Amherst College
Amherst College is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher education in Massachusetts; the institution was named after the town, which in turn had been named after Lord Amherst. Established as a men's college, Amherst became coeducational in 1975. Amherst is an undergraduate four-year institution. Students choose courses from 38 major programs in an open curriculum and are not required to study a core curriculum or fulfill any distribution requirements. For the class of 2023, Amherst received 10,567 applications and accepted 1,144, yielding a 10.8% acceptance rate. Amherst was ranked as the best liberal arts college in the country for 2018–19 by The Wall Street Journal, the second best liberal arts college in the country by U. S. News & World Report, 16th out of all U. S. colleges and universities by Forbes in their 2018 rankings.
Amherst competes in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Amherst has had close relationships and rivalries with Williams College and Wesleyan University, which form the Little Three colleges; the college is a member of the Five College Consortium, which allows its students to attend classes at four other Pioneer Valley institutions: Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Hampshire College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Founded in 1821, Amherst College developed out of the secondary school Amherst Academy; the college was suggested as an alternative to Williams College, struggling to stay open. Although Williams remained open, Amherst was formed and diverged from its Williams roots into an individual institution. In 1812, funds were raised in Amherst for Amherst Academy; the academy incorporated in 1816. The institution was named after the town, which in turn had been named after Jeffery, Lord Amherst, a veteran from the Seven Years' War and commanding general of the British forces in North America.
On November 18, 1817, a project was adopted at the Academy to raise funds for the free instruction of "indigent young men of promising talents and hopeful piety, who shall manifest a desire to obtain a liberal education with a sole view to the Christian ministry." This required a substantial investment from benefactors. During the fundraising for the project, it became clear that without larger designs, it would be impossible to raise sufficient funds; this led the committee overseeing the project to conclude. On August 18, 1818, the Amherst Academy board of trustees accepted this conclusion and began building a new college. Moore President of Williams College, still believed that Williamstown was an unsuitable location for a college, with the advent of Amherst College was elected its first president on May 8, 1821. At its opening, Amherst had forty-seven students. Fifteen of these had followed Moore from Williams College; those fifteen represented about one-third of the whole number at Amherst, about one-fifth of the whole number in the three classes to which they belonged in Williams College.
President Moore died on June 29, 1823, was replaced with a Williams College trustee, Heman Humphrey. Williams alumni are fond of an apocryphal story ascribing the removal of books from the Williams College library to Amherst College. In 1995, Williams president Harry C. Payne declared the story false, but many still nurture the legend. Amherst grew and for two years in the mid-1830s it was the second largest college in the United States, second only to Yale. In 1835, Amherst attempted to create a course of study parallel to the classical liberal arts education; this parallel course focused less on Greek and Latin, instead focusing on English, Spanish, economics, etc. The parallel course did not take hold, until the next century. Amherst was founded as a non-sectarian institution "for the classical education of indigent young men of piety and talents for the Christian ministry,". One of the hallmarks of the new college was its Charity Fund, an early form of financial aid that paid the tuition of poorer students.
Although non-denominational, the initial Amherst was considered a religiously conservative institution with a strong connection to Calvinism, as a result, there was considerable debate in the Massachusetts government over whether the new college should receive an official charter from the state, a charter was not granted until February 21, 1825. As a result of the official charter being granted four years after the official founding of the college, the Amherst seal lists a date of 1825. Religious conservatism persisted at Amherst until the mid-nineteenth century: students who consumed alcohol or played cards were subject to expulsion, there were a number of religious revivals at Amherst where mobs of righteous students would herd less religious students into the chapel and berate them for lack of piety. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the college began a transition towards secularism, culminating in the demolishing of the college church in 1949. Academic hoods in the United States are traditionally lined with the official colors of the school, in theory so watchers can tell where the hood wearer earned his or her degree.
