-square-foot Lewisville manufacturing facility, which opened in 2018, replaced its Dallas facility built between 1968 and 1980 on over eleven acres, houses company operations, including processing, packaging, warehousing, offices, and research and development laboratories. The corporation's major symbol, the bumblebee, identifies Mary Kay with an insect that aerodynamically should not be able to fly, but does so anyway.

In 1963, with just $5,000, Mary Kay (Mary Kathlyn Wagner), a native of Hot Wells, Texas, started the company, then called Beauty by Mary Kay, with her son Richard's help in a tiny storefront in downtown Dallas. She based the company's structure on her previous job in direct sales with Stanley Home Products. She started with Stanley in 1938 to make enough money to enable herself and her first husband to move out of her mother's house. She worked and was taking pre-med classes at the University of Houston when her husband deserted her. Three weeks later she attended the company's annual Dallas convention, witnessed the year's Queen of Sales win an alligator handbag, and became determined to succeed at sales. Awarded only a trophy as the next year's winner, she later carried an alligator briefcase with her initials in gold. As a single mother, direct sales allowed her the flexibility she needed as a single mother. She enlisted her three children to pack products and began full time work for Stanley. This also began her son Richard R. Rogers's lifetime career as her business partner.

Although Mary Kay displayed a talent for recruiting and marketing, she was denied the title of unit manager that she felt she deserved. In 1952 she left Stanley to work for World Gift Company, a Dallas home accessories firm, where she was instrumental in extending distribution to forty-three states in eleven years and was eventually made a member of the board of directors. When she still saw her ideas ignored after achieving board status, Mary Kay resigned in 1963. By listing successes and failures in her direct sales experience, Mary Kay wrote the outline for a new company that lacked only a product. She subsequently purchased the formulas of a group of skin care products and created her own line of skin care and cosmetics products. Of that original line, the extra emollient night cream is still in production.

Mary Kay's most important innovation was to utilize independent businesswomen by recruiting a sales force independent of her company. The firm sells its products at wholesale prices to a world-wide network of as many as 250,000 independent Mary Kay consultants, each of whom receives a 40 to 50 percent markup on products sold at retail prices through personal customer networks. Although not employees of Mary Kay in a traditional benefit sense, the sales force is educated in selling techniques by the company, which stresses that each "consider herself Mary Kay" to project the founder's charisma and selling ability. Consultants are encouraged to "fake it till you make it," with the understanding that "You are in business for yourself, but not by yourself." Top saleswomen receive pink Cadillacs, vacations, and diamond rings at annual seminars, which encourage them to set and reach personal goals, much like Mary Kay's alligator bag. The use of Mary Kay pink extends to its fleet of eighteen-wheeler trucks used to transport cosmetics to Mary Kay distribution centers.

Mary Kay Cosmetics expanded geographically in 1970, after a 1968 public offering in the over-the-counter stock market enabled the firm to open its first distribution center outside of Dallas. By 1976 the company was large enough to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and between 1973 to 1983 its stock price rose by 670 percent. By the 1990s national distribution centers were located in California, Georgia, New Jersey, and Illinois.

Mary Kay acquired its first subsidiary in the international market in Australia in 1971, followed by outlets in Canada in 1978, Argentina in 1980, Germany in 1986, Mexico in 1989, Taiwan in 1992, Japan in 1994, and China in 1995. In addition to the company's primary manufacturing plant in Dallas, Texas, they also open their first overseas manufacturing plant in Hangzhou in 1995 to produce products for their Asian market. In 1996 wholesale sales reached $1 billion, and the company expanded into the Ukraine and the Czech Republic. The next year they opened a manufacturing plant in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, to supply their European market; however, the plant closed in 2003. In 2018 the Mary Kay Incorporation opened a 453,000 square-foot, $100 million facility for global manufacturing and research and development in Lewisville, Texas. Although they pulled out of Australia and New Zealand in 2020, the company was in nearly forty countries in 2021. Instead of pink Cadillacs, top sales directors received pink Opel convertibles in Australia, pink Ford Mondeos in Russia, pink Honda Civics in Brazil, and pink Mercedes-Benzes in China and most of Europe.

In 1985, through a leveraged buyout, the company was returned to private ownership by Richard Rogers and Mary Kay Ash. In 1991 Mary Kay announced a $3 million settlement with the Internal Revenue Service to end a $29 million claim by IRS officials resulting from the company's 1985 leveraged buyout by Mary Kay's family members. In response to the public criticism by animal rights groups in 1989, Mary Kay Cosmetics issued a moratorium on its use of laboratory animals for consumer product development and safety testing and formed a panel of experts to advise its researchers on alternatives. In the 1990s the company shared its findings with groups such as the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing and supported academic research on alternatives through direct grants to scientists at CAAT and the University of Texas.

Mary Kay was active in organizations dealing with health care issues both locally and nationally and guided the company to help with these concerns, especially when they concerned women ( see WOMEN AND HEALTH). Later married to vitamin industry executive and retired wholesale manufacturer's representative Mel Ash, she became a leader in the fight to find a cure for cancer after her husband's death from the disease in 1980. She twice served as the honorary chairman of the Texas Breast Screening Project; lobbied for Texas legislation to require insurance companies to cover mammograms; participated in projects of the American Cancer Society, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the St. Paul Research Center, and the Dallas YWCA; and is a frequent speaker to women's organizations and others. The firm contributes to the North Texas Food Bank and provides a mobile mammogram unit for members of its sales staff. In 1987 Mary Kay Ash became chairman emeritus and her son Richard took her place. She remained active in the company until she suffered a stroke in 1996. She later died on Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2001.

In 1996 the Mary Kay Ash Charitable Foundation was established and continued to fund breast cancer research and support for survivors of gender-based domestic violence. Between 2000 and 2001 the foundation donated $58 million to domestic violence shelters. The foundation also made a long-term commitment to aid the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and the anti-poverty humanitarian organization, CARE. Mary Kay Incorporated donated nearly $10 million in monetary donations, product donations, and distribution support in countries where it operated during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

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The Legacy of Mary Kay Cosmetics: Empowering Women Through Beauty

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Discover the inspiring story of Mary Kay Cosmetics, a global leader in beauty products founded by Mary Kay Ash. Learn about its history, innovations, and commitment to empowering women.

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60 Years in Print

Silent Spring

Perhaps the finest nature writer of the Twentieth Century, Rachel Carson (1907-1964) is remembered more today as the woman who challenged the notion that humans could obtain mastery over nature by chemicals, bombs and space travel than for her studies of ocean life. Her sensational book Silent Spring (1962) warned of the dangers to all natural systems from the misuse of chemical pesticides such as DDT, and questioned the scope and direction of modern science, initiated the contemporary environmental movement.

Welcome to our website dedicated to the environmental teachings of Rachel Carson! Through my journey of writing and publishing the biography "Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature," I have delved deeply into the life and work of this incredible individual.

​Explore the life and work of Rachel Carson, one of the 20th century's most influential voices in literature and environmentalism. This website, based on the biography Witness for Nature, aims to educate readers about Carson's life, legacy, and the impact of her revolutionary text, Silent Spring.

Carson was a student of nature, a born ecologist before that science was defined, and a writer who found that the natural world gave her something to write about. Born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, upstream from the industrial behemoth of Pittsburgh, she became a marine scientist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington, DC, primarily as a writer and editor. She was always aware of the impact that humans had on the natural world. Her first book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941) was a gripping account of the interactions of a sea bird, a fish and an eel -- who shared life in the open seas. A canny scholar working in government during World War II, Carson took advantage of the latest scientific material for her next book, The Sea Around Us (1951) which was nothing short of a biography of the sea. It became an international best-seller, raised the consciousness of a generation, and made Rachel Carson the trusted public voice of science in America. The Edge of the Sea (1955) brought Carson's focus on the ecosystems of the eastern coast from Maine to Florida. All three books were physical explanations of life, all drenched with miracle of what happens to life in and near the sea.

In her books on the sea Carson wrote about geologic discoveries from submarine technology and underwater research -- of how islands were formed, how currents change and merge, how temperature affects sea life, and how erosion impacts not just shore lines but salinity, fish populations, and tiny micro-organisms. Even in the 1950's, Carson's ecological vision of the oceans shows her embrace of a larger environmental ethic which could lead to the sustainability of nature's interactive and interdependent systems. Climate change, rising sea-levels, melting Arctic glaciers, collapsing bird and animal populations, crumbling geological faults -- all are part of Carson's work. But how, she wondered, would the educated public be kept informed of these challenges to life itself? What was the public's "right to know"?

In her books on the sea Carson wrote about geologic discoveries from submarine technology and underwater research -- of how islands were formed, how currents change and merge, how temperature affects sea life, and how erosion impacts not just shore lines but salinity, fish populations, and tiny micro-organisms. Even in the 1950's, Carson's ecological vision of the oceans shows her embrace of a larger environmental ethic which could lead to the sustainability of nature's interactive and interdependent systems. Climate change, rising sea-levels, melting Arctic glaciers, collapsing bird and animal populations, crumbling geological faults -- all are part of Carson's work. But how, she wondered, would the educated public be kept informed of these challenges to life itself? What was the public's "right to know"?

Evidence of the widespread misuse of organic chemical pesticides government and industry after World War II prompted Carson to reluctantly speak out not just about the immediate threat to humans and non-human nature from unwitting chemical exposure, but also to question government and private science's assumption that human domination of nature was the correct course for the future. In Silent Spring Carson asked the hard questions about whether and why humans had the right to control nature; to decide who lives or dies, to poison or to destroy non-human life. In showing that all biological systems were dynamic and by urging the public to question authority, to ask "who speaks, and why"? Rachel Carson became a social revolutionary, and Silent Spring became the handbook for the future of all life on Earth.

