1.
Supreme Court of the United States
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The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest federal court of the United States. In the legal system of the United States, the Supreme Court is the interpreter of federal constitutional law. The Court normally consists of the Chief Justice of the United States and eight justices who are nominated by the President. Once appointed, justices have life tenure unless they resign, retire, in modern discourse, the justices are often categorized as having conservative, moderate, or liberal philosophies of law and of judicial interpretation. Each justice has one vote, and while many cases are decided unanimously, the Court meets in the United States Supreme Court Building in Washington, D. C. The Supreme Court is sometimes referred to as SCOTUS, in analogy to other acronyms such as POTUS. The ratification of the United States Constitution established the Supreme Court in 1789 and its powers are detailed in Article Three of the Constitution. The Supreme Court is the court specifically established by the Constitution. The Court first convened on February 2,1790, by which five of its six initial positions had been filled. According to historian Fergus Bordewich, in its first session, he Supreme Court convened for the first time at the Royal Exchange Building on Broad Street and they had no cases to consider. After a week of inactivity, they adjourned until September, the sixth member was not confirmed until May 12,1790. Because the full Court had only six members, every decision that it made by a majority was made by two-thirds. However, Congress has always allowed less than the Courts full membership to make decisions, under Chief Justices Jay, Rutledge, and Ellsworth, the Court heard few cases, its first decision was West v. Barnes, a case involving a procedural issue. The Courts power and prestige grew substantially during the Marshall Court, the Marshall Court also ended the practice of each justice issuing his opinion seriatim, a remnant of British tradition, and instead issuing a single majority opinion. Also during Marshalls tenure, although beyond the Courts control, the impeachment, the Taney Court made several important rulings, such as Sheldon v. Nevertheless, it is primarily remembered for its ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which helped precipitate the Civil War. In the Reconstruction era, the Chase, Waite, and Fuller Courts interpreted the new Civil War amendments to the Constitution, during World War II, the Court continued to favor government power, upholding the internment of Japanese citizens and the mandatory pledge of allegiance. Nevertheless, Gobitis was soon repudiated, and the Steel Seizure Case restricted the pro-government trend, the Warren Court dramatically expanded the force of Constitutional civil liberties. It held that segregation in public schools violates equal protection and that traditional legislative district boundaries violated the right to vote
2.
Earl Warren
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Earl Warren was an American jurist and politician, who served as the 30th Governor of California and later the 14th Chief Justice of the United States. Warren is the person elected to three consecutive terms as Governor of California, and with those three elected terms he is second only to Jerry Brown for total gubernatorial wins in California. Before holding these positions, he was the District Attorney for Alameda County, California, Warren was the nominee of the Republican Party for Vice President in 1948, as the running mate of Thomas E. Dewey. He was appointed to chair what became known as the Warren Commission, which was formed to investigate the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Earl Warren was born in Los Angeles, on March 19,1891, to Mathias H. Warren, a Norwegian immigrant whose family name was Varren, and his wife, Crystal. Mathias Warren was an employee of the Southern Pacific Railroad. After he was blacklisted for joining in a strike, the moved to Bakersfield, California. Matthias worked in a repair yard, and Earl had summer jobs in railroading. Earl Warren grew up in Bakersfield, where he attended Washington Junior High and his father was murdered there by an unknown person during a robbery. In 1912 Warren graduated with a B. A. in political science from the University of California, in 1914 he earned his J. D. at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. He was a member of The Gun Club secret society, and the Sigma Phi Society, as an undergraduate, Warren also played clarinet in the Cal Band. Warren maintained a friendship with fellow Cal student Robert Gordon Sproul. In 1948, at the Republican National Convention, Sproul would nominate Warren for Vice President, Warren was admitted to the California bar in 1914. Warren worked a year for Associated Oil Company in San Francisco, then joined Robinson & Robinson, in August 1917, Warren enlisted in the U. S. Army for World War I service. Assigned to the 91st Division at Camp Lewis, Washington, 1st Lieutenant Earl Warren was discharged in 1918. After the war, he served as a clerk of the Judicial Committee for the 1919 Session of the California State Assembly, then as the Deputy City Attorney in Oakland, Warren came to the attention of powerful Republican Joseph R. Knowland, publisher of The Oakland Tribune. He was strongly influenced by California Governor Hiram Johnson and other leaders of the Progressive Era to oppose corruption, in 1925, Warren was appointed as the District Attorney of Alameda County. Warren was re-elected to three four-year terms, Warren vigorously investigated allegations that a deputy sheriff was taking bribes in connection with street-paving arrangements
3.