Amherst's hoods are purple with a white stripe or chevron, said to signify that Amherst was born of Williams. Amherst records one of the first uses of Latin honors of any American college, dating back to 1881
53rd United States Congress
The Fifty-third United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, consisting of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. It met in Washington, D. C. from March 4, 1893, to March 4, 1895, during the first two years of Grover Cleveland's second presidency. The apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives was based on the Eleventh Census of the United States in 1890. Both chambers had a Democratic majority; the count below identifies party affiliations at the beginning of the first session of this Congress, includes members from vacancies and newly admitted states, when they were first seated. Changes resulting from subsequent replacements are shown below in the "Changes in membership" section. Democratic: 211 Republican: 133 Populist: 11 Independent Democratic: 1TOTAL members: 356 President: Adlai Stevenson President pro tempore: Charles F. Manderson Isham G. Harris, elected March 22, 1893 Matt Whitaker Ransom, elected January 7, 1895 Isham G. Harris, elected January 10, 1895 Democratic Caucus Chairman: Arthur P. Gorman Republican Conference Chairman: John Sherman Speaker: Charles F. Crisp Democratic Caucus Chairman: William S. Holman Republican Conference Chair: Thomas J. Henderson Democratic Campaign Committee Chairman: John L. Mitchell March 4, 1893: Grover Cleveland became President of the United States for a second time.
May 5, 1893: Panic of 1893: A crash on the New York Stock Exchange started a depression. November 7, 1893: Colorado women were granted the right to vote May 1, 1894: Coxey's Army, the first significant American protest march, arrived in Washington, D. C. July 16, 1894: Utah Enabling Act August 27, 1894: Wilson–Gorman Tariff Act February 18, 1895: Maguire Act of 1895 This list is arranged by chamber by state. Senators are listed in order of seniority, Representatives are listed by district. Skip to House of Representatives, below Senators were elected by the state legislatures every two years, with one-third beginning new six-year terms with each Congress. Preceding the names in the list below are Senate class numbers, which indicate the cycle of their election. In this Congress, Class 1 meant their term began in this Congress, requiring reelection in 1898; the count below reflects changes from the beginning of the first session of this Congress. Replacements: 6 Democratic: no net change Republican: no net change Liberal Republican: 1 seat net loss deaths: 4 resignations: 8 interim appointments: 2 Total seats with changes: 12 replacements: 22 Democratic: 2 seat net gain Republican: 2 seat net loss deaths: 11 resignations: 13 contested election: 3 Total seats with changes: 30 Lists of committees and their party leaders, for members of the committees and their assignments, go into the Official Congressional Directory at the bottom of the article and click on the link, in the directory after the pages of terms of service, you will see the committees of the Senate and Joint and after the committee pages, you will see the House/Senate committee assignments in the directory, on the committees section of the House and Senate in the Official Congressional Directory, the committee's members on the first row on the left side shows the chairman of the committee and on the right side shows the ranking member of the committee.
Additional Accommodations for the Library of Congress Agriculture and Forestry Appropriations Audit and Control the Contingent Expenses of the Senate Bribery Attempts Investigation Canadian Relations Census Civil Service and Retrenchment Claims Coast Defenses Commerce Corporations Organized in the District of Columbia Distributing Public Revenue Among the States District of Columbia Education and Labor Engrossed Bills Enrolled Bills Epidemic Diseases Establish a University in the United States Examine the Several Branches in the Civil Service Finance Fisheries Five Civilized Tribes of Indians Ford Theater Disaster Foreign Relations Forest Reservations Geological Survey Immigration Immigration and Naturalization Indian Affairs Interstate Commerce Irrigation and Reclamation Judiciary Library Manufactures Military Affairs Mines and Mining Mississippi River and its Tributaries National Banks Naval Affairs Nicaraguan Claims Pacific Railroads Patents Pensions Post Office and Post Roads Potomac River Front Printing Private Land Claims Privileges and Elections Public Buildings and Grounds Public Distress Public Lands Quadrocentennial Railroads Revision of the Laws Revolutionary Claims Rules Tariff Regulation Territories Transportation and Sale of Meat Products Transportation Routes to the Seaboard Whole Woman Suffrage Accounts Agriculture Alcoholic Liquor Traffic Appropriations Banking and Currency Claims Coinage and Measures Disposition of Executive Papers District of Columbia Education Election of the President, Vice President and Representatives in Congress Elections Enrolled Bills Expenditures in the Agriculture Department Expenditures in the Interior Department Expenditures in the Justice Department Expenditures in the Navy Department Expenditures in the Post Office Department Expenditures in the State Department Expenditures in the Treasury Department Expenditures in the War Department Expenditures on Public Buildings Foreign Affairs Immigration and Naturalization Irrigation of Arid Lands Indian Affairs Interstate and Foreign Commerce Invalid Pensions Labor Levees and Improvements of the
