St. Joseph, Michigan
St. Joseph is a city in the U. S. state of Michigan. It was incorporated as a village in 1834 and as a city in 1891; as of the 2010 census, the city population was 8,365. It lies on the shore of Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the St. Joseph River, about 90 miles east-northeast of Chicago, it is the county seat of Berrien County. It is home of the American Society of Biological Engineers; the mouth of the St. Joseph River at present day St. Joseph was an important point of Amerindian travel and commerce, as it lay along a key water route between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. Both the Miami and Potawatomi would use the area as a camp; the St. Joseph River allowed for connection with the Sauk Trail, the major land trail through Michigan. In 1669, the mouth of the river was discovered by European explorers. French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, built Fort Miami on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. In 1679, he waited for the ship Le Griffon. Once the ship was deemed lost, La Salle and his men made the first land crossing of the lower peninsula by Europeans.
The next permanent white settler in St. Joseph was William Burnett, who around 1780 started a trading post at the mouth of the St. Joseph River; the post traded food and goods with places including Detroit and Chicago. In 1829, Calvin Britain, who had come from Jefferson County, New York, had taught at the Carey Mission at Niles for two years, came to the site of St. Joseph. Shortly thereafter, he laid out the plat of the village known as Newburyport, named after a coastal city in Massachusetts. Britain was influential in attracting other settlers to the area. Lots sold and the village flourished; the St. Joseph river mouth was straightened through a channel and piers were added later; the first lighthouse in St. Joseph contends with Chicago's original lighthouse as the first to be built on Lake Michigan. Newburyport changed its name to St. Joseph when it was incorporated in 1834; the first water route across Lake Michigan between St. Joseph and Chicago began as a mail route in 1825, but service was sporadic until 1842 when Samuel and Eber Ward began a permanent service.
That lasted eleven years. Before the rise of large ship companies on Lake Michigan, service was done by owner-operated boats. With the rise in shipping in Benton Harbor and the rise in tourism in St. Joseph and larger operations began operating out of the ports; the Coast Guard still maintains a station on this site. In 1876 the United States Lifesaving Service built a Lifesaving Station at St Joseph, appointing Joseph Napier as the first stationkeeper. After a bitterly fought political contest, St. Joseph was named the seat of Berrien County in 1894, when Berrien Springs relinquished that status; the three largest towns in the county, Benton Harbor, St. Joseph, Niles, each wanted to be the county seat, but none had a majority vote. Once St. Joseph and Benton Harbor voters combined their votes, St. Joseph had enough to win. On October 11, 1898, Augustus Moore Herring took one of his gliders, fitted with a motor, to Silver Beach in St. Joseph. Herring’s machine lifted so off the ground and flew for seven seconds.
Eleven days the inventor made another flight of ten seconds. While Herring had a powered heavier-than-air craft, he did not have a way to control it, it was left to the Wright brothers to perfect controlled flight five years and give themselves and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a place in history that might have ended up belonging to Herring and St. Joseph. Two major shipping companies operated between St. Joseph and Chicago during the last half of the 19th century, the Goodrich Transportation company and the local firm of Graham and Morton, they dominated the traffic at St. Joseph for more than 100 years, although other smaller companies did operate during this time. Starting in 1874, Henry Graham and J. Stanley Morton began operating a steam line out of St. Joseph, their collaboration would become Morton Transportation Company. Through vigorous competition, they won the war to become the major carrier out of St. Joseph. Goodrich stopped service to the Twin Cities in 1880; the company grew fast and over the fifty plus years of its existence became the second largest line on Lake Michigan behind only Goodrich.
In 1924 G & M merged with Goodrich. Like most other ports along Lake Michigan, St. Joseph saw a huge drop in traffic during the early years of the twentieth century and this was exacerbated by the Great Depression; the route between Chicago and St. Joseph did survive until the 1950s. On January 29, 1870, the Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad extended a rail line from New Buffalo to St. Joseph; this railroad connected St. Joseph to Grand Rapids, Muskegon and Chicago; the line was reorganized as the Chicago and West Michigan Railway and was incorporated into the Pere Marquette Railroad. In 1892, Truscott Boat Manufacturing Co moved to St. Joseph from Grand Rapids. In the early 20th Century, the company was the largest employer in St. Joseph with 700 employees and built 600 wooden boats per year; the company built boats for the government in World War I, struggled during the Depression, was sold in 1940, revived during World War II to build ships for the Navy and went bankrupt in 1948. In 1911, Louis and Frederick Upton began a business that produced household washing machines.