Welcome to our special collection of pages dedicated to the life of Rachel Carson, an inspiring pioneer in the world of environmental science and conservation.

Journey through her remarkable life, from her early love for nature and writing to her groundbreaking research and advocacy that shaped the modern environmental movement.

Discover the enduring legacy of Rachel Carson, a pioneering environmentalist and author of the groundbreaking book, "Silent Spring." Explore how her courageous work ignited a global environmental movement, inspired generations of eco-activists, and led to significant policy changes that continue to shape our world today.

​Our comprehensive collection of resources will help you explore her groundbreaking research, literary works, and the numerous topics related to her life's work. Gain a deeper understanding of Carson's passion for the environment and her relentless pursuit of the truth, which ultimately led to a worldwide environmental movement. Join us in celebrating her remarkable contributions and learn how her legacy continues to inspire and shape our understanding of the natural world.

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RachelCarson.org - Perhaps the finest nature writer of the Twentieth Century, Rachel Carson (1907-1964) is remembered more today as the woman who challenged the notion that humans could obtain mastery over nature by chemicals, bombs and space travel than for her studies of ocean life.

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Rachel Carson catalyzed the global environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring.

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An overview of Thomas A. Edison’s involvement in motion pictures detailing the development of the Kinetoscope, the films of the Edison Manufacturing Company, and the company’s ultimate decline is given here. This essay relies heavily on the research and writings of film historians Charles Musser, David Robinson, and Eileen Bowser. More detailed information can be found in their books listed in the Bibliography, as well as in additional source materials.

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Although they will probably always be less celebrated than wars, marches, riots, or stormy political campaigns, books have at times been the most powerful influencer of social change in American life. Thomas Paine's Common Sense galvanized radical sentiment in the early days of the Revolution; Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe roused the North's antipathy to slavery in the decade leading up to the Civil War; and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which in 1962 exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, eloquently questioned humanity's faith in technological progress and helped set the stage for the environmental movement.

Carson, a renowned nature author and a former marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or FWS, was uniquely equipped to create so startling and inflammatory a book. A native of rural Pennsylvania, she had grown up with an enthusiasm for nature matched only by her love of writing and poetry. The educational brochures she wrote for FWS, as well as her published books and magazine articles, were characterized by meticulous research and a poetic evocation of her subject.

"Things go out of kilter"

Carson was happiest writing about the strength and resilience of natural systems. Her books Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us (which stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 86 weeks), and The Edge of the Sea were hymns to the interconnectedness of nature and all living things. Although she rarely used the term, Carson held an ecological view of nature, describing in precise yet poetic language the complex web of life that linked mollusks to seabirds to the fish swimming in the ocean's deepest and most inaccessible reaches.

DDT, the most powerful pesticide the world had ever known, exposed nature's vulnerability. Unlike most pesticides, whose effectiveness is limited to destroying one or two types of insects, DDT was capable of killing hundreds of different kinds at once. Developed in 1939, it first distinguished itself during World War II, clearing South Pacific islands of malaria-causing insects for U.S. troops while being used as an effective delousing powder in Europe. Its inventor was awarded the Nobel Prize.

When DDT became available for civilian use in 1945, there were only a few people who expressed second thoughts about this new miracle compound. One was nature writer Edwin Way Teale, who warned, "A spray as indiscriminate as DDT can upset the economy of nature as much as a revolution upsets social economy. Ninety percent of all insects are good, and if they are killed, things go out of kilter right away." Another was Carson, who wrote to Reader's Digest to propose an article about a series of tests on DDT being conducted not far from where she lived in Maryland. The magazine rejected the idea.

Silent Spring

Thirteen years later, in 1958, Carson's interest in writing about the dangers of DDT was rekindled when she received a letter from a friend in Massachusetts bemoaning the large bird kills that had occurred on Cape Cod as the result of DDT sprayings. The use of the pesticide had proliferated greatly since 1945, and Carson again tried, unsuccessfully, to interest a magazine in assigning her the story of its less desirable effects. By 1958, Carson was a best-selling author, and the fact that she could not obtain an assignment to write about DDT is indicative of how heretical and controversial her views on the subject must have seemed. Having already amassed a large quantity of research on the subject, however, Carson decided to go ahead and tackle the issue in a book.

Silent Spring took Carson four years to complete. It meticulously described how DDT entered the food chain and accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings, and caused cancer and genetic damage. A single application on a crop, she wrote, killed insects for weeks and months-not only the targeted insects but countless more-and remained toxic in the environment even after it was diluted by rainwater. Carson concluded that DDT and other pesticides had irrevocably harmed animals and had contaminated the world's food supply. The book's most haunting and famous chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," depicted a nameless American town where all life-from fish to birds to apple blossoms to human children-had been "silenced" by the insidious effects of DDT.

First serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, the book alarmed readers across America and, not surprisingly, brought a howl of indignation from the chemical industry. "If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," complained an executive of the American Cyanamid Company, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Monsanto published and distributed 5,000 copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring entitled "The Desolate Year," relating the devastation and inconvenience of a world where famine, disease, and insects ran amok because chemical pesticides had been banned. Some of the attacks were more personal, questioning Carson's integrity and even her sanity.

Vindication

Her careful preparation, however, had paid off. Anticipating the reaction of the chemical industry, she had compiled Silent Spring as one would a lawyer's brief, with no fewer than 55 pages of notes and a list of experts who had read and approved the manuscript. Many eminent scientists rose to her defense, and when President John F. Kennedy ordered the President's Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues the book raised, its report thoroughly vindicated both Silent Spring and its author. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned. The public debate moved quickly from whether pesticides were dangerous to which ones were dangerous, and the burden of proof shifted from the opponents of unrestrained pesticide use to the manufacturers.

The most important legacy of Silent Spring, though, was a new public awareness that nature was vulnerable to human intervention. Carson had made a radical proposal: that, at times, technological progress is so fundamentally at odds with natural processes that it must be curtailed. Conservation had never raised much broad public interest, for few people really worried about the disappearance of wilderness. But the threats Carson had outlined-the contamination of the food chain, cancer, genetic damage, the deaths of entire species-were too frightening to ignore. For the first time, the need to regulate industry in order to protect the environment became widely accepted, and environmentalism was born.

Carson was well aware of the larger implications of her work. Appearing on a CBS documentary about Silent Spring shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1964, she remarked, "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."

One of the landmark books of the 20th century, Silent Spring' s message resonates loudly today, even several decades after its publication. And equally inspiring is the example of Rachel Carson herself. Against overwhelming difficulties and adversity, but motivated by her unabashed love of nature, she rose like a gladiator in its defense.

This NRDC.org story is available for online republication by news media outlets or nonprofits under these conditions: The writer(s) must be credited with a byline; you must note prominently that the story was originally published by NRDC.org and link to the original; the story cannot be edited (beyond simple things such as grammar); you can't resell the story in any form or grant republishing rights to other outlets; you can't republish our material wholesale or automatically-you need to select stories individually; you can't republish the photos or graphics on our site without specific permission; you should to let us know when you've used one of our stories.

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How a courageous woman took on the chemical industry and raised important questions about humankind's impact on nature.

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Kinetoscope | Definition, Inventors, History, & Facts

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Kinetoscope, forerunner of the motion-picture film projector, invented by Thomas A. Edison and William Dickson of the United States in 1891. In it, a strip of film was passed rapidly between a lens and an electric light bulb while the viewer peered through a peephole.

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Learn about the history and development of cinema, from the Kinetoscope in 1891 to today's 3D revival.

Cinematography is the illusion of movement by the recording and subsequent rapid projection of many still photographic pictures on a screen. Originally a product of 19th-century scientific endeavour, cinema has become a medium of mass entertainment and communication, and today it is a multi-billion-pound industry.

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A very short history of cinema | National Science and Media Museum

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Learn about the history and development of cinema, from the Kinetoscope in 1891 to today's 3D revival, in our very short history of cinema.

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Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1770-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities external link and the Library of Congress. Learn more

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Chronicling America " Library of Congress

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Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1770-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

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The content for this article was researched and written by Jade Ryerson, an intern with the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, social reformers established settlement houses in cities to address issues created by urbanization and industrialization, such as housing shortages and unsanitary living conditions. In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established Hull-House in Chicago, the first settlement house in the United States.

By the late 1800s, Chicago had begun its transformation into the manufacturing hub of the United States. The steel, clothing, and meatpacking industries attracted thousands of workers from Europe and the American South. The Nineteenth Ward on the Near West Side became an enclave for Eastern European working-class immigrants. Many of them took low-wage jobs in sweatshops and garment factories in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull-House to offer social services to the community. Some of those services included legal aid, an employment office, childcare, and training in crafting and domestic skills. While touring Europe in 1888, Addams and Starr had visited Toynbee Hall in London and been inspired to create their own institution. Hull-House expanded from one aging mansion, built by Charles J. Hull in 1856, into a 13-building complex that spanned an entire city block. Its facilities included a gymnasium, theater, art gallery, libraries, pools, classrooms, a kindergarten, and dormitories.

Many of the staff who worked at Hull-House were educated, white women from middle- and upper-class families. Some lived full time at Hull-House, while others commuted from their homes in other Chicago neighborhoods. Their work at Hull-House exposed them firsthand to the unsafe and unsanitary conditions faced every day by the working-class residents of the Nineteenth Ward. Some Hull-House workers also became involved in social and political reforms, such as protective labor laws for women and children, women's suffrage, and addressing neighborhood housing and sanitation problems.

Hull-House was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1966.

Selected Sources:

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. New York: Macmillan, 1912. A Celebration of Women Writers. University of Pennsylvania Digital Library. Accessed December 15, 2020.

Johnson, Mary Ann. " Hull House." Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 2005. Accessed January 5, 2021.