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major political parties in the United States. The GOP was founded in 1854 by opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had expanded slavery into U. S. territories. The party subscribed to classical liberalism and took ideological stands that were anti-slavery and pro-economic reform. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president in the history of the United States; the Party was dominant over the Democrats during the Third Party System and Fourth Party System. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party after being rejected by the GOP and ran unsuccessfully as a third-party presidential candidate calling for social reforms. After the 1912 election, many Roosevelt supporters left the Party, the Party underwent an ideological shift to the right; the liberal Republican element in the GOP was overwhelmed by a conservative surge begun by Barry Goldwater in 1964 that continued during the Reagan Era in the 1980s. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the party's core base shifted, with the Southern states becoming more reliably Republican in presidential politics and the Northeastern states becoming more reliably Democratic.
White voters identified with the Republican Party after the 1960s. Following the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party made opposition to abortion a key plank of its national party platform and grew its support among evangelicals. By 2000, the Republican Party was aligned with Christian conservatism; the Party's core support since the 1990s comes chiefly from the South, the Great Plains, the Mountain States and rural areas in the North. The 21st century Republican Party ideology is American conservatism, which contrasts with the Democrats' liberal platform and progressive wing; the GOP supports lower taxes, free market capitalism, a strong national defense, gun rights and restrictions on labor unions. The GOP was committed to protectionism and tariffs from its founding until the 1930s when it was based in the industrial Northeast and Midwest, but has grown more supportive of free trade since 1952. In addition to advocating for conservative economic policies, the Republican Party is conservative.
Founded in the Northern states in 1854 by abolitionists, modernizers, ex-Whigs and ex-Free Soilers, the Republican Party became the principal opposition to the dominant Democratic Party and the popular Know Nothing Party. The party grew out of opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission as slave states; the Northern Republicans saw the expansion of slavery as a great evil. The first public meeting of the general anti-Nebraska movement, at which the name Republican was suggested for a new anti-slavery party, was held on March 20, 1854 in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin; the name was chosen to pay homage to Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party. The first official party convention was held on July 1854 in Jackson, Michigan. At the 1856 Republican National Convention, the party adopted a national platform emphasizing opposition to the expansion of slavery into U. S. territories. While Republican candidate John C.
Frémont lost the 1856 United States presidential election to James Buchanan, he did win 11 of the 16 northern states. The Republican Party first came to power in the elections of 1860 when it won control of both houses of Congress and its candidate, former congressman Abraham Lincoln, was elected President. In the election of 1864, it united with War Democrats to nominate Lincoln on the National Union Party ticket. Under Republican congressional leadership, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution—which banned slavery in the United States—passed the Senate in 1864 and the House in 1865; the party's success created factionalism within the party in the 1870s. Those who felt that Reconstruction had been accomplished, was continued to promote the large-scale corruption tolerated by President Ulysses S. Grant, ran Horace Greeley for the presidency; the Stalwart faction defended Grant and the spoils system, whereas the Half-Breeds pushed for reform of the civil service. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was passed in 1883.