Hugo Black
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Black is widely regarded as one of the most influential Supreme Court justices in the 20th century. During his political career, Black was regarded as a supporter of liberal policies. A reformer in the Senate and a devoted New Dealer, Black endorsed Roosevelt in both the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections, Hugo LaFayette Black was the youngest of the eight children of William Lafayette Black and Martha Toland Black. He was born on February 27,1886, in a wooden farmhouse in Ashland, Alabama. Because his brother Orlando had become a doctor, Hugo decided at first to follow in his footsteps. At age seventeen, he left school and enrolled at Birmingham Medical School, however, it was Orlando who suggested that Hugo should enroll at the University of Alabama School of Law. After graduating in June 1906, he moved back to Ashland and his practice was not successful there, so Black moved to Birmingham in 1907 where he specialized in labor law and personal injury cases. Consequent to his defense of an African American who was forced into a form of slavery after incarceration, Black was befriended by A. O. Lane. When Lane was elected to the Birmingham City Commission in 1911, he asked Black to serve as a court judge. In 1912, Black resigned that seat in order to return to practicing law full-time and he was not done with public service, in 1914, he began a four-year term as the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney. Three years later, during World War I, Black resigned in order to join the United States Army and he served in the 81st Field Artillery, but was not assigned to Europe. He joined the Birmingham Civitan Club during this time, eventually serving as president of the group and he remained an active member throughout his life, occasionally contributing articles to Civitan publications. On February 23,1921, he married Josephine Foster, with whom he would have three children, Hugo L. Black, II, an attorney, Sterling Foster, Josephine died in 1951, in 1957, Black married Elizabeth Seay DeMeritte. In 1926, Black sought election to the United States Senate from Alabama, since the Democratic Party dominated Alabama politics at the time, he easily defeated his Republican opponent, E. H. Dryer, winning 80. 9% of the vote. He was reelected in 1932, winning 86. 3% of the vote against Republican J. Theodore Johnson, Senator Black gained a reputation as a tenacious investigator. In 1934, for example, he chaired the committee that looked into the contracts awarded to air mail carriers under Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown, an inquiry which led to the Air Mail scandal. In order to correct what he termed abuses of fraud and collusion resulting from the Air Mail Act of 1930, he introduced the Black-McKellar Bill, the following year he participated in a Senate committees investigation of lobbying practices. In 1935, Black became chairman of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, in 1937 he sponsored the Black-Connery Bill, which sought to establish a national minimum wage and a maximum workweek of thirty hours
4.
William O. Douglas
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William Orville Douglas was an American jurist and politician who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Douglas was confirmed at the age of 40 and his term, lasting 36 years and 209 days, is the longest term in the history of the Supreme Court. Douglas holds a number of records as a Supreme Court Justice and he was the 79th person appointed and confirmed to the bench of that court. In 1975 Time magazine called Douglas the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court. Douglas was born in 1898 in Maine Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota, the son of Julia Bickford and William Douglas and his family moved to California, and then to Cleveland, Washington. At age two Douglas suffered through an intestinal colic, which Douglas would claim had been polio and his mother attributed his recovery to a miracle, telling Douglas that one day he would be President of the United States. His father died in Portland, Oregon, in 1904, when Douglas was six years old, Douglas would later claim his mother had been left destitute. After moving the family from town to town in the West, his mother, William, like the rest of the Douglas family, worked at odd jobs to earn extra money, and a college education appeared to be unaffordable. He was the valedictorian at Yakima High School and did enough in school to earn a scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla. While at Whitman, Douglas became a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity and he worked at various jobs while attending school, including as a waiter and janitor during the school year, and at a cherry orchard in the summer. Picking cherries, Douglas would say later, inspired him to a legal career. He once said of his early interest in the law, I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos, I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law. Douglas was elected Phi Beta Kappa, participated on the debate team, after graduating in 1920 with a B. A. in English and economics, he taught English and Latin at Yakima high schools for the next two years, hoping to earn enough to attend law school. Finally, he said, I decided it was impossible to save money by teaching. He traveled to New York, with hopes to attend the Columbia Law School, six months later, Douglas funds were running out. The appointments office at the law school told him that a New York firm wanted a student to prepare a correspondence course for law. Douglas earned $600 for his work, enabling him to stay in school, hired for similar projects, he saved $1,000 by semesters end. His wife Mildred worked as a schoolteacher to support him throughout law school and he graduated fifth in his class in 1925, although he later claimed to have been second
5.