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The content for this article was researched and written by Jade Ryerson, an intern with the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, social reformers established settlement houses in cities to address issues created by urbanization and industrialization, such as housing shortages and unsanitary living conditions.

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MLA - Michals, Debra. "Jane Addams." National Women's History Museum, 2017. Date accessed.

Chicago - Michals, Debra "Jane Addams." National Women's History Museum. 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/jane-addams.

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A progressive social reformer and activist, Jane Addams was on the frontline of the settlement house movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She later became internationally respected for the peace activism that ultimately won her a Nobel Peac

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Jane Addams was a famous activist, social worker, author, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and she is best known for founding the Hull House in Chicago, IL. was a progressive social settlement aimed at reducing poverty by providing social services and education to working class immigrants and laborers (Harvard University Library, n.d.).

Jane Addams was born in Cedarville, IL in 1860, and she graduated from Rockford College in 1882. In 1888, while traveling in London, Addams visited the settlement house Toynbee Hall (Harvard University Library, n.d.). Her experiences at Toynbee Hall inspired her to recreate the social services model in Chicago. In 1889, she leased a large home built by Charles Hull, which she chose for its "diversity and variety of activity for which it presented an opportunity." In her essay, "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," Addams stated that the settlement movement existed to add social function to political democracy, to assist the progress of humanity, and to express Christianity through humanitarian action (Tims, 1961).

Thus, with Hull House, Addams proposed to "provide a center for a higher civic and social life, to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts in Chicago" (Harvard University Library, n.d.). Addams sought to foster a place where social progress, education, democracy, ethics, art, religion, peace, and happiness could all be daily experiences (Tims, 1961). Hull House offered kindergarten and day care for children of working mothers, an art gallery, libraries, and art classes, and an employment bureau. By its second year of operation, Hull House served more than 2,000 residents weekly. By 1900, Hull House expanded to include a book bindery, gym, pool, cooperative for working women, theater, labor museum, and meeting space for trade unions (Harvard University Library, n.d.).

Florence Kelley , Alice Hamilton , Julia Lathrop , Ellen Gates Starr , Sophonisba Breckinridge , and and Edith Abbott joined Jane Addams at Hull House. They helped to launch numerous important social programs, including the Immigrants' Protective League, the Juvenile Protective Association, which was the first juvenile court in the U.S., and the Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic, later called the Institute for Juvenile Research. Moreover, these women helped enact protective legislation for women and children, child labor regulations, and mandatory minimum education laws. (Harvard University Library, n.d.). Thanks to Addams, this group of women was able to not only create a "cathedral of humanity" for the underserved, but also address civic and state legislation (Tims, 1961).

Addams became a prolific writer and speaker, and she helped to found the National Child Labor Committee . This committee, chartered by Congress in 1907, led to the creation of the Federal Children's Bureau in 1912 and passage of the Federal Child Labor Law in 1916. Furthermore, Addams was a leader in the National Consumers League, the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections , later called the National Conference of Social Work , chairwoman of the Labor Committee of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, vice president of the Campfire Girls , and on the executive boards of the National Playground Association, National Child Labor Committee, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) . Additionally, Addams campaigned for women's suffrage and the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. (Harvard University Library, n.d.).

In the early 20th century, Addams became active in the international peace movement. She opposed American involvement in the First World War, a controversial opinion which led to her expulsion from the Daughters of the American Revolution. Nevertheless, Addams was asked to serve as Herbert Hoover 's assistant in providing relief supplies to women and children in enemy nations. This story is captured her Peace and Bread in the Time of War (1922). Addams continued to be a leading pacifist through her work with the Women's Peace Party, which became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (Harvard University Library, n.d.). While she was demonstrably involved in political action for peace, Addams, too, emphasized the importance of rediscovering humanity's ability to foster compassion and goodness in light of large-scale warfare (Tims, 1961).

Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, and she continued to live and work at Hull House until she died in 1935. (Harvard University Library, n.d.).

This work may also be read through the Internet Archive.
For further reading:
Addams, J. (1899). The Subtle Problems of Charity. Atlantic Monthly, 83 (496), February.
"Jane Addams - Biographical," courtesy of Nobelprize.org Jane Addams Hull House Museum Jane Addams' publication, courtesy of the Harvard University Open Collections Program The Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighbors, 1889-1963, courtesy of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The American Abolitionist Movement Primary Source Set, courtesy of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)Settlement Houses in the Progressive Era Primary Source Set, courtesy of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)References:
Elshtain, J. B. (2002). The Jane Addams reader . New York, NY: Basic Books.

Harvard University Library. (n.d.). Jane Addams (1860-1935). Harvard University Library Open Collections Program . Retrieved from http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/addams.html

Tims, M. (1961). Jane Addams of Hull House, 1860-1935: A centenary study . London, UK: Ruskin House.

How to Cite this Article (APA Format): Paul, C.A. (2016). Jane Addams (1860-1935). Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved from http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/settlement-houses/addams-jane/

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Jane Addams was a famous activist, social worker, author, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and she is best known for founding the Hull House in Chicago, IL. was a progressive social settlement aimed at reducing poverty by providing social services and education to working class immigrants and laborers (Harvard University Library, n.d.).

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Wisconsin Idea: University of Wisconsin–Madison

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The University of Wisconsin is a top-ranked research institution located in Madison, Wisconsin, providing exceptional education opportunities to undergraduates, graduate and professional students.

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Fighting Bob La Follette

Portrait of Robert M. La Follette during his tenure as U.S. senator from Wisconsin. View the original source document: WHI 10650

The rise of big business in the 1870s created an oligarchy of wealthy businessmen. Politicians and business leaders conspired to create policies that favored their friends rather than the public. Wisconsin's legislature was controlled by a few powerful Republican leaders until the 1890s.

Progressive Republicans

But Progressive Republicans believed that the government's job was to serve the people. They wanted to restrict the power of corporations when it interfered with the needs of citizens. The Progressive Movement appealed to citizens who wanted honest government and moderate economic reforms. Robert La Follette was governor from 1901 to 1906, and U.S. Senator from 1906 to 1925. In that time, he developed a strong party platform for Wisconsin's Progressive Republicans and legislated important Progressive policies.

The Wisconsin Idea

La Follete had an idea for a Progressive experiment called the Wisconsin Idea. It was the belief that efficient government should be controlled by voters rather than businesses and lobbyists, and that help from specialists in law, economics and the social and natural sciences would produce the most effective government possible.

The University of Wisconsin played an important role in Progressive reform efforts and the Wisconsin idea. UW faculty helped legislators draft laws and served as experts for the government. The state founded the Legislative Reference Library to research legal history and educate law makers. The Legislative Reference Library - or "LRB" - was created in 1901. The LRB provided legislators with fast service from trained researchers. It added a bill drafting service in 1907 that was so successful it was adopted around the world.

Achievements

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Francis E. McGovern, 1914

Quarter-length studio portrait of Francis E. McGovern when he was a lawyer in Milwaukee. View the original source document: WHI 62290

One of the most important pieces of progressive legislation was passed in the 1911 session under Governor Francis McGovern. It created the nation's most effective workers' compensation program to protect people who were injured on the job.

Many progressive laws were enacted while James Davidson was governor. Davidson's cabinet passed laws to give state control to corporate stock issues, extend power to a railroad commission to regulate transportation, fix railroad fares, regulate insurance, limit working hours for women and children and create forest and waterpower conservation acts.

Programs Progressives Influenced

Progressivism became popular throughout the U.S. in the 1930s. Progressive Wisconsin professor of economics John R. Commons trained Edwin Witte, who authored the 1935 Social Security act. Wisconsin Progressives drafted much of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. La Follette and Wisconsin's Progressives inspired John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" and Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs.

Learn More
Explore the Turning Points in Wisconsin History Collection
[Source: The History of Wisconsin vol. 4 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin); Kasparek, Jon, Bobbie Malone and Erica Schock. Wisconsin History Highlights: Delving into the Past (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2004); McCarthy, Charles. The Wisconsin Idea. Wisconsin Electronic Reader]

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Progressivism and the Wisconsin Idea | Wisconsin Historical Society

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Enlarge Portrait of Robert M. La Follette during his tenure as U.S. senator from Wisconsin. View the original source document: WHI 10650 The rise of big business in the 1870s created an oligarchy of wealthy businessmen. Politicians and business leaders conspired to create policies that favored their friends rather than the public.

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Watch Todd Berry Gives History of Wisconsin Idea on PBS Wisconsin

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Berry, the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance president, discusses the UW System’s mission.

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As farmers pushed westward into Texas, Kansas, and other western states and territories after the Civil War, they experienced some difficult times. To meet these problems they began to form organizations such as the Farmers’ Alliance. Besides facing such neutral problems as drought, farmers experienced low commodity prices, high freight rates, high interest rates, and other difficulties. They were very critical of the larger corporations, especially the railroads. These conditions and complaints were familiar to farmers in Indian Territory and to those who rushed into Oklahoma Territory in 1889 and later.

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Farmers' Alliance, an American agrarian movement during the 1870s and '80s that sought to improve the economic conditions for farmers through the creation of cooperatives and political advocacy. The movement was made up of numerous local organizations that coalesced into three large groupings.

In the American Midwest and West, farming in the late 19th century was made difficult by a combination of drought and high fees for the storage and transportation of farm goods to market. In addition, interest rates on loans were high. Farmers subsequently formed various associations to deal with these issues. One such organization was the National Farmers' Alliance (also called the Northern Alliance), which grew out of the Granger movement (a farming coalition that fought monopolistic grain transport practices). There was an attempt in 1877 in New York to start a national organization, but the first effective body was founded in 1880 by farm journalist Milton George in Chicago. Numerous local chapters were formed and organized into state groupings of the National Farmers' Alliance.