The Republican Party supported hard money, high tariffs to promote economic growth, high wages and high profits, generous pensions for Union veterans, the annexation of Hawaii. The Republicans had strong support from pietistic Protestants, but they resisted demands for Prohibition; as the Northern postwar economy boomed with heavy and light industry, mines, fast-growing cities, prosperous agriculture, the Republicans took credit and promoted policies to sustain the fast growth. The GOP was dominant over the Democrats during the Third Party System. However, by 1890 the Republicans had agreed to the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Interstate Commerce Commission in response to complaints from owners of small businesses and farmers; the high McKinley Tariff of 1890 hurt the party and the Democrats swept to a landslide in the off-year elections defeating McKinley himself. The Democrats elected Grover Cleveland in 1884 and 1892; the election of William McKinley in 1896 was marked by a resurgence of Republican dominance that lasted until 1932.
McKinley promised that high tariffs would end the severe hardship caused by the Pa
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, the Senate being the upper chamber. Together they compose the legislature of the United States; the composition of the House is established by Article One of the United States Constitution. The House is composed of Representatives who sit in congressional districts that are allocated to each of the 50 states on a basis of population as measured by the U. S. Census, with each district entitled to one representative. Since its inception in 1789, all Representatives have been directly elected; the total number of voting representatives is fixed by law at 435. As of the 2010 Census, the largest delegation is that of California, with fifty-three representatives. Seven states have only one representative: Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming; the House is charged with the passage of federal legislation, known as bills, after concurrence by the Senate, are sent to the President for consideration.
In addition to this basic power, the House has certain exclusive powers, among them the power to initiate all bills related to revenue. The House meets in the south wing of the United States Capitol; the presiding officer is the Speaker of the House, elected by the members thereof. The Speaker and other floor leaders are chosen by the Democratic Caucus or the Republican Conference, depending on whichever party has more voting members. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Congress of the Confederation was a unicameral body in which each state was represented, in which each state had a veto over most action. After eight years of a more limited confederal government under the Articles, numerous political leaders such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton initiated the Constitutional Convention in 1787, which received the Confederation Congress's sanction to "amend the Articles of Confederation". All states except Rhode Island agreed to send delegates; the issue of how to structure Congress was one of the most divisive among the founders during the Convention.
Edmund Randolph's Virginia Plan called for a bicameral Congress: the lower house would be "of the people", elected directly by the people of the United States and representing public opinion, a more deliberative upper house, elected by the lower house, that would represent the individual states, would be less susceptible to variations of mass sentiment. The House is referred to as the lower house, with the Senate being the upper house, although the United States Constitution does not use that terminology. Both houses' approval is necessary for the passage of legislation; the Virginia Plan drew the support of delegates from large states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania, as it called for representation based on population. The smaller states, favored the New Jersey Plan, which called for a unicameral Congress with equal representation for the states; the Convention reached the Connecticut Compromise or Great Compromise, under which one house of Congress would provide representation proportional to each state's population, whereas the other would provide equal representation amongst the states.
The Constitution was ratified by the requisite number of states in 1788, but its implementation was set for March 4, 1789. The House began work on April 1789, when it achieved a quorum for the first time. During the first half of the 19th century, the House was in conflict with the Senate over regionally divisive issues, including slavery; the North was much more populous than the South, therefore dominated the House of Representatives. However, the North held no such advantage in the Senate, where the equal representation of states prevailed. Regional conflict was most pronounced over the issue of slavery. One example of a provision supported by the House but blocked by the Senate was the Wilmot Proviso, which sought to ban slavery in the land gained during the Mexican–American War. Conflict over slavery and other issues persisted until the Civil War, which began soon after several southern states attempted to secede from the Union; the war culminated in the abolition of slavery. All southern senators except Andrew Johnson resigned their seats at the beginning of the war, therefore the Senate did not hold the balance of power between North and South during the war.