The business soon has continued to grow to this day. In 1929, Upton Machine Company merged with Nineteen Hundred Corp. taking the latter name. The company began marketing a line of appliances known as the "Whirlpool" brand in 1948. Withi
Gustav Koerner
Gustav Philipp Koerner spelled Gustave or Gustavus Koerner was a revolutionary, lawyer, politician and statesman in Illinois and Germany and a Colonel of the U. S. Army, a confessed enemy of slavery, he married on 17 June 1836 in Belleville Sophia Dorothea Engelmann, they had 9 children. He was one of the first members of the Grand Old Party. Gustav was the son of the Frankfurt publisher and art dealer Bernhard Körner and his wife Maria Magdalena Kämpfe, daughter of another Frankfurt bookseller, he graduated with Abitur from the Gymnasium Francofurtanum. He studied law at the universities in Jena and Heidelberg and graduated 1832 from the University of Heidelberg as Dr. iuris utriusque, doctor as well as German and Roman law. On Christmas Eve 1830 in Munich, Koerner was involved in a somewhat drunken snowball fight that led to a confrontation with the Gendarmerie of that city in royal Bavaria where an officer was knocked down and wounded; because of his participation in these so-called "Christmas riots," he was taken into custody for four months recalling that during the time of his captivity he learned more about the law than during the whole of his two-years' study at the University of Jena.
Owing to this event the University of Munich was temporarily closed and after his custody, Koerner changed to the university in Heidelberg. Koerner was one of the participants at the Hambach Festival in spring of 1832, held to prepare a free and unified state in Germany; the German Confederation's legation of sovereigns, the Bundestag, was located in the Palais Thurn und Taxis in the center of Frankfurt, Koerner's native city. During the Frankfurter Wachensturm in 1833, a failed attempt by students to start a revolution in all states of the German Confederation, Koerner was injured and, to avoid being prosecuted by the authorities and held captive for high treason which would threaten capital punishment, he escaped in female dress to France. A warrant was out for him, he is counted as one of the Dreissiger. The Central Federal Bureau for Investigations in Frankfurt was set up after the revolt against the reign of the President of the German Confederation, Francis I, Emperor of Austria, his chancellor Prince Metternich and his other vassals including King Frederick William III of Prussia.
These authorities assigned him number 908 with the name Gustav Peter Philipp Koerner in their infamous "black book" of revolutionary suspects. The Free City of Frankfurt was occupied by federal troops from Austria and Prussia which meant a de facto total loss of its independence. On 1 May 1833, Koerner boarded a ship in Le Havre sailing to North America with a group of emigrants headed by the patriarch of the Engelmann family, whose son Theodor was an old friend of his from college. On the passage he became engaged to his future wife Sophie, a daughter of Engelmann's, born in the Electorate of the Palatinate, an historic region of Germany. A year earlier, as a vanguard for the family, her cousin George Engelmann had explored the region of the Midwestern United States. George was from Frankfurt, about the same age as Gustav, had attended the same school, receiving a degree as M. D. and becoming a famous expert in the botany of North America. They reached the Port of New York City on 17 June and went next to St. Louis in Missouri, a slave state that Koerner abhorred.
Shortly after, having departed that city, he and the Engelmanns settled down in the Shiloh Valley near Belleville, Illinois. Koerner continued his legal studies in American law. At Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky during 1834-1835. While at the University, he got to know Mary Todd who a few years married Abraham Lincoln. From 1835 he practiced in Belleville as a lawyer in his own firm practiced in the office of Adam W. Snyder in Belleville and from 1837 worked in the office of James Shields. In 1838 he received American citizenship. Koerner was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1842, served on the Illinois Supreme Court from 1845 to 1848, as the 12th Lieutenant Governor of Illinois from 1853 to 1857. A Democrat, he became a member of the Republican Party after its formation, helped develop its anti-slavery platform; as a friend, he took over some of Abraham Lincoln's cases. Koerner was the first citizen of German extraction elected to the Illinois or Missouri legislatures.