Tom C. Clark
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Clark was born in Dallas, Texas, on September 23,1899, the son of Virginia Maxey, and William Henry Clark. His parents had moved from Mississippi to Texas, his father became the youngest man ever elected president of the Texas Bar Association to that time. Young Tom attended the public schools including Dallas High School and received honors for debate and oratory. He then attended the Virginia Military Institute for a year, in 1918 Clark volunteered to serve in World War I with the U. S. Army, but his weight was too low. However, the Texas National Guard accepted him, and he served as an infantryman, after the war ended, Clark enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, receiving an A. B. degree in 1921. He then began studies and received a law degree from the University of Texas School of Law. He was a brother of Delta Tau Delta fraternity, and later served as their international president, upon admission to the Texas bar, Clark set up a law practice in his home town from 1922 to 1937. He left private practice to serve Dallas as civil district attorney from 1927 to 1932 and he then resumed his private practice for four years. Clark, a Democrat, joined the Justice Department in 1937 as an assistant to the U. S. attorney general. He later moved to the antitrust division, then run by legendary trust-buster Thurman Arnold, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor the following year, Clark was named by Attorney General Francis Biddle as the Civilian Coordinator of the Alien Enemy Control Program. Clark also was appointed to head up a new War Frauds unit created to investigate and prosecute corruption by government contractors, during this period he worked closely with, and befriended Harry Truman, whose Truman Committee was investigating war frauds. One, William Colepaugh, was an American citizen, while the other, the prosecution took place before a military tribunal on Governor’s Island in New York, only the third such military trial in the nation’s history. Media coverage of Clark’s nomination was generally favorable, and reflected the strength of Clark’s legal and political skills, as a short article in Life Magazine stated, “He is a good prosecutor and good lawyer, but most of all he is a thorough politician. ”. As attorney general, Clark initially continued to focus a good deal of the energy on prosecuting war fraud crimes. Clark and the White House also challenged John Lewis, the head of the United Mine Workers union, Clark played an important role in support of President Truman’s pioneering efforts in civil rights, helping to bring the power of the federal government behind civil rights enforcement. The most important of the briefs he filed was in Shelley v. Kraemer, Clark also helped guide the creation of a presidentially established committee on civil rights. The report had an important and lasting influence on civil rights providing, as Tom Clark later said, important early anti-Communist cases during his tenure include the Smith Act, Coplon, and Hiss-Chambers cases. Clarks anti-communist efforts also emphasized the promotion of the values of democracy, History, including the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Mayflower Compact
6.
Wikisource
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Wikisource is an online digital library of free content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project, the projects aims are to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, the project officially began in November 24,2003 under the name Project Sourceberg. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name seven months later, the project has come under criticism for lack of reliability but it is also cited by organisations such as the National Archives and Records Administration. The project holds works that are either in the domain or freely licensed, professionally published works or historical source documents, not vanity products. Verification was initially made offline, or by trusting the reliability of digital libraries. Now works are supported by online scans via the ProofreadPage extension, some individual Wikisources, each representing a specific language, now only allow works backed up with scans. While the bulk of its collection are texts, Wikisource as a whole hosts other media, some Wikisources allow user-generated annotations, subject to the specific policies of the Wikisource in question. Wikisources early history included several changes of name and location, the original concept for Wikisource was as storage for useful or important historical texts. These texts were intended to support Wikipedia articles, by providing evidence and original source texts. The collection was focused on important historical and cultural material. The project was originally called Project Sourceberg during its planning stages, in 2001, there was a dispute on Wikipedia regarding the addition of primary source material, leading to edit wars over their inclusion or deletion. Project Sourceberg was suggested as a solution to this, perhaps Project Sourceberg can mainly work as an interface for easily linking from Wikipedia to a Project Gutenberg file, and as an interface for people to easily submit new work to PG. Wed want to complement Project Gutenberg--how, exactly, and Jimmy Wales adding like Larry, Im interested that we think it over to see what we can add to Project Gutenberg. It seems unlikely that primary sources should in general be editable by anyone -- I mean, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, unlike our commentary on his work, the project began its activity at ps. wikipedia. org. The contributors understood the PS subdomain to mean either primary sources or Project Sourceberg, however, this resulted in Project Sourceberg occupying the subdomain of the Pashto Wikipedia. A vote on the name changed it to Wikisource on December 6,2003. Despite the change in name, the project did not move to its permanent URL until July 23,2004, since Wikisource was initially called Project Sourceberg, its first logo was a picture of an iceberg
7.