In the South, the Civil War and its aftermath caused trouble for farmers, many of whom were sharecroppers, meaning that they did not own the land they farmed and remained mired in debt owed to the landowners. Smallholders also faced difficulty obtaining affordable loans. The alliance movement in the South had its genesis as the Texas Alliance, founded in the mid-1870s in Lampasas county in Texas. As it expanded throughout the state, it became the Texas State Farmers' Alliance. From the mid-1880s, under the leadership of Charles W. Macune, it was known as the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union (also called the Southern Alliance). It spread throughout the South and made inroads into the West and Midwest as well.

African American farmers in the South, banned from membership in the Southern Alliance, formed the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union (also called the Colored Farmers' Alliance). This organization had many of the same goals as its white counterpart.

Many Farmers' Alliance chapters set up cooperative stores that sold goods at lower prices than retail establishments, and they also established cooperative mills and storehouses to help decrease the costs to farmers of bringing goods to market. Many alliance members became impatient with the piecemeal approach and began making political demands as well. They supported government regulation or ownership of railways and telegraph companies, an increase in the supply of money, a graduated income tax and a decrease in tariffs, the abolition of national banks, and the establishment of subtreasuries-government warehouses in which farmers could deposit crops and borrow against the worth of the crop at a low interest rate. In addition, the alliance sought the direct election of members of the U.S. Senate.

Proponents of the political objectives of the Farmers' Alliance organizations found that, while they were able to achieve some victories in local elections, they were unable to effect change on a national scale. Leaders of the Farmers' Alliance therefore in 1892 founded a political party, the People's, or Populist, Party, to pursue these goals and nominated James B. Weaver as their candidate in the 1892 presidential election. In the process the Farmers' Alliance faded away.

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Farmers' Alliance | Description, History, Significance, & Facts

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Farmers' Alliance, an American agrarian movement during the 1870s and '80s that sought to improve the economic conditions for farmers through the creation of cooperatives and political advocacy. The movement consisted of three large regional groupings. Learn more about the movement's history and political goals.

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Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a prominent journalist, activist, and researcher, in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. In her lifetime, she battled sexism, racism, and violence. As a skilled writer, Wells-Barnett also used her skills as a journalist to shed light on the conditions of African Americans throughout the South.

Ida Bell Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16 th, 1862. She was born into slavery during the Civil War. Once the war ended Wells-Barnett's parents became politically active in Reconstruction Era politics. Her parents instilled into her the importance of education. Wells-Barnett enrolled at Rust College but was expelled when she started a dispute with the university president. In 1878, Wells-Barnett went to visit her grandmother. While she was there Wells-Barnett was informed that a yellow fever epidemic had hit her hometown. The disease took both of Wells-Barnett's parents and her infant brother. Left to raise her brothers and sister, she took a job as a teacher so that she could keep the family together. Eventually, Wells-Barnett moved her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee. There she continued to work as an educator.

In 1884, Wells-Barnett filed a lawsuit against a train car company in Memphis for unfair treatment. She had been thrown off a first-class train, despite having a ticket. Although she won the case on the local level, the ruling was eventually overturned in federal court. After the lynching of one of her friends, Wells-Barnett turned her attention to white mob violence. She became skeptical about the reasons black men were lynched and set out to investigate several cases. She published her findings in a pamphlet and wrote several columns in local newspapers. Her expose about an 1892 lynching enraged locals, who burned her press and drove her from Memphis. After a few months, the threats became so bad she was forced to move to Chicago, Illinois.

In 1893, Wells-Barnett, joined other African American leaders in calling for the boycott of the World's Columbian Exposition. The boycotters accused the exposition committee of locking out African Americans and negatively portraying the black community. In 1895, Wells-Barnett married famed African American lawyer Ferdinand Barnett. Together, the couple had four children. Throughout her career Wells-Barnett, balanced motherhood with her activism.

Wells-Barnett traveled internationally, shedding light on lynching to foreign audiences. Abroad, she openly confronted white women in the suffrage movement who ignored lynching. Because of her stance, she was often ridiculed and ostracized by women's suffrage organizations in the United States. Nevertheless, Wells-Barnett remained active the women's rights movement. She was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women's Club which was created to address issues dealing with civil rights and women's suffrage. Although she was in Niagara Falls for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), her name is not mentioned as an official founder. Late in her career Wells-Barnett focused on urban reform in the growing city of Chicago. She died on March 25 th, 1931.

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Pioneering journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett battled sexism, racism, and violence, particularly working to shed light on the conditions of African Americans throughout the South. Read her story on womenshistory.org.

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Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). LC-USZ62-107756 DLC.

(1862-1931)

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an African-American woman of striking courage and conviction. She achieved nationwide attention as leader of the anti-lynching crusade.

Raised in Mississippi after the Civil War, Wells worked her way through Rust College and taught school in Memphis, Tennessee. A writer, she became part-owner of a newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech. In May 1892, in response to an article on a local lynching, a mob ransacked her offices and threatened her life if she did not leave town.

Moving to Chicago, Wells continued to write about Southern lynchings. While investigating, she would go directly to the site of a killing, sometimes despite extreme danger. In 1895, she published The Red Record, the first documented statistical report on lynching.

A forceful speaker, Wells lectured widely in the North and in Great Britain. She was a founding member of the National Afro-American Council, served as its secretary, and was chairman of its Anti-Lynching Bureau. Wells was also a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Wells married African-American rights advocate Ferdinand Barnett, and the couple published the Chicago Conservator. They were considered pillars of the black community of Chicago. Ida B. Wells-Barnett had several children, including Ida B. Wells, Jr.

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Ida B. Wells-Barnett | Daniel Murray: A Collector's Legacy by John Y. Cole | Articles and Essays | African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). LC-USZ62-107756 DLC. (1862-1931) Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an African-American woman of striking courage and conviction. She achieved nationwide attention as leader of the anti-lynching crusade.

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The oldest of eight children, Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her parents, who were very active in the Republican Party during Reconstruction, died in a yellow fever epidemic in the late 1870s. Wells attended Rust College and then became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. Shortly after she arrived, Wells was involved in an altercation with a white conductor while riding the railroad. She had purchased a first-class ticket, and was seated in the ladies car when the conductor ordered her to sit in the Jim Crow (i.e. black) section, which did not offer first-class accommodations. She refused and when the conductor tried to remove her, she "fastened her teeth on the back of his hand." Wells was ejected from the train, and she sued. She won her case in a lower court, but the decision was reversed in an appeals court.

While living in Memphis, Wells became a co-owner and editor of a local black newspaper called THE FREE SPEECH AND HEADLIGHT. Writing her editorials under the pseudonym "Iola," she condemned violence against blacks, disfranchisement, poor schools, and the failure of black people to fight for their rights. She was fired from her teaching job and became a full-time journalist. In 1892, Tom Moss, a respected black store owner and friend of Barnett, was lynched, along with two of his friends, after defending his store against an attack by whites. Wells, outraged, attacked the evils of lynching in her newspaper; she also encouraged the black residents of Memphis to leave town. When Wells was out of town, her newspaper was destroyed by a mob and she was warned not to return to Memphis because her life was in danger. Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to England and was well received.

Wells wrote many pamphlets exposing white violence and lynching and defending black victims. In 1895 she married Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent Chicago attorney. The following year she helped organize the National Association of Colored Women. She was opposed to the policy of accommodation advocated by Booker T. Washington and had personal, if not ideological, difficulties with W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1909, she helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Wells-Barnett continued her fight for black civil and political rights and an end to lynching until shortly before she died.

--Richard Wormser

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The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Jim Crow Stories . Ida B. Wells | PBS

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The oldest of eight children, Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her parents, who were very active in the Republican Party during Reconstruction, died in a yellow fever epidemic in the late 1870s. Wells attended Rust College and then became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee.

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Early in the 20th century, mob lynchings were all too common, particularly in the South. In 1916, NAACP prioritized advocating for anti-lynching legislation and formed a special committee to bring public awareness to this unconscionable practice. A partnership with Anti-Lynching Crusaders led to rallies, the mobilization of volunteers, and targeted media advertisements.

Protecting all from lynching

In 1918, Missouri Representative Leonidas Dyer, a white Republican, introduced his anti-lynching bill in Congress. A progressive who represented a predominantly African-American district, Dyer was deeply disgusted by the violence resulting from race riots in St. Louis and continued lynching across the South.

AN ACT To assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every State the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching.

Under Moorfield Storey, NAACP did not support the Dyer Bill, arguing that it was unconstitutional. Storey, a lawyer, revised his position in 1918 and NAACP supported Dyer's anti-lynching legislation and pushed other lawmakers to act.

The Dyer Bill was passed by the House of Representatives on January 26, 1922. Although the Senate Judiciary Committee moved the bill to the Senate floor for a vote, its passage was halted by a filibuster in the Senate by Southern Democrats.

Efforts to pass similar legislation were not taken up again for another decade. The Dyer Bill influenced the language of all subsequent anti-lynching legislation supported by the NAACP into the 1950s, including the Costigan-Wagner Bill in 1935. Read the Dyer Bill in its entirety below:

Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill

APRIL 20 (calendar day, JULY 28), 1922.

AN ACT To assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every State the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the phrase "mob or riotous assemblage," when used in this act, shall mean an assemblage composed of

SEC. 2. That if any State or governmental subdivision thereof fails, neglects, or refuses to provide and maintain protection to the life of any person within its jurisdiction against a mob or riotous assemblage, such State shall by reason of such failure, neglect, or refusal be deemed to have denied to such person the equal protection of the laws of the State, and to the end that such protection as is guaranteed to the citizens of the United States by its Constitution may be secured it is provided:

SEC. 3. That any State or municipal officer charged with the duty or who possess the power or authority as such officer to protect the life of any person that may be put to death by any mob or riotous assemblage, or who has any such person in his charge as a prisoner, who fails, neglects, or refuses to make all reasonable efforts to prevent such person from being so put to death, or any State or municipal officer charged with the duty of apprehending or prosecuting any person participating in such mob or riotous assemblage who fails, neglects, or refuses to make all reasonable efforts to perform his duty in apprehending or prosecuting to final judgment under the laws of such State all persons so participating except such, if any, as are to have been held to answer for such participation in any district court of the United States, as herein provided, shall be guilty of a felony, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by imprisonment not exceeding five years or by a fine of not exceeding $5,000, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

Any State or municipal officer, acting as such officer State law, having in his custody or control a prisoner, who shall conspire, combine, who shall conspire, combine, with such officer shall likewise be guilty of a felony. parties participating therein shall be punished by imprisonment for life or not less than five years.