In 1851, in a clash with the editor of Anzeiger des Westens Henry Boernstein, he called the Forty-Eighters Greens in his Belleviller Zeitung newspaper and Boernstein, in a published reply, insultingly called him Gray Gustav. In 1861, Koerner was instrumental in raising the 43rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment but before its organization had been completed, he was appointed Colonel of Volunteers and assigned as aide to Gen. John C. Frémont, upon whos
Lawrence Yates Sherman
Lawrence Yates Sherman was a Republican politician from the State of Illinois. He served as United States Senator, the 28th Lieutenant Governor, as Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. Sherman is best known for his role in preventing the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, which kept the United States out of the League of Nations. Sherman was born on November 8, 1858 near Piqua in Miami County, the son of Nelson Sherman and Maria Sherman. A year he moved with his parents to McDonough County and eight years they moved to Grove Township in Jasper County, Illinois, he attended the common schools and Lee's Academy in Coles County, in 1882 earned an LL. B. degree from McKendree University in Lebanon, Illinois. He studied law under Judge Henry Horner and Professor Samuel H. Deneen and was admitted to the bar in Illinois in 1882. In 1891, he married Ella M. Crews, who died in 1893. On March 4, 1908, he married Estelle Spitler, who died in 1910. After passing the bar, Sherman involved himself in Illinois politics.
He was city attorney for Macomb, Illinois from 1885 to 1887 and a McDonough County judge from 1886 to 1890. In 1890, he entered into the private practice of law in Macomb. Sherman served 4 terms in the Illinois House of Representatives from 1897 to 1905. During his second term in 1899 he was chosen as the 40th Speaker of the House, in 1901 he became the second Republican to serve two terms in that office, 5th overall. While Speaker, Sherman played an important role in the creation of Western Illinois State Normal School and was instrumental in the selection of Macomb for its location. Sherman Hall, the main administrative building at Western Illinois University, was renamed after Senator Sherman in 1957. In 1904, he ran an unsuccessful bid for Governor of Illinois, but was nominated for the Lieutenant Governor position, he became the 28th Lieutenant Governor of Illinois, serving from 1905 to 1909. As lieutenant governor he was ex officio president of the Illinois Senate. In 1909, he ran for Mayor of Springfield, but lost by 300 votes.
He served as president of the Illinois state board of administration, public charities, 1909-1913 before returning to the practice of law in Springfield. As a delegate to the 1912 Republican National Convention, Sherman supported Theodore Roosevelt, but worked to prevent the party split that resulted in the Bull Moose party. After the split, he supported William Howard Taft, for president. In 1912, Sherman entered the Republican "advisory" primary for the United States Senate, challenging incumbent five-term Republican Senator Shelby M. Cullom. Cullom had suffered politically over his support for the other Illinois senator, William Lorimer, embroiled in a scandal over alleged bribery in his 1909 election to the Senate. On April 9, Sherman defeated Cullom by 60,000 votes and Cullom withdrew his name from consideration by the General Assembly. Three months after the primary, the United States Senate invalidated the election of Lorimer and declared the seat vacant; the Illinois Attorney General, William H.
Stead determined that the General Assembly had failed to properly elect Lorimer in 1909 and so the Governor could not appoint a replacement. As a result, the General Assembly had two Senate seats to fill. In the November 1912 election, the Republicans lost control of the state due to the Republican / Progressive split, but while the Democrats held a plurality of the General Assembly, they did not have a majority. The General Assembly took up the matter of electing the senators on February 1. On March 26, in a compromise arranged by governor Dunne, the General Assembly elected Democrat J. Hamilton Lewis to fill the Cullom seat and chose Sherman to fill the two remaining years of Lorimer's term. In 1914, he was elected to a full term, this time by the people of Illinois due to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, which he had supported prior to being elected to the Senate. In 1916, Sherman made the decision to retire from politics not to run for reelection in 1920, due to his failing hearing, which prevented him from hearing what was said on the Senate floor.