The years of Reconstruction that followed witnessed large majorities for the Republican Party, which many Americans associated with the Union's victory in the Civil War and the ending of slavery. The Reconstruction period ended in about 1877; the Democratic Party and Republican Party each held majorities in the House at various times. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a dramatic increase in the power of the Speaker of the House; the rise of the Speaker's influence began in the 1890s, during the tenure of Republican Thomas Brackett Reed. "Czar Reed", as he was nicknamed, attempted to put into effect his view that "The best system is to have one party govern and the other party watch." The leadership structure of the House developed during the same period, with the positions of Majority Leader and Minority Leader being created in 1899. While the Minority Leader
1924 United States presidential election
The United States presidential election of 1924 was the 35th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 4, 1924. In a three-way contest, incumbent Republican President Calvin Coolidge won election to a full term. Coolidge had been vice president under Warren G. Harding and became president in 1923 upon Harding's death. Coolidge was given credit for a booming economy at home and no visible crises abroad, he faced little opposition at the 1924 Republican National Convention; the Democratic Party nominated former Congressman John W. Davis of West Virginia, making Davis the first major party nominee who had held public office in a former slave state since the end of the Civil War. Davis, a compromise candidate, triumphed on the 103rd ballot of the 1924 Democratic National Convention after a deadlock between supporters of William Gibbs McAdoo and Al Smith. Dissatisfied by the conservatism of both major party candidates, the Progressive Party nominated Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.
Garland S. Tucker, in a 2010 book, argues that the election marked the "high tide of American conservatism," as both major candidates campaigned for limited government, reduced taxes, less regulation. By contrast, La Follette called for the gradual nationalization of the railroads and increased taxes on the wealthy. Coolidge won a decisive victory, taking majorities in both the popular vote and the Electoral College and winning every state outside of the Solid South. La Follette won 16.6% of the popular vote, a strong showing for a third party candidate, while Davis won the lowest share of the popular vote of any Democratic nominee in history. Republican candidates When Coolidge became president, he was fortunate to have had a stable cabinet that remained untarnished by the scandals of the Harding administration, he won public confidence by taking a hand in settling a serious Pennsylvania coal strike though much of the negotiation's success was due to the state's governor, Gifford Pinchot. However, the more conservative factions within the Republican Party remained unconvinced in the new president's own conservatism, given his rather liberal record while governor of Massachusetts, he had not been their first choice for the vice presidency back in 1920.
However it should be noted that Coolidge was not popular with the liberal or progressive factions within the party either. Heartened by their victories in the 1922 midterms, the party's progressives vigorously opposed a continuation of the late Harding's policies. In the fall of 1923, Senator Hiram Johnson of California announced his intention of fighting Coolidge in the presidential primaries, friends of Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin were planning a third party. Coolidge decided to head off the immediate threat of Johnson's candidacy by gaining the endorsement of some of the liberals, he first approached Senator William Borah from Idaho and cultivated his circle by making a conciliatory reference to the Soviet Union in a speech in December. No sooner had the Soviet Union reacted favorably than Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes persuaded the President to reject it; this left Borah on the verge of deserting Coolidge, but the subsequent disclosure of corruption among the Establishment persuaded him to stay and to try to convince Coolidge to align his policies more to his own.
Coolidge for his part seemed unsure of. His State of the Union address in January was neither reactionary, he played Borah by promising to fire Attorney General Harry Daugherty and putting it off. In a speech on Lincoln Day Coolidge promised unstinting prosecution that would not mingle the innocent and the guilty—and managed to keep Borah within his ranks until he no longer feared the senator's influence. By Coolidge had made himself sufficiently strong to replace not only corrupt officeholders but many Republican stalwarts on the national committee and throughout the party hierarchy, elevating in their stead business friends loyal to him. In an effort to try to get at least some of the liberals back into the party ranks, he offered the vice presidency to the popular Senator Borah; the senator declined refusing to nominate Coolidge at that year's Republican convention which he decided against attending. Another task for Coolidge, only easier than tightening his hold over the party's divergent factions, was to rebuild the party organization.