SEC. 4. That the district court of the judicial district wherein a person is put to death by a mob or riotous assemblage shall have jurisdiction to try and punish, in accordance with the laws of the State where the homicide is committed, those who participate therein: Provided, That it shall be charged in the indictment that by reason of the failure, neglect, or refusal of the officers of the State charged with the duty of prosecuting such offense under the laws of the State to proceed with due diligence to apprehend and prosecute such participants the State has denied to its citizens the equal protection of the laws. It shall not be necessary that the jurisdictional allegations herein required shall be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and it shall be sufficient if such allegations are sustained by a preponderance of the evidence.

SEC. 5. That any county in which a person is put to death by a mob or riotous assemblage shall, if it is alleged and proven that the officers of the State charged with the duty of prosecuting criminally such offense under the laws of the State have failed, neglected, or refused to proceed with due diligence to apprehend and prosecute the participants in the mob or riotous assemblage, forfeit $10,000, be recovered by an action therefor [sic] in the name of the United States against any such county for the use of the family, if any, of the person so put to death; if he had no family, then to his dependent parents, if any; otherwise for the use of the United States. Such action shall be brought and prosecuted by the district attorney of the United States of the district in which such county is situated in any court of the United States having jurisdiction therein. If such forfeiture is not paid upon recovery of a judgment therefor [sic], such court shall have jurisdiction to enforce [sic], and to any other penalty provided by law therefor [sic].

SEC. 6. That in the event that any person so put to death shall have been transported by such mob or riotous assemblage from one county to another county during the time intervening between his capture and putting to death, the county in which he is seized and the county in which he is put to death shall be jointly and severally liable to pay the forfeiture herein provided.

SEC. 7. That any act committed in any State or Territory of the United States in violation of the rights of a citizen or subject of a foreign country secured to such citizen or subject by treaty between the United States and such foreign country, which act constitutes a crime under the laws of such State or Territory, shall constitute a like crime against the peace and dignity of the United States, punishable in like manner as in the courts of said State or Territory, and within the period limited by the laws of such State or Territory, and may be prosecuted in the courts of the United States, and upon conviction the sentence executed in like manner as sentences upon convictions for crimes under the laws of the United States.

SEC. 8. That in construing and applying this act the District of Columbia shall be deemed a county, as shall also each of the parishes of the State of Louisiana.

That if any section or provision of this acts shall be held by any court to be invalid, the balance of the act shall not for that reason be held invalid.

Early in the 20th century, mob lynchings were all too common, particularly in the South. In 1916, NAACP prioritized advocating for anti-lynching legislation and formed a special committee to bring public awareness to this unconscionable practice. A partnership with Anti-Lynching Crusaders led to rallies, the mobilization of volunteers, and targeted media advertisements.

Protecting all from lynching

In 1918, Missouri Representative Leonidas Dyer, a white Republican, introduced his anti-lynching bill in Congress. A progressive who represented a predominantly African-American district, Dyer was deeply disgusted by the violence resulting from race riots in St. Louis and continued lynching across the South.

AN ACT To assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every State the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching.

Under Moorfield Storey, NAACP did not support the Dyer Bill, arguing that it was unconstitutional. Storey, a lawyer, revised his position in 1918 and NAACP supported Dyer's anti-lynching legislation and pushed other lawmakers to act.

The Dyer Bill was passed by the House of Representatives on January 26, 1922. Although the Senate Judiciary Committee moved the bill to the Senate floor for a vote, its passage was halted by a filibuster in the Senate by Southern Democrats.

Efforts to pass similar legislation were not taken up again for another decade. The Dyer Bill influenced the language of all subsequent anti-lynching legislation supported by the NAACP into the 1950s, including the Costigan-Wagner Bill in 1935. Read the Dyer Bill in its entirety below:

Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill

APRIL 20 (calendar day, JULY 28), 1922.

AN ACT To assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every State the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the phrase "mob or riotous assemblage," when used in this act, shall mean an assemblage composed of

SEC. 2. That if any State or governmental subdivision thereof fails, neglects, or refuses to provide and maintain protection to the life of any person within its jurisdiction against a mob or riotous assemblage, such State shall by reason of such failure, neglect, or refusal be deemed to have denied to such person the equal protection of the laws of the State, and to the end that such protection as is guaranteed to the citizens of the United States by its Constitution may be secured it is provided:

SEC. 3. That any State or municipal officer charged with the duty or who possess the power or authority as such officer to protect the life of any person that may be put to death by any mob or riotous assemblage, or who has any such person in his charge as a prisoner, who fails, neglects, or refuses to make all reasonable efforts to prevent such person from being so put to death, or any State or municipal officer charged with the duty of apprehending or prosecuting any person participating in such mob or riotous assemblage who fails, neglects, or refuses to make all reasonable efforts to perform his duty in apprehending or prosecuting to final judgment under the laws of such State all persons so participating except such, if any, as are to have been held to answer for such participation in any district court of the United States, as herein provided, shall be guilty of a felony, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by imprisonment not exceeding five years or by a fine of not exceeding $5,000, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

Any State or municipal officer, acting as such officer State law, having in his custody or control a prisoner, who shall conspire, combine, who shall conspire, combine, with such officer shall likewise be guilty of a felony. parties participating therein shall be punished by imprisonment for life or not less than five years.

SEC. 4. That the district court of the judicial district wherein a person is put to death by a mob or riotous assemblage shall have jurisdiction to try and punish, in accordance with the laws of the State where the homicide is committed, those who participate therein: Provided, That it shall be charged in the indictment that by reason of the failure, neglect, or refusal of the officers of the State charged with the duty of prosecuting such offense under the laws of the State to proceed with due diligence to apprehend and prosecute such participants the State has denied to its citizens the equal protection of the laws. It shall not be necessary that the jurisdictional allegations herein required shall be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and it shall be sufficient if such allegations are sustained by a preponderance of the evidence.

SEC. 5. That any county in which a person is put to death by a mob or riotous assemblage shall, if it is alleged and proven that the officers of the State charged with the duty of prosecuting criminally such offense under the laws of the State have failed, neglected, or refused to proceed with due diligence to apprehend and prosecute the participants in the mob or riotous assemblage, forfeit $10,000, be recovered by an action therefor [sic] in the name of the United States against any such county for the use of the family, if any, of the person so put to death; if he had no family, then to his dependent parents, if any; otherwise for the use of the United States. Such action shall be brought and prosecuted by the district attorney of the United States of the district in which such county is situated in any court of the United States having jurisdiction therein. If such forfeiture is not paid upon recovery of a judgment therefor [sic], such court shall have jurisdiction to enforce [sic], and to any other penalty provided by law therefor [sic].

SEC. 6. That in the event that any person so put to death shall have been transported by such mob or riotous assemblage from one county to another county during the time intervening between his capture and putting to death, the county in which he is seized and the county in which he is put to death shall be jointly and severally liable to pay the forfeiture herein provided.

SEC. 7. That any act committed in any State or Territory of the United States in violation of the rights of a citizen or subject of a foreign country secured to such citizen or subject by treaty between the United States and such foreign country, which act constitutes a crime under the laws of such State or Territory, shall constitute a like crime against the peace and dignity of the United States, punishable in like manner as in the courts of said State or Territory, and within the period limited by the laws of such State or Territory, and may be prosecuted in the courts of the United States, and upon conviction the sentence executed in like manner as sentences upon convictions for crimes under the laws of the United States.

SEC. 8. That in construing and applying this act the District of Columbia shall be deemed a county, as shall also each of the parishes of the State of Louisiana.

That if any section or provision of this acts shall be held by any court to be invalid, the balance of the act shall not for that reason be held invalid.

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An important chapter in NAACP early history is the defense of Black life in the form of an anti-lynching campaign prior to the first world war.

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LibGuides: Researching Hate Crimes & Hate Crime Legislation: Emmett Till Antilynching Act

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LibGuides: Researching Hate Crimes & Hate Crime Legislation: Emmett Till Antilynching Act

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Martin Luther | Biography, Reformation, Accomplishments, Quotes, & Facts

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Martin Luther, German theologian and religious reformer who initiated the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Through his words and actions, Luther precipitated a movement that reformulated certain basic tenets of Christian belief. Learn about his life, education, writings, excommunication, and legacy.

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Martin Luther (l. 1483-1546) was a German priest, monk, and theologian who became the central figure of the religious and cultural movement known as the Protestant Reformation. Even though earlier reformers had expressed Luther's views, his charismatic personality and efficient use of the printing press encouraged widespread acceptance of his vision of Christianity.

He was born to lower-class parents, who hoped he would become a lawyer, but his insistence on defining unassailable truths, coupled with an appeal for divine help he made during a storm, led him to become an Augustinian monk. He was a devout, if troubled, priest of the Roman Catholic Church in Wittenberg, Germany, until his outrage over church policy, especially the sale of indulgences, encouraged him to question the Church's authority.

Luther never intended, initially, to challenge the church hierarchy or the pope. Martin Luther's 95 Theses of 1517 were an invitation to discuss policies and practices of the Church he found troublesome and unbiblical. The original document, written in Latin, was intended for an ecclesiastical audience, but it was translated into German by his friends and supporters, and thanks to the advent of the printing press c. 1440, they spread the theses throughout Germany and on to other nations igniting the Protestant Reformation.