He served as chairman of the Committee on the District of Columbia during the Sixty-sixth Congress. As one of the group of senators known as the "irreconcilables" or the "bitter-enders", Sherman opposed the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and of U. S. involvement in the League of Nations, according to Historian Aaron Chandler, played a key role in its defeat. He characterized the treaty as "humanitarian in purpose, but impracticable in operation", believed the league would be weak. Sherman was a nationalist, but not an isolationist, he maintained that the country's interests would be served by maintaining close relations with England and France, was willing to accept limited obligations to America's wartime allies. He opposed any league that would limit America's sovereignty, believed that membership in a league of nations with divergent interests would weaken the United States in foreign affairs, by giving equal votes to small, weak countries, allowing them to join together and dictate foreign policy to the United States, Great Britain and Italy.
Sherman was concerned with America's influence in the League. He criticized the provisions of Article 7 that would give to the British Empire, counting its colonies, six votes, while the United States would have only one, he said that "Great Britain with her diplomatic influence in the Old World much superior to ours could secure a majority of the nations to outvote us any time she wished." He argued that the large number of predominately Catholic nations in the League were dominated by the Vatican, which would leave the United States beh
Illinois's 2nd congressional district
Illinois's 2nd congressional district is a congressional district in the U. S. state of Illinois. Based in the south suburbs of Chicago, the district includes southern Cook county, eastern Will county, Kankakee county, as well as the city of Chicago's far southeast side; the district covers parts of Cook and Will counties and all of Kankakee, as of the 2011 redistricting which followed the 2010 census. All or parts of Bradley, Calumet City, Chicago Heights, Country Club Hills, Harvey, Hazel Crest, Kankakee, Markham, Park Forest, Richton Park, Sauk Village and Thornton are included; the representatives for these districts were elected in the 2012 primary and general elections, the boundaries became effective on January 3, 2013. Illinois's 2nd Congressional District is adjacent to the 1st Congressional District to the north and west, the 11th Congressional District to the south, Indiana's 1st Congressional District to the east; the district's northeast border follows Lake Michigan's shoreline for several miles.
The district was created following the 1830 U. S. Census and came into existence in 1833; the 2nd Congressional District included Southeastern Illinois until 1853 and stretches of Northern Illinois until 1873. It has been based in Chicago since 1853, part of the southeast side since 1903. Redistricting following the 2000 U. S. Census placed a majority of the district's population outside Chicago for the first time in 100 years, moved the district's borders beyond Cook County for the first time since 1873; as in the neighboring 1st District, a majority of this district's residents are African American. The district has been reliably Democratic since the 1960s. Democratic congressional candidates receive over 80% of the vote here, it has been held by black congressmen since 1981. The southeast side of Chicago was for many decades the home of numerous Eastern European and Irish immigrants who sought the industrial work of the steel mills and railroad companies which were dominant in the area. However, as local industry declined in the 1950s and 1960s, these groups were displaced by African Americans who were migrating southward from other parts of the city.
Whereas 20% of district residents were black in the 1960s, this figure increased to 70% by the 1980s, by the 1990s the racial demographics of the 1st and 2nd Congressional Districts were similar. At the same time, decreasing population in the district required expanding its borders into the suburbs, it is now nearly three times the size it was in the 1980s, when it covered only 68 square miles. Following redistricting for the 2000s, 59% of the 2nd Congressional District's population resides in the suburbs, with a total of 98.4% living in Cook County. The district's white population now resides in the southern suburbs and a few far southeastern Chicago neighborhoods such as East Side and Hegewisch. Several suburbs closer to Chicago near Interstate 57 have black populations exceeding 75%: Calumet Park, Country Club Hills, Harvey, Hazel Crest, Matteson, Richton Park and University Park. In contrast, there are five suburbs further southeast with white populations exceeding 75% – Homewood, South Chicago Heights and Thornton – although they surround Ford Heights, with a population of only about 2800 the district's most racially one-sided population.
Chicago Heights features the most racial mix, with a population, 45% white and 38% black. The district's largest white ethnic groups are German, Irish and Italian, similar to other districts in southern Cook County. Hispanics represent 10% of the district's population, with sizable communities in East Side and Chicago Heights. Chicago's South Shore neighborhood was the longtime home to a Jewish community which has since migrated to suburbs such as Homewood and Flossmoor. South Shore is now a middle-class black community and is home to a notable minority of Black Muslims including the national headquarters of the Nation of Islam, Mosque Maryam; the district includes some sharp economic disparities. Olympia Fields, Country Club Hills and Matteson are suburbs with black majority populations, but Ford Heights is one of the most impoverished places in the United States, with a median household income of just $17,500 in 2000 – less than 42% of the national average, it is home to more single mothers per capita than anyplace else in the country.