Alabama
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Alabama is a state in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, Alabama is the 30th-most extensive and the 24th-most populous of the U. S. states. At nearly 1,500 miles, Alabama has one of the nations longest navigable inland waterways, Alabama is nicknamed the Yellowhammer State, after the state bird. Alabama is also known as the Heart of Dixie and the Cotton State, the state tree is the longleaf pine, and the state flower is the camellia. The largest city by population is Birmingham, which has long been the most industrialized city, the oldest city is Mobile, founded by French colonists in 1702 as the capital of French Louisiana. From the American Civil War until World War II, Alabama, like many states in the southern U. S. suffered economic hardship, like other southern states, Alabama legislators disenfranchised African Americans and many poor whites at the turn of the century. Following World War II, Alabama grew as the economy changed from one primarily based on agriculture to one with diversified interests. The state economy in the 21st century is based on management, automotive, finance, manufacturing, aerospace, mineral extraction, healthcare, education, retail, in the Alabama language, the word for a person of Alabama lineage is Albaamo. The word Alabama is believed to have come from the Alabama language, the words spelling varies significantly among historical sources. As early as 1702, the French called the tribe the Alibamon, other spellings of the name have included Alibamu, Alabamo, Albama, Alebamon, Alibama, Alibamou, Alabamu, Allibamou. Sources disagree on the words meaning, some scholars suggest the word comes from the Choctaw alba and amo. The meaning may have been clearers of the thicket or herb gatherers, the state has numerous place names of Native American origin. However, there are no correspondingly similar words in the Alabama language, an 1842 article in the Jacksonville Republican proposed it meant Here We Rest. This notion was popularized in the 1850s through the writings of Alexander Beaufort Meek, experts in the Muskogean languages have not found any evidence to support such a translation. Indigenous peoples of varying cultures lived in the area for thousands of years before the advent of European colonization, trade with the northeastern tribes by the Ohio River began during the Burial Mound Period and continued until European contact. The agrarian Mississippian culture covered most of the state from 1000 to 1600 AD, with one of its major centers built at what is now the Moundville Archaeological Site in Moundville, Alabama. This is the second-largest complex of the classic Middle Mississippian era, after Cahokia in present-day Illinois, Analysis of artifacts from archaeological excavations at Moundville were the basis of scholars formulating the characteristics of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Contrary to popular belief, the SECC appears to have no links to Mesoamerican culture
8.