Early Life & the Vow

Luther was born in Eisleben, modern-day Germany, in 1483, a region then part of the Holy Roman Empire. His parents were of the upper peasantry as his father was not bound to the land as a farmer but owned a number of copper mines. Scholar Roland H. Bainton comments:

His father, Hans Luther, and his mother, Margaretta, were sturdy, stocky, swarthy German [ peasants]. They were not indeed actually engaged in the tilling of the soil because, as a son without inheritance, Hans had moved from the farm to the mines. In the bowels of the earth, he had prospered with the help of St. Anne, the patroness of miners, until he had come to be the owner of half a dozen foundries; yet he was not unduly affluent, and his wife had still to go to the forest and drag home the wood. The atmosphere of the family was that of the peasantry: rugged, rough, at time coarse, credulous, and devout. Old Hans prayed at the beside of his son and Margaretta was a woman of prayer. (10-11)

Luther struggled with his studies & dropped out of the law curriculum, believing it was ultimately meaningless.

Luther was the eldest of a number of children and his father saw to it he was well educated so he could become a lawyer and move up the social hierarchy to a more comfortable position. Luther was first educated at Magdeburg and Eisenach before entering the University of Erfurt in 1501 when he was 17. According to his later writings, Luther struggled with his studies and dropped out of the law curriculum, believing it was ultimately meaningless.

His search for meaning in life, something concrete and unchanging, led him to philosophy, but he found this equally unsatisfying as it relied on human reason and interpretation of changeable circumstance which could not be trusted, he felt, because intellectual reasoning was flawed since human beings were of necessity at the mercy of subjective interpretations of their experiences. He believed God was the ultimate truth but had no idea how one was supposed to pursue any meaningful or lasting communion. He had been brought up fearing God as a strict and unforgiving judge and could not conceive of any other image of the divine.

In July 1505, when Luther was traveling back to university along a road, a storm blew up and lightning struck a nearby tree. Frightened, he cried out, "St. Anne, help me! I will become a monk!" (Bainton, 5). He considered this a solemn vow, and upon arriving back at university, he sold his books and dropped out, entering St. Augustine's Monastery that same month on 17 July 1505, much to his father's displeasure.

Spiritual Crisis & Revelation

Luther took his vow to Saint Anne so seriously because he was terrified of death and credited the saint with saving his life that day of the storm. His fear of death came directly from his understanding of God as a divine being, all-powerful and all-knowing, who saw into people's hearts and punished them for their failings. Recognizing himself as a deeply flawed human, Luther could see no way toward God's forgiveness or life after death in heaven and could only imagine the torments of hell for eternity.

He devoted himself to a strict discipline of prayer, fasting, almost constant confession of sin, and studying the scripture but still could not conceive of a loving God who offered forgiveness. Luther later wrote of his view of God at this time:

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Is it not against all natural reason that God, out of his mere whim, deserts men, hardens them, damns them, as if he delighted in sins and in such torments of the wretched for eternity, he who is said to be of such mercy and goodness? This appears iniquitous, cruel, and intolerable in God, by which very many have been offended in all ages. And who would not be? I was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated him! (Bainton, 44)

He complained of his struggles to his mentor, Johann von Staupitz, expecting perhaps to be released from the order, but, instead, Staupitz told him to pursue his doctoral degree and take over Staupitz's Chair of the Bible at the University of Wittenberg. Luther did not accept this advice gladly, arguing that such a course would kill him, but Staupitz assured him that, if so, he would find plenty to occupy his time in heaven.

Luther was awarded his doctorate in 1512, took over Staupitz's position, and became a member of the university's faculty and, around 1513, had a revelation concerning the nature of God while reading Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans. The passage from Romans 1:17 which reads, in part, "the just shall live by faith", spoke deeply to him. He later wrote of that moment:

Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that "the just shall live by his faith." Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through the open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning and, whereas before the "justice of God" had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate into heaven. (Bainton, 51)

This experience also impressed upon Luther the primacy of the scripture over church teachings, as the Church had been unable to offer him anything meaningful in dealing with his spiritual struggles, while the biblical passage had opened the way for complete communion with the divine.

95 Theses

Once he understood the nature of God as revealed in scripture, he began to seriously question the vision of that God encouraged by the medieval Church. If one was saved through faith alone, Luther reasoned, what was the purpose of all the policies and rules and tithes the Church imposed on believers? Where, in the Bible, was there any support for the Church's teaching on purgatory, the intermediate zone between hell and heaven where sinners were tormented in fires until their sins were purged and they could enter paradise? Where, even, was the biblical justification for the pope?

The 95 Theses were not intended as a direct challenge to the Church & were also nothing new.

Luther's questions became more urgent in 1516 when the archbishop of Mainz, Albrecht von Brandenburg, asked Pope Leo X to allow the sale of indulgences - writs that allegedly lessened one's time in purgatory - in his region. Albrecht at this time was deeply in debt and agreed to split the money from the indulgences with Leo X who needed funds for the rebuilding of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. Leo X sent the Dominican friar Johann Tetzel to the region in 1516, and Luther, who knew nothing of the deal the archbishop and the pope had struck, objected by writing his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, later known as his 95 Theses.

According to tradition, Luther nailed his document to the door of the Wittenberg Church on 31 October 1517, All Saint's Eve, but modern scholarship challenges this claim. The story of Luther and the church door was circulated later by Luther's friend and colleague Philip Melanchthon (l. 1497-1560) who was not even in Wittenberg at the time. Still, scholars concede, nailing his arguments to the church door is the sort of dramatic gesture Luther would be known for. Luther's theses were translated by his followers into German, printed, and disseminated, sparking widespread challenges to ecclesiastical authority in Germany and, translated and spread further, in England, France, and other regions.

The 95 Theses were not intended as a direct challenge to the Church, however, and were also nothing new. Luther's 97 theses only a month before in September presented his objections to scholastic theology. His 95 theses, written in Latin, only proposed 95 "talking points" for discussion but became the catalyst for reformation once they were translated and distributed because, to the people, they did challenge the authority of the Church.

Whether they were posted on the Wittenberg church door, the 95 Theses were sent by Luther to Albrecht von Brandenburg who had them checked for heresy and sent them on to Rome. Pope Leo X then sent a number of delegations to persuade Luther he was in error, especially concerning his claim that the pope should fund the building of St. Peter's Basilica instead of demanding money from the poor. Among the most famous delegates was Cardinal Thomas Cajetan (l. c. 1468-1534) who tried to steer Luther back toward orthodoxy, unsuccessfully, at Augsburg in 1518.

Another famous delegate was the theologian Johann Eck (l. 1486-1543), a former friend of Luther's, who, at the disputation with Luther and his fellow reformer Andreas Karlstadt (l. 1486-1541) at Leipzig in 1519, maintained the view that, if there was no central authority interpreting scripture, anyone who read it could interpret it for themselves, and this would lead to chaos because not all people could understand holy writ correctly. The Church, Eck claimed, relied on a scholarly tradition (the same Luther had complained about in September 1517) in interpreting the Bible, which meant its understanding was correct and Luther's claims concerning justification by faith were wrong. Luther refused to back down, and in 1520, the papal bull Exsurge Domine was issued threatening excommunication, which Luther publicly burned in Wittenberg that December.

Worms & Wartburg

He was excommunicated in January 1521, and his case was turned over to the secular authorities who called Luther to appear at the Diet of Worms, a hearing at the city of Worms. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, presided, and one Johann Eck (not the same man as above) represented the Church in again pressing Luther to recant. Luther was promised safe passage to and from the hearing by Frederick III (the Wise, l. 1463-1525), an elector (one of the nobles who elected the emperor) of Saxony who was sympathetic to Luther's views.

On 18 April 1521, Luther refused to recant, delivering his famous speech which included the lines:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience...I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me. Amen. (Roper, 172)

When he finished speaking, he is said to have raised his arm in the traditional salute of a knight after winning a bout. As with the 95 Theses, modern scholarship challenges the inclusion of the famous line, "Here I Stand," in Martin Luther's speech at the Diet of Worms, as it only appears in later transcripts of the hearing, but the line is generally accepted as authentic.

Luther was condemned as an outlaw on 25 May 1521, meaning anyone offering him assistance would be charged, and he could be killed without consequences. On his way back to Wittenberg from Worms, he was abducted by soldiers of Frederick III, disguised as highwaymen to deflect suspicion, and brought to Frederick's castle at Wartburg where he was protected. While at Wartburg, Luther wrote almost constantly and translated the New Testament from Latin to German, which quickly became a bestseller owing to the speed and efficiency of the printing press.

The printing press, in fact, was Luther's "secret weapon" which allowed not only for the swift dissemination of his views but for illustrations picturing him as a heroic figure and "man of the people" challenging the authorities that maintained policies of inequality and kept the people in poverty. Earlier so-called "proto-reformers" such as John Wycliffe of England (l. 1330-1384) and Jan Hus of Bohemia (l. c. 1369-1415) had no access to this kind of technology as the printing press had not yet been invented. They had to rely on woodblock printing, which took longer and produced texts of poorer quality. The press of Luther's time could produce pamphlets, posters, books, and anything else quickly, which were then made available to the public.

Although most of the population could not read, they could have these materials read to them, and Luther became a hero to the people who, encouraged by local leaders, began to revolt in Wittenberg, starting the German Peasants' War (1524-1525) which was encouraged, in part, by a former admirer of Luther's, turned adversary, Thomas Muntzer (l. c. 1489-1525), who preached an apocalyptic/mystical interpretation of Christianity. The peasants expected Luther to come out in support of their cause, but instead, he denounced the violence, citing scripture on the importance of obeying temporal authority, and, in eight sermons delivered in Wittenberg, ended the revolt.