The 2nd Congressional District was, for most of the 20th century, a thriving center of heavy industry centered around Lake Calumet and the Port of Chicago, augmented by the nearby railroad industry which had the Pullman Company as its centerpiece. The steel industry was a major component, with U. S. Steel at one time employing 20,000 district residents, but the Wisconsin Steelworks in South Deering closed in March 1980, U. S. Steel's South Works plant in South Chicago – source of the steel for Chicago skyscrapers including the Sears Tower – was closed in April 1992; the last remnant of the industry in the area is ISG Riverdale, which began a shutdown in 2001 before being sold and restructured as a smaller company. The most significant remaining industrial presence in the district is now the Ford Motor Company, which operates the Chicago Assembly plant on the border between South D
William Bross
William J. Bross was an American politician and publisher from the New Jersey–New York–Pennsylvania tri-state area, he was the 16th Lieutenant Governor of Illinois. He engaged in the lumber trade with his father before attending Williams College, he taught at schools for ten years headed west to Chicago, Illinois. He engaged in book-selling and publishing interests before co-founding the successful Democratic Press paper. Following the organization of the Republican Party in 1854, he became a staunch supporter of its political candidates, his support for Abraham Lincoln helped win him support for a bid as Lieutenant Governor. In 1865, he accompanied future Vice President of the United States Schuyler Colfax on a trip west to California publishing a book about the excursion. William Bross was born on November 1813, in northwest Sussex County, New Jersey, he was the eldest of eleven children of Jane Winfield Bross. He was the eldest; when he was nine, William moved with his family to Milford, Pennsylvania in anticipation of the construction of the Delaware and Hudson Canal.
He helped his father furnish lumber for the canal near Shohola. In 1832, he enlisted at Milford Academy attended Williams College, rooming with his twin brother. William Bross was one of the founding members of The Social Fraternity at Williams, forerunner to Delta Upsilon. Shortly after graduating in 1838, he became the principal of Ridgebury Academy in Ridgebury, New York. In 1843, he began to teach at a school in Chester, teaching for another five years. Starting in 1846, Bross took trips west to identify a better place to settle, he decided on the emerging city of Chicago, arriving on May 12, 1848. Bross formed a partnership with S. C. Griggs and the Newman & Co. publishing house, opening the book-selling firm of Griggs, Bross & Co. The partnership dissolved eighteen months later. In the autumn of 1849, Bross co-published the Prairie Herald, a religious newspaper, with Rev. J. A. Wright. Bross first achieved prosperity in 1852 when he teamed with Chicago postmaster John L. Scripps to start the Democratic Press.
The paper espoused Democratic viewpoints, but differed from the party line regarding slavery, notably opposing Stephen A. Douglas' Missouri Compromise; when the Republican Party formed in 1854, Bross became a public speaker on behalf of the cause. He gave the first public endorsement of John C. Frémont for President in the West, speaking at Dearborn Park the night he was nominated. Bross went on a tour of southern Illinois a pro-slavery area, to extoll the virtues of Frémont. While at the former State House in Vandalia, Illinois, he became acquainted with fellow Frémont campaigner Abraham Lincoln and the two would speak at the same engagements. In 1855, Bross was elected to the Chicago City Council; the Democratic Press struggled to overcome the Panic of 1857. On July 1, 1858, the paper was merged into the Tribune, creating The Tribune. Bross advocated for Abraham Lincoln for President following his nomination. Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Bross helped to raise the 29th Regiment, United States Colored Infantry.
It was commanded by his brother, Col. John A. Bross, killed during the Siege of Petersburg on July 30, 1864. Bross' support of Lincoln helped him to receive nomination as the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Illinois under Richard J. Oglesby, he traveled with Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Schuyler Colfax in 1865 to examine the path west to California. He traveled to Europe with his daughter in 1867. Bross married Mary Jane Jansen, the daughter of Dr. John T. Jansen, in 1839, they had four sons and four daughters. Daughter Jessie Bross married muckraking journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd. Grandson William Bross Lloyd was a founding members of the Communist Labor Party of America. In 1879, Bross established the Bross Foundation at Lake Forest University in memory of his son Nathaniel, he donated $40,000 to invest over ten years to buy literature "on the connection and mutual bearing of any practical science, the history of our race, or the facts in any department of knowledge and upon the Christian Religion."