NAACP
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Du Bois, Mary White Ovington and Moorfield Storey. Its mission in the 21st century is to ensure the political, educational, social and their national initiatives included political lobbying, publicity efforts, and litigation strategies developed by their legal team. The group enlarged its mission in the late 20th century by considering issues such as police misconduct, the status of foreign refugees. Its name, retained in accordance with tradition, uses the common term colored people. The NAACP bestows annual awards to people of color in two categories, Image Awards are for achievement in the arts and entertainment, and Spingarn Medals are for outstanding achievement of any kind and its headquarters is in Baltimore, Maryland. The NAACP is headquartered in Baltimore, with regional offices in New York, Michigan, Georgia, Maryland, Texas, Colorado. Each regional office is responsible for coordinating the efforts of state conferences in that region, local, youth, and college chapters organize activities for individual members. In the U. S. the NAACP is administered by a 64-member board, julian Bond, Civil Rights Movement activist and former Georgia State Senator, was chairman until replaced in February 2010 by health-care administrator Roslyn Brock. For decades in the first half of the 20th century, the organization was led by its executive secretary. James Weldon Johnson and Walter F. White, who served in that role successively from 1920 to 1958, were more widely known as NAACP leaders than were presidents during those years. Departments within the NAACP govern areas of action, local chapters are supported by the Branch and Field Services department and the Youth and College department. The Legal department focuses on cases of broad application to minorities, such as systematic discrimination in employment, government. The Washington, D. C. bureau is responsible for lobbying the U. S. government, the goal of the Health Division is to advance health care for minorities through public policy initiatives and education. As of 2007, the NAACP had approximately 425,000 paying and non-paying members, the NAACPs non-current records are housed at the Library of Congress, which has served as the organizations official repository since 1964. The records held there comprise approximately five million items spanning the NAACPs history from the time of its founding until 2003, in 1905, a group of thirty-two prominent African-American leaders met to discuss the challenges facing people of color and possible strategies and solutions. They were particularly concerned by the Southern states disenfranchisement of blacks starting with Mississippis passage of a new constitution in 1890, through 1908, southern legislatures dominated by white Democrats ratified new constitutions and laws creating barriers to voter registration and more complex election rules. In practice, this caused the exclusion of most blacks and many whites from the political system in southern states. Black voter registration and turnout dropped markedly in the South as a result of such legislation, men who had been voting for thirty years in the South were told they did not qualify to register
9.
New York (state)
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New York is a state in the northeastern United States, and is the 27th-most extensive, fourth-most populous, and seventh-most densely populated U. S. state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south and Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to the east. With an estimated population of 8.55 million in 2015, New York City is the most populous city in the United States, the New York Metropolitan Area is one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world. New York City makes up over 40% of the population of New York State, two-thirds of the states population lives in the New York City Metropolitan Area, and nearly 40% lives on Long Island. Both the state and New York City were named for the 17th-century Duke of York, the next four most populous cities in the state are Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, and Syracuse, while the state capital is Albany. New York has a diverse geography and these more mountainous regions are bisected by two major river valleys—the north-south Hudson River Valley and the east-west Mohawk River Valley, which forms the core of the Erie Canal. Western New York is considered part of the Great Lakes Region and straddles Lake Ontario, between the two lakes lies Niagara Falls. The central part of the state is dominated by the Finger Lakes, New York had been inhabited by tribes of Algonquian and Iroquoian-speaking Native Americans for several hundred years by the time the earliest Europeans came to New York. The first Europeans to arrive were French colonists and Jesuit missionaries who arrived southward from settlements at Montreal for trade, the British annexed the colony from the Dutch in 1664. The borders of the British colony, the Province of New York, were similar to those of the present-day state, New York is home to the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of the United States and its ideals of freedom, democracy, and opportunity. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. On April 17,1524 Verrazanno entered New York Bay, by way of the now called the Narrows into the northern bay which he named Santa Margherita. Verrazzano described it as a vast coastline with a delta in which every kind of ship could pass and he adds. This vast sheet of water swarmed with native boats and he landed on the tip of Manhattan and possibly on the furthest point of Long Island. Verrazannos stay was interrupted by a storm which pushed him north towards Marthas Vineyard, in 1540 French traders from New France built a chateau on Castle Island, within present-day Albany, due to flooding, it was abandoned the next year. In 1614, the Dutch under the command of Hendrick Corstiaensen, rebuilt the French chateau, Fort Nassau was the first Dutch settlement in North America, and was located along the Hudson River, also within present-day Albany. The small fort served as a trading post and warehouse, located on the Hudson River flood plain, the rudimentary fort was washed away by flooding in 1617, and abandoned for good after Fort Orange was built nearby in 1623. Henry Hudsons 1609 voyage marked the beginning of European involvement with the area, sailing for the Dutch East India Company and looking for a passage to Asia, he entered the Upper New York Bay on September 11 of that year
10.