A few years before, Will Hays had brought disciplined energy to the office of Republican national chairman. Hays's replacement, William Butler, lacked his predecessor's experience, it fell to Coolidge himself to whip the party into shape, his prime task was to establish control over the party. Through the power of patronage Coolidge consolidated his hold over Republican officeholders and office-seekers in the South, where the party was made up of little more than those whose positions were awarded through such a system; this allowed him to gain control of southern delegates to the coming Republican convention. He let it be known that his secretary Campbell Slemp, who favored the policy, would remove African-American Republican leaders in the South in order to attract more white voters to the party. Only California Senator Hiram Johnson challenged Coolidge in the South; when the early Alabama primary resulted in a slate contes
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, with about 6,700 undergraduate students and about 15,250 postgraduate students. Established in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, clergyman John Harvard, Harvard is the United States' oldest institution of higher learning, its history and wealth have made it one of the world's most prestigious universities; the Harvard Corporation is its first chartered corporation. Although never formally affiliated with any denomination, the early College trained Congregational and Unitarian clergy, its curriculum and student body were secularized during the 18th century, by the 19th century, Harvard had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's long tenure transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a modern research university. A. Lawrence Lowell, who followed Eliot, further reformed the undergraduate curriculum and undertook aggressive expansion of Harvard's land holdings and physical plant.
James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College; the university is organized into eleven separate academic units—ten faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—with campuses throughout the Boston metropolitan area: its 209-acre main campus is centered on Harvard Yard in Cambridge 3 miles northwest of Boston. Harvard's endowment is worth $39.2 billion, making it the largest of any academic institution. Harvard is a large residential research university; the nominal cost of attendance is high, but the university's large endowment allows it to offer generous financial aid packages. The Harvard Library is the world's largest academic and private library system, comprising 79 individual libraries holding over 18 million items; the University is cited as one of the world's top tertiary institutions by various organizations.
Harvard's alumni include eight U. S. presidents, more than thirty foreign heads of state, 62 living billionaires, 359 Rhodes Scholars, 242 Marshall Scholars. As of October 2018, 158 Nobel laureates, 18 Fields Medalists, 14 Turing Award winners have been affiliated as students, faculty, or researchers. In addition, Harvard students and alumni have won 10 Academy Awards, 48 Pulitzer Prizes and 108 Olympic medals, have founded a large number of companies worldwide. Harvard was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1638, it acquired British North America's first known printing press. In 1639, it was named Harvard College after deceased clergyman John Harvard, an alumnus of the University of Cambridge, who had left the school £779 and his scholar's library of some 400 volumes; the charter creating the Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650. A 1643 publication gave the school's purpose as "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust".
It offered a classic curriculum on the English university model—many leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge—but conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. It was never affiliated with any particular denomination, but many of its earliest graduates went on to become clergymen in Congregational and Unitarian churches; the leading Boston divine Increase Mather served as president from 1685 to 1701. In 1708, John Leverett became the first president, not a clergyman, marking a turning of the college from Puritanism and toward intellectual independence. Throughout the 18th century, Enlightenment ideas of the power of reason and free will became widespread among Congregational ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties; when the Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803 and the president of Harvard Joseph Willard died a year in 1804, a struggle broke out over their replacements. Henry Ware was elected to the chair in 1805, the liberal Samuel Webber was appointed to the presidency of Harvard two years which signaled the changing of the tide from the dominance of traditional ideas at Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Arminian ideas.
In 1846, the natural history lectures of Louis Agassiz were acclaimed both in New York and on the campus at Harvard College. Agassiz's approach was distinctly idealist and posited Americans' "participation in the Divine Nature" and the possibility of understanding "intellectual existences". Agassiz's perspective on science combined observation with intuition and the assumption that a person can grasp the "divine plan" in all phenomena; when it came to explaining life-forms, Agassiz resorted to matters of shape based on a presumed archetype for his evidence. This dual view of knowledge was in concert with the teachings of Common Sense Realism derived from Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, whose works were part of the Harvard curriculum at the time; the popularity of Agassiz's efforts to "soar with Plato" also derived from other writings to which Harvard students
Joseph Gurney Cannon
Joseph Gurney Cannon was a United States politician from Illinois and leader of the Republican Party. Cannon served as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1903 to 1911, many consider him to be the most dominant Speaker in United States history, with such control over the House that he could control debate. Cannon is the second-longest continuously serving Republican Speaker in history, having been surpassed by fellow Illinoisan Dennis Hastert, who passed him on June 1, 2006. Cannon is the second longest serving Republican Representative only surpassed by Alaska congressman Don Young, as well as first member of Congress, of either party to surpass 40 years of service. Cannon's congressional career spanned 46 years of cumulative service—a record, not broken until 1959, he is the longest serving member of the House of Representatives in Illinois, although the longest continuous service belongs to Adolph J. Sabath. Cannon has the distinction of being the subject of the first Time cover dated March 3, 1923.