He would later change his mind and encourage resistance to unjust authority, but at the time, he believed he was obeying his conscience, and scripture, in condemning violence and maintaining the status quo. Critics have pointed out, however, that he may have been motivated by his relationship with Frederick III whose lands and wealth, and so Luther's protection, were threatened by the revolt. This very charge was advanced by Muntzer in written attacks on Luther between 1521-1524 and also by Karlstadt who blamed Luther for halting the Reformation's progress in Wittenberg at the request of Frederick III.

Marriage & Lutheranism

Luther was married in June 1525 to Katharina von Bora (l. 1499-1552), a former nun who, in 1523, had written Luther asking for his help in freeing her and some of her associates from their convent. Luther arranged for them to be smuggled out in a wagon of herring barrels and found suitable homes for all of the women except Katharina who wanted to marry him. He had already concluded there was no biblical basis for the celibacy of the clergy, and although he initially had some doubts, he went ahead with the marriage.

Luther and Katharina were very close, and their marriage served as an inspiration to other clergy to follow their example. Katharina took care of the management of their lands, bore him six children, and helped Luther in formulating what would become Lutheranism. Between 1526 and his death, Luther, Katharina, Philip Melanchthon, and others busied themselves with the organization and administration of the new church, concentrating on educating the people so they could interpret the scriptures according to their own understanding.

Luther wrote his Large Catechism to educate priests and his Small Catechism for laypeople in 1529 and published the complete Bible in German in 1534. He also wrote a number of hymns, still popular in the present day (notably A Mighty Fortress is Our God), theological works, and participated in the Marburg Colloquy, an attempt at unifying the differing Protestant movements in Europe. At the conference, Luther and the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli (l. 1484-1531) parted ways over their interpretation of the Eucharist, while other differences between Protestant parties proved equally insurmountable, and the various sects were left to develop their own visions.

Conclusion

Luther died of a stroke at age 62 on 18 February 1546 in his hometown of Eisleben. He was buried in front of the pulpit of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, the same Church whose doors he had posted his 95 Theses on years before. By the time of his death, he was an international hero to Protestant sects and an irredeemable devil to Catholics, who saw him as an agent of Satan that had broken the unity of the Church.

Even among his admirers, Luther faced criticism as he was censured for his handling of a scandal involving Philip I of Hesse, who Luther counseled to lie about his bigamy, and for his refusal to compromise with other Protestant leaders at Marburg. Luther was also virulently antisemitic, publishing a number of works condemning the Jews as "the other" and perpetuating the image of Jews as "Christ-killers" and a fallen people who had rejected God's grace.

Although modern scholars have offered various apologetics for this aspect of his character, it is impossible to explain away easily as Luther simply being "a man of his time" as he was quite clearly extraordinary in many respects. Still, his powerful rhetoric and skill as a writer continued to encourage antisemitism and hate crimes after his death. Luther's works, in fact, were greatly admired by the Nazi party of Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s and were used as justification for genocide.

His stubborn streak was noted by his friend Melanchthon, and his attitude toward Judaism seems symptomatic of this, as once he had decided upon anything, he was unlikely to be moved from that position (also seen in his rejection of Copernicus' theory of the heliocentric universe). There is no evidence he ever interacted to any meaningful degree with any Jewish people, and it is most likely he developed his antisemitism the way many still do today, by never questioning what they hear about people they have never met.

This aspect of his personality is at odds with a man who was not afraid to question the precepts of the Church which claimed to hold the keys to heaven and hell. History, however, presents accounts of many great women and men who, in spite of their achievements, were flawed to greater or lesser degrees, and Martin Luther is no exception.

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Martin Luther (l. 1483-1546) was a German priest, monk, and theologian who became the central figure of the religious and cultural movement known as the Protestant Reformation. Even though earlier reformers...

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artin Luther is the epic tale of the great Protestant revolutionary whose belief in his faith would overthrow the all-powerful Catholic Church and reshape Medieval Europe. Join Luther as he recalls his life, from his initial crisis of faith in a storm-wracked forest that led him to become a monk, to his heady confrontation with the great powers of Europe...

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Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in Ordinary on the same at that place. Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to be present and debate orally with us, may do so by letter.

In the Name our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.

2. This word cannot be understood to mean sacramental penance, i.e., confession and satisfaction, which is administered by the priests.

3. Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers mortifications of the flesh.

4. The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues; for this is the true inward repentance, and continues until our entrance into the kingdom of heaven.

5. The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons.

6. The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God's remission; though, to be sure, he may grant remission in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in such cases were despised, the guilt would remain entirely unforgiven.

7. God remits guilt to no one whom He does not, at the same time, humble in all things and bring into subjection to His vicar, the priest.

8. The penitential canons are imposed only on the living, and, according to them, nothing should be imposed on the dying.

9. Therefore the Holy Spirit in the pope is kind to us, because in his decrees he always makes exception of the article of death and of necessity.

10. Ignorant and wicked are the doings of those priests who, in the case of the dying, reserve canonical penances for purgatory.

11. This changing of the canonical penalty to the penalty of purgatory is quite evidently one of the tares that were sown while the bishops slept.

12. In former times the canonical penalties were imposed not after, but before absolution, as tests of true contrition.

13. The dying are freed by death from all penalties; they are already dead to canonical rules, and have a right to be released from them.

14. The imperfect health [of soul], that is to say, the imperfect love, of the dying brings with it, of necessity, great fear; and the smaller the love, the greater is the fear.

15. This fear and horror is sufficient of itself alone (to say nothing of other things) to constitute the penalty of purgatory, since it is very near to the horror of despair.

16. Hell, purgatory, and heaven seem to differ as do despair, almost-despair, and the assurance of safety.

17. With souls in purgatory it seems necessary that horror should grow less and love increase.

18. It seems unproved, either by reason or Scripture, that they are outside the state of merit, that is to say, of increasing love.

19. Again, it seems unproved that they, or at least that all of them, are certain or assured of their own blessedness, though we may be quite certain of it.

20. Therefore by "full remission of all penalties" the pope means not actually "of all," but only of those imposed by himself.

21. Therefore those preachers of indulgences are in error, who say that by the pope's indulgences a man is freed from every penalty, and saved;

22. Whereas he remits to souls in purgatory no penalty which, according to the canons, they would have had to pay in this life.

23. If it is at all possible to grant to any one the remission of all penalties whatsoever, it is certain that this remission can be granted only to the most perfect, that is, to the very fewest.

24. It must needs be, therefore, that the greater part of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate and highsounding promise of release from penalty.

25. The power which the pope has, in a general way, over purgatory, is just like the power which any bishop or curate has, in a special way, within his own diocese or parish.

26. The pope does well when he grants remission to souls [in purgatory], not by the power of the keys (which he does not possess), but by way of intercession.

27. They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory].

28. It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone.

29. Who knows whether all the souls in purgatory wish to be bought out of it, as in the legend of Sts. Severinus and Paschal.

30. No one is sure that his own contrition is sincere; much less that he has attained full remission.

31. Rare as is the man that is truly penitent, so rare is also the man who truly buys indulgences, i.e., such men are most rare.

32. They will be condemned eternally, together with their teachers, who believe themselves sure of their salvation because they have letters of pardon.

33. Men must be on their guard against those who say that the pope's pardons are that inestimable gift of God by which man is reconciled to Him;

34. For these "graces of pardon" concern only the penalties of sacramental satisfaction, and these are appointed by man.

35. They preach no Christian doctrine who teach that contrition is not necessary in those who intend to buy souls out of purgatory or to buy confessionalia.

36. Every truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without letters of pardon.

37. Every true Christian, whether living or dead, has part in all the blessings of Christ and the Church; and this is granted him by God, even without letters of pardon.

38. Nevertheless, the remission and participation [in the blessings of the Church] which are granted by the pope are in no way to be despised, for they are, as I have said, the declaration of divine remission.

39. It is most difficult, even for the very keenest theologians, at one and the same time to commend to the people the abundance of pardons and [the need of] true contrition.

40. True contrition seeks and loves penalties, but liberal pardons only relax penalties and cause them to be hated, or at least, furnish an occasion [for hating them].

41. Apostolic pardons are to be preached with caution, lest the people may falsely think them preferable to other good works of love.

42. Christians are to be taught that the pope does not intend the buying of pardons to be compared in any way to works of mercy.

43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better work than buying pardons;

44. Because love grows by works of love, and man becomes better; but by pardons man does not grow better, only more free from penalty.

45. 45. Christians are to be taught that he who sees a man in need, and passes him by, and gives [his money] for pardons, purchases not the indulgences of the pope, but the indignation of God.

46. Christians are to be taught that unless they have more than they need, they are bound to keep back what is necessary for their own families, and by no means to squander it on pardons.

47. Christians are to be taught that the buying of pardons is a matter of free will, and not of commandment.

48. Christians are to be taught that the pope, in granting pardons, needs, and therefore desires, their devout prayer for him more than the money they bring.

49. Christians are to be taught that the pope's pardons are useful, if they do not put their trust in them; but altogether harmful, if through them they lose their fear of God.

50. Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter's church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep.

51. Christians are to be taught that it would be the pope's wish, as it is his duty, to give of his own money to very many of those from whom certain hawkers of pardons cajole money, even though the church of St. Peter might have to be sold.

52. The assurance of salvation by letters of pardon is vain, even though the commissary, nay, even though the pope himself, were to stake his soul upon it.

53. They are enemies of Christ and of the pope, who bid the Word of God be altogether silent in some Churches, in order that pardons may be preached in others.

54. Injury is done the Word of God when, in the same sermon, an equal or a longer time is spent on pardons than on this Word.