Montgomery bus boycott
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Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional. Many important figures in the Civil Rights Movement took part in the boycott, including Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. the local background for the Montgomery bus boycott lies in growing abuse and humiliation of the black passengers by white bus drivers due to three main reasons. First, drivers increasingly abused passengers due to their own frustrations over labor disputes, third, the 1954 Brown decision also resulted in increased animosity of bus drivers towards blacks -- many of whom joined the White Citizens Councils. On February 25,1953, the Baton Rouge, Louisiana city-parish council passed Ordinance 222, however, the ordinance was largely unenforced by the city bus drivers. The drivers later went on strike after city authorities refused to arrest Rev. T. J, Jemison for sitting in a front row. Four days after the strike began, Louisiana Attorney General and former Baton Rouge mayor Fred S. LeBlanc declared the ordinance unconstitutional under Louisiana state law and this led Rev. Jemison to organize what historians believe to be the first bus boycott of the civil rights movement. The boycott ended after eight days when an agreement was reached to only retain the first two front and back rows as racially reserved seating areas. On March 2,1955, Colvin was handcuffed, arrested, at the time, Colvin was an active member in the NAACP Youth Council, a group to which Rosa Parks served as Advisor. Colvins legal case formed the core of Browder v. Gayle, but neither the Supreme Courts Morgan ruling nor the ICCs Keys ruling addressed the matter of Jim Crow travel within the individual states. Under the system of segregation used on Montgomery buses, the ten front seats were reserved for whites at all times, the ten back seats were supposed to be reserved for blacks at all times. The middle section of the bus consisted of sixteen unreserved seats for whites, whites filled the middle seats from the front to back, and blacks filled seats from the back to front until the bus was full. If other black people boarded the bus, they were required to stand, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white person, she was sitting in the first line of the middle section. Often when boarding the buses, black people were required to pay at the front, get off, occasionally, bus drivers would drive away before black passengers were able to reboard. National City Lines owned the Montgomery Bus Line at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks was a seamstress by profession, she was also the secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. Twelve years before her history-making arrest, Parks was stopped from boarding a city bus by driver James F. Blake, Parks vowed never again to ride a bus driven by Blake. As a member of the NAACP, Parks was an investigator assigned to cases of sexual assault, in 1945, she was sent to Abbeville, Alabama, to investigate the gang rape of Recy Taylor. The protest that arose around the Taylor case was the first instance of a civil rights protest. In 1955, Parks completed a course in Race Relations at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee where nonviolent civil disobedience had been discussed as a tactic, on December 1,1955, Parks was sitting in the frontmost row for black people
11.
United States Constitution
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The United States Constitution is the supreme law of the United States of America. The Constitution, originally comprising seven articles, delineates the national frame of government, Articles Four, Five and Six entrench concepts of federalism, describing the rights and responsibilities of state governments and of the states in relationship to the federal government. Article Seven establishes the procedure used by the thirteen States to ratify it. In general, the first ten amendments, known collectively as the Bill of Rights, offer specific protections of individual liberty, the majority of the seventeen later amendments expand individual civil rights protections. Others address issues related to federal authority or modify government processes and procedures, Amendments to the United States Constitution, unlike ones made to many constitutions worldwide, are appended to the document. All four pages of the original U. S, according to the United States Senate, The Constitutions first three words—We the People—affirm that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens. From September 5,1774 to March 1,1781, the Continental Congress functioned as the government of the United States. The process of selecting the delegates for the First and Second Continental Congresses underscores the revolutionary role of the people of the colonies in establishing a governing body. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was the first constitution of the United States and it was drafted by the Second Continental Congress from mid-1776 through late-1777, and ratification by all 13 states was completed by early 1781. Under the Articles of Confederation, the governments power was quite limited. The Confederation Congress could make decisions, but lacked enforcement powers, implementation of most decisions, including modifications to the Articles, required unanimous approval of all thirteen state legislatures. The Continental Congress could print money but the currency was worthless, Congress could borrow money, but couldnt pay it back. No state paid all their U. S. taxes, some paid nothing, some few paid an amount equal to interest on the national debt owed to their citizens, but no more. No interest was paid on debt owed foreign governments, by 1786, the United States would default on outstanding debts as their dates came due. Internationally, the Articles of Confederation did little to enhance the United States ability to defend its sovereignty, most of the troops in the 625-man United States Army were deployed facing – but not threatening – British forts on American soil. They had not been paid, some were deserting and others threatening mutiny, spain closed New Orleans to American commerce, U. S. officials protested, but to no effect. Barbary pirates began seizing American ships of commerce, the Treasury had no funds to pay their ransom, if any military crisis required action, the Congress had no credit or taxing power to finance a response. Domestically, the Articles of Confederation was failing to bring unity to the sentiments and interests of the various states