Cannon was born in Guilford County, North Carolina, in 1840 moved with his parents to Annapolis, about 30 miles north of Terre Haute. He was the elder of Horace Franklin Cannon, a country doctor. Horace Cannon drowned on August 7, 1851 when Joseph was fifteen years old as he tried to reach a sick patient by crossing Sugar Creek. Young Cannon took charge of the family farm, his brother William would become a successful realtor. Asked by Terre Haute politician and lawyer John Palmer Usher, future Secretary of the Interior under President Abraham Lincoln, to testify in a slander case, Cannon became fascinated with the law, he asked Usher if he could study law under him and moved to Terre Haute. At age 19 he traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio to attend a semester of law school at the University of Cincinnati law school. In 1858, he was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Terre Haute, Indiana but was disappointed when Usher refused to offer him a place in his office; that year he relocated to Illinois.
His choice of a new hometown was somewhat involuntary, taking place while he was travelling from Shelbyville, Illinois, to Chicago to find more clients for his law firm. During the trip, he ran out of money, he boarded a Chicago-bound train in Illinois. As Cannon did not have a ticket, he was removed from the train in Tuscola. There, he became State's attorney for the twenty-seventh judicial district of Illinois, holding the position from March 1861 to December 1868, he was one of the charter members of Tuscola's Masonic Lodge No. 332, founded on October 2, 1860. In 1876 Cannon moved to Danville, where he resided for the rest of his life, he and his wife Mary P. Reed, whom he married in 1862, had two daughters, he became a follower of Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. After Lincoln was elected President in 1860, Cannon received an appointment as a regional prosecutor. Cannon, a member of the Republican Party, was elected as to the United States House of Representatives from Illinois to the Forty-second and to the eight succeeding Congresses, was the chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the Post Office Department and of the Committee on Appropriations.
Cannon was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1890 to the Fifty-second Congress, but was elected to the Fifty-third and to the nine succeeding Congresses that sat between 1893 and 1913. He attempted to gain the Speakership four times before succeeding, his antic speaking style, diminutive stature and pugnacious manner were his trademarks. The newspapers lampooned him as a colorful rube. "Uncle Joe", as he was known clashed with fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt, asserting that Roosevelt "has no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat has for a marriage license". Cannon was chairman to the Committee on Appropriations, Committee on Rules, Speaker of the House of Representatives, he received fifty-eight votes for the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention at Chicago in 1908. Cannon wielded the office of Speaker with unprecedented power. At the time of Cannon's election, the Speaker of the House concurrently held the chair of the Rules Committee, which determined under what rules and restrictions bills could be debated and voted on, and, in some cases, whether they would be allowed on the floor at all.
As such, Cannon controlled every aspect of the House's agenda: bills reached the floor of the house only if Cannon approved of them, in whatever form he determined — with Cannon himself deciding whether and to what extent the measures could be debated and amended. Cannon reserved to himself the right to appoint not only the chairs of the various House committees, but all of the committees' members, used that power to appoint his allies and proteges to leadership positions while punishing those who opposed his legislation. Crucially, Cannon exercised these powers to maintain discipline within the ranks of his own party: the Republicans were divided into the conservative "Old Guard," led by Cannon, the progressives, led by President Theodore Roosevelt, his committee assignment privileges ensured that the party's Progressive element had little influence in the House, his control over the legislative process obstructed progressive legislatio