University trustees offered $6,000 as a prize to one who would author a book best fulfilling these conditions. The fund provided the university with the ability to invite lecturers, including Francis Landey Patton, Marcus Dods, John Arthur Thomson, Frederick J. Bliss, Josiah Royce. Bross died in Chicago on January 27, 1890 and was buried in Rosehill Cemetery
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Democratic Party was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party; the Democrats' dominant worldview was once social conservatism and economic liberalism, while populism was its leading characteristic in the rural South. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate in the Progressive Party, beginning a switch of political platforms between the Democratic and Republican Party over the coming decades, leading to Woodrow Wilson being elected as the first fiscally progressive Democrat. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal coalition in the 1930s, the Democratic Party has promoted a social liberal platform, supporting social justice. Well into the 20th century, the party had conservative pro-business and Southern conservative-populist anti-business wings.
The New Deal Coalition of 1932–1964 attracted strong support from voters of recent European extraction—many of whom were Catholics based in the cities. After Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s, the pro-business wing withered outside the South. After the racial turmoil of the 1960s, most Southern whites and many Northern Catholics moved into the Republican Party at the presidential level; the once-powerful labor union element became less supportive after the 1970s. White Evangelicals and Southerners became Republican at the state and local level since the 1990s. People living in metropolitan areas, women and gender minorities, college graduates, racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, such as Jewish Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans and African Americans, tend to support the Democratic Party much more than they support the rival Republican Party; the Democratic Party's philosophy of modern liberalism advocates social and economic equality, along with the welfare state.
It seeks to provide government regulation in the economy. These interventions, such as the introduction of social programs, support for labor unions, affordable college tuitions, moves toward universal health care and equal opportunity, consumer protection and environmental protection form the core of the party's economic policy. Fifteen Democrats have served as President of the United States; the first was President Andrew Jackson, the seventh president and served from 1829 to 1837. The most recent was President Barack Obama, the 44th president and held office from 2009 to 2017. Following the 2018 midterm elections, the Democrats held a majority in the House of Representatives, "trifectas" in 14 states, the mayoralty of numerous major American cities, such as Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Portland and Washington, D. C. Twenty-three state governors were Democrats, the Party was the minority party in the Senate and in most state legislatures; as of March 2019, four of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court had been appointed by Democratic presidents.
Democratic Party officials trace its origins to the inspiration of the Democratic-Republican Party, founded by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other influential opponents of the Federalists in 1792. That party inspired the Whigs and modern Republicans. Organizationally, the modern Democratic Party arose in the 1830s with the election of Andrew Jackson. Since the nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, the party has positioned itself to the left of the Republican Party on economic issues, they have been more liberal on civil rights issues since 1948. On foreign policy, both parties have changed position several times; the Democratic Party evolved from the Jeffersonian Republican or Democratic-Republican Party organized by Jefferson and Madison in opposition to the Federalist Party of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. The party favored republicanism; the Democratic-Republican Party came to power in the election of 1800. After the War of 1812, the Federalists disappeared and the only national political party left was the Democratic-Republicans.
The era of one-party rule in the United States, known as the Era of Good Feelings, lasted from 1816 until the early 1830s, when the Whig Party became a national political group to rival the Democratic-Republicans. However, the Democratic-Republican Party still had its own internal factions, they split over the choice of a successor to President James Monroe and the party faction that supported many of the old Jeffersonian principles, led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, became the modern Democratic Party. As Norton explains the transformation in 1828: Jacksonians believed the people's will had prevailed. Through a lavishly financed coalition of state parties, political leaders, newspaper editors, a popular movement had elected the president; the Democrats became the nation's first well-organized national party and tight party organization became the hallmark of nineteenth-century American politics. Opposing factions led by Henry Clay helped form the Whig Party; the Democratic Party had a small yet decisive advantage over the Whigs until the 1850s, when the Whigs fell apart over the issue of slavery.