55. It must be the intention of the pope that if pardons, which are a very small thing, are celebrated with one bell, with single processions and ceremonies, then the Gospel, which is the very greatest thing, should be preached with a hundred bells, a hundred processions, a hundred ceremonies.

56. The "treasures of the Church," out of which the pope. grants indulgences, are not sufficiently named or known among the people of Christ.

57. That they are not temporal treasures is certainly evident, for many of the vendors do not pour out such treasures so easily, but only gather them.

58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and the Saints, for even without the pope, these always work grace for the inner man, and the cross, death, and hell for the outward man.

59. St. Lawrence said that the treasures of the Church were the Church's poor, but he spoke according to the usage of the word in his own time.

60. Without rashness we say that the keys of the Church, given by Christ's merit, are that treasure;

61. For it is clear that for the remission of penalties and of reserved cases, the power of the pope is of itself sufficient.

62. The true treasure of the Church is the Most Holy Gospel of the glory and the grace of God.

63. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes the first to be last.

64. On the other hand, the treasure of indulgences is naturally most acceptable, for it makes the last to be first.

65. Therefore the treasures of the Gospel are nets with which they formerly were wont to fish for men of riches.

66. The treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men.

67. The indulgences which the preachers cry as the "greatest graces" are known to be truly such, in so far as they promote gain.

68. Yet they are in truth the very smallest graces compared with the grace of God and the piety of the Cross.

69. Bishops and curates are bound to admit the commissaries of apostolic pardons, with all reverence.

70. But still more are they bound to strain all their eyes and attend with all their ears, lest these men preach their own dreams instead of the commission of the pope.

71. He who speaks against the truth of apostolic pardons, let him be anathema and accursed!

72. But he who guards against the lust and license of the pardon-preachers, let him be blessed!

73. The pope justly thunders against those who, by any art, contrive the injury of the traffic in pardons.

74. But much more does he intend to thunder against those who use the pretext of pardons to contrive the injury of holy love and truth.

75. To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God -- this is madness.

76. We say, on the contrary, that the papal pardons are not able to remove the very least of venial sins, so far as its guilt is concerned.

77. It is said that even St. Peter, if he were now Pope, could not bestow greater graces; this is blasphemy against St. Peter and against the pope.

78. We say, on the contrary, that even the present pope, and any pope at all, has greater graces at his disposal; to wit, the Gospel, powers, gifts of healing, etc., as it is written in I. Corinthians xii.

79. To say that the cross, emblazoned with the papal arms, which is set up [by the preachers of indulgences], is of equal worth with the Cross of Christ, is blasphemy.

80. The bishops, curates and theologians who allow such talk to be spread among the people, will have an account to render.

81. This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men, to rescue the reverence due to the pope from slander, or even from the shrewd questionings of the laity.

82. To wit: -- "Why does not the pope empty purgatory, for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a Church? The former reasons would be most just; the latter is most trivial."

83. Again: -- "Why are mortuary and anniversary masses for the dead continued, and why does he not return or permit the withdrawal of the endowments founded on their behalf, since it is wrong to pray for the redeemed?"

84. Again: -- "What is this new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul's own need, free it for pure love's sake?"

85. Again: -- "Why are the penitential canons long since in actual fact and through disuse abrogated and dead, now satisfied by the granting of indulgences, as though they were still alive and in force?"

86. Again: -- "Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?"

87. Again: -- "What is it that the pope remits, and what participation does he grant to those who, by perfect contrition, have a right to full remission and participation?"

88. Again: -- "What greater blessing could come to the Church than if the pope were to do a hundred times a day what he now does once, and bestow on every believer these remissions and participations?"

89. "Since the pope, by his pardons, seeks the salvation of souls rather than money, why does he suspend the indulgences and pardons granted heretofore, since these have equal efficacy?"

90. To repress these arguments and scruples of the laity by force alone, and not to resolve them by giving reasons, is to expose the Church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make Christians unhappy.

91. If, therefore, pardons were preached according to the spirit and mind of the pope, all these doubts would be readily resolved; nay, they would not exist.

92. Away, then, with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, "Peace, peace," and there is no peace!

93. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, "Cross, cross," and there is no cross!

94. Christians are to be exhorted that they be diligent in following Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hell;

95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven rather through many tribulations, than through the assurance of peace.

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Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in Ordinary on the same at tha…

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Mahatma Gandhi (born October 2, 1869, Porbandar, India-died January 30, 1948, Delhi) Indian lawyer, politician, social activist, and writer who became the leader of the nationalist movement against the British rule of India. As such, he came to be considered the father of his country. Gandhi is internationally esteemed for his doctrine of nonviolent protest ( satyagraha) to achieve political and social progress.

In the eyes of millions of his fellow Indians, Gandhi was the Mahatma ("Great Soul"). The unthinking adoration of the huge crowds that gathered to see him all along the route of his tours made them a severe ordeal; he could hardly work during the day or rest at night. "The woes of the Mahatmas," he wrote, "are known only to the Mahatmas." His fame spread worldwide during his lifetime and only increased after his death. The name Mahatma Gandhi is now one of the most universally recognized on earth.

Youth

Gandhi was the youngest child of his father's fourth wife. His father-Karamchand Gandhi, who was the dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in western India (in what is now Gujarat state) under British suzerainty-did not have much in the way of a formal education. He was, however, an able administrator who knew how to steer his way between the capricious princes, their long-suffering subjects, and the headstrong British political officers in power.

Gandhi's mother, Putlibai, was completely absorbed in religion, did not care much for finery or jewelry, divided her time between her home and the temple, fasted frequently, and wore herself out in days and nights of nursing whenever there was sickness in the family. Mohandas grew up in a home steeped in Vaishnavism-worship of the Hindu god Vishnu-with a strong tinge of Jainism, a morally rigorous Indian religion whose chief tenets are nonviolence and the belief that everything in the universe is eternal. Thus, he took for granted ahimsa (noninjury to all living beings), vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance between adherents of various creeds and sects.

The educational facilities at Porbandar were rudimentary; in the primary school that Mohandas attended, the children wrote the alphabet in the dust with their fingers. Luckily for him, his father became dewan of Rajkot, another princely state. Though Mohandas occasionally won prizes and scholarships at the local schools, his record was on the whole mediocre. One of the terminal reports rated him as "good at English, fair in Arithmetic and weak in Geography; conduct very good, bad handwriting." He was married at the age of 13 and thus lost a year at school. A diffident child, he shone neither in the classroom nor on the playing field. He loved to go out on long solitary walks when he was not nursing his by then ailing father (who died soon thereafter) or helping his mother with her household chores.

He had learned, in his words, "to carry out the orders of the elders, not to scan them." With such extreme passivity, it is not surprising that he should have gone through a phase of adolescent rebellion, marked by secret atheism, petty thefts, furtive smoking, and-most shocking of all for a boy born in a Vaishnava family-meat eating. His adolescence was probably no stormier than that of most children of his age and class. What was extraordinary was the way his youthful transgressions ended.

"Never again" was his promise to himself after each escapade. And he kept his promise. Beneath an unprepossessing exterior, he concealed a burning passion for self-improvement that led him to take even the heroes of Hindu mythology, such as Prahlada and Harishcandra-legendary embodiments of truthfulness and sacrifice-as living models.

In 1887 Mohandas scraped through the matriculation examination of the University of Bombay (now University of Mumbai) and joined Samaldas College in Bhavnagar (Bhaunagar). As he had to suddenly switch from his native language- Gujarati -to English, he found it rather difficult to follow the lectures.

Meanwhile, his family was debating his future. Left to himself, he would have liked to have been a doctor. But, besides the Vaishnava prejudice against vivisection, it was clear that, if he was to keep up the family tradition of holding high office in one of the states in Gujarat, he would have to qualify as a barrister. That meant a visit to England, and Mohandas, who was not too happy at Samaldas College, jumped at the proposal. His youthful imagination conceived England as "a land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization." But there were several hurdles to be crossed before the visit to England could be realized. His father had left the family little property; moreover, his mother was reluctant to expose her youngest child to unknown temptations and dangers in a distant land. But Mohandas was determined to visit England. One of his brothers raised the necessary money, and his mother's doubts were allayed when he took a vow that, while away from home, he would not touch wine, women, or meat. Mohandas disregarded the last obstacle-the decree of the leaders of the Modh Bania subcaste ( Vaishya caste), to which the Gandhis belonged, who forbade his trip to England as a violation of the Hindu religion-and sailed in September 1888. Ten days after his arrival, he joined the Inner Temple, one of the four London law colleges ( The Temple).

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Mahatma Gandhi | Biography, Education, Religion, Accomplishments, Death, & Facts

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Mahatma Gandhi, the revered Indian leader and advocate of nonviolent resistance, inspired a nation to fight for independence from British rule through peaceful means, leaving an enduring legacy in history.

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EBSCO Information Services, Inc. | www.ebsco.com

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Mahatma Gandhi, born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was a prominent leader in the Indian independence movement against British rule, known for his philosophy of nonviolent resistance called satyagraha. Born in 1869 in Porbandar, India, he was educated in law in Britain before moving to South Africa, where he began advocating for the rights of Indian immigrants facing discrimination. Gandhi’s experiences there shaped his commitment to civil rights and nonviolent protest. Returning to India in 1914, he emerged as a key figure in the struggle for independence, uniting various factions and promoting social reforms, including improvements for the untouchables and opposition to the caste system. His leadership style involved organizing large-scale protests, such as the Salt March in 1930, and he spent significant periods in prison for his activism. Despite his efforts, he faced challenges leading to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, which resulted in significant communal violence. Gandhi dedicated his final years to alleviating this strife, advocating for peace among religious communities, until his assassination in 1948. His legacy endures globally, as his methods of nonviolent protest have influenced civil rights movements and leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Gandhi’s life exemplifies the pursuit of justice and equality through peaceful means, leaving a profound impact on the world.