In 1854, angry with the Kansas–Nebraska Act, anti-slavery Dem
Illinois
Illinois is a state in the Midwestern and Great Lakes region of the United States. It has the fifth largest gross domestic product, the sixth largest population, the 25th largest land area of all U. S. states. Illinois is noted as a microcosm of the entire United States. With Chicago in northeastern Illinois, small industrial cities and immense agricultural productivity in the north and center of the state, natural resources such as coal and petroleum in the south, Illinois has a diverse economic base, is a major transportation hub. Chicagoland, Chicago's metropolitan area, encompasses over 65% of the state's population; the Port of Chicago connects the state to international ports via two main routes: from the Great Lakes, via the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, via the Illinois Waterway to the Illinois River. The Mississippi River, the Ohio River, the Wabash River form parts of the boundaries of Illinois. For decades, Chicago's O'Hare International Airport has been ranked as one of the world's busiest airports.
Illinois has long had a reputation as a bellwether both in social and cultural terms and, through the 1980s, in politics. The capital of Illinois is Springfield, located in the central part of the state. Although today's Illinois' largest population center is in its northeast, the state's European population grew first in the west as the French settled the vast Mississippi of the Illinois Country of New France. Following the American Revolutionary War, American settlers began arriving from Kentucky in the 1780s via the Ohio River, the population grew from south to north. In 1818, Illinois achieved statehood. Following increased commercial activity in the Great Lakes after the construction of the Erie Canal, Chicago was founded in the 1830s on the banks of the Chicago River at one of the few natural harbors on the southern section of Lake Michigan. John Deere's invention of the self-scouring steel plow turned Illinois's rich prairie into some of the world's most productive and valuable farmland, attracting immigrant farmers from Germany and Sweden.
The Illinois and Michigan Canal made transportation between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River valley faster and cheaper, new railroads carried immigrants to new homes in the country's west and shipped commodity crops to the nation's east. The state became a transportation hub for the nation. By 1900, the growth of industrial jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Illinois was an important manufacturing center during both world wars; the Great Migration from the South established a large community of African Americans in the state, including Chicago, who founded the city's famous jazz and blues cultures. Chicago, the center of the Chicago Metropolitan Area, is now recognized as a global alpha-level city. Three U. S. presidents have been elected while living in Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Barack Obama. Additionally, Ronald Reagan, whose political career was based in California, was born and raised in the state.
Today, Illinois honors Lincoln with its official state slogan Land of Lincoln, displayed on its license plates since 1954. The state is the site of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and the future home of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. "Illinois" is the modern spelling for the early French Catholic missionaries and explorers' name for the Illinois Native Americans, a name, spelled in many different ways in the early records. American scholars thought the name "Illinois" meant "man" or "men" in the Miami-Illinois language, with the original iliniwek transformed via French into Illinois; this etymology is not supported by the Illinois language, as the word for "man" is ireniwa, plural of "man" is ireniwaki. The name Illiniwek has been said to mean "tribe of superior men", a false etymology; the name "Illinois" derives from the Miami-Illinois verb irenwe·wa - "he speaks the regular way". This was taken into the Ojibwe language in the Ottawa dialect, modified into ilinwe·.
The French borrowed these forms, changing the /we/ ending to spell it as -ois, a transliteration for its pronunciation in French of that time. The current spelling form, began to appear in the early 1670s, when French colonists had settled in the western area; the Illinois's name for themselves, as attested in all three of the French missionary-period dictionaries of Illinois, was Inoka, of unknown meaning and unrelated to the other terms. American Indians of successive cultures lived along the waterways of the Illinois area for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans; the Koster Site demonstrates 7,000 years of continuous habitation. Cahokia, the largest regional chiefdom and urban center of the Pre-Columbian Mississippian culture, was located near present-day Collinsville, Illinois, they built an urban complex of more than 100 platform and burial mounds, a 50-acre plaza larger than 35 football fields, a woodhenge of sacred cedar, all in a planned design expressing the culture's cosmology.
Monks Mound, the center of the site, is the largest Pre-Columbian structure north of the Valley of Mexico. It is 100 feet high, 951 feet long, 836 feet wide, covers 13.8 acres. It contains about 814,000 cubic yards of earth, it was topped by a structure thought to have measured about 105 feet in length and 48 feet in width, covered an area 5,000 square feet, been as much as 50 feet high, making its peak 150 feet above the level of the pl
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This article incorporates public domain material from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress website http://bioguide.congress.gov. Retrieved on 2008-02-09
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