Legal status of Hawaii
The legal status of Hawaii—as opposed to its political status—is a settled legal matter as it pertains to United States law, but there has been scholarly and legal debate. While Hawaii is internationally recognized as a state of the United States of America while being broadly accepted as such in mainstream understanding, there have been essays written denying the legality of this status; the argument is. The legality of control of Hawaii by the United States has been raised in the losing side in cases in the U. S. Supreme Court, in U. S. District Court; the islands that we know of today as Hawaii were settled by Polynesian explorers some time around 350 AD. The indigenous inhabitants are referred to as kānaka maoli. After 1778, the arrival of James Cook, populations levels changed drastically and the islands would be unified in 1795 under the leadership of Kamehameha I. Within one hundred years of the founding of the kingdom, American political and religious influence would erode the powers of the indigenous monarchs and overthrow the kingdom on January 17, 1893.
A provisional government was established. U. S. President Grover Cleveland rejected the provisional government for the illegal overthrow of a sovereign nation and demanded the restoration of Queen Liliʻuokalani to her rightful place as ruler of the Kingdom of Hawaii; the new government refused and the Republic of Hawaii was declared instead. Cleveland sent Georgia Congressman James Henderson Blount to investigate the matter. Following his investigation, Blount issued a 1342-page report on July 17, 1893, which called the coup an "act of war" against a friendly and independent nation, recommended that appropriate measures be taken by the U. S. to restore the Hawaiian Kingdom. The Cleveland Administration, Secretary of State Gresham, recommended the fair yet forcible removal of the usurpers from power, they were advised, that this would require a Declaration of War. It was doubtful. Cleveland nonetheless advocated for intervention. Meanwhile, the new Minister to Hawaii, Alfred Willis, asked the Queen if she would pardon the usurpers if restored.
The Queen stated that she was bound to follow the 1887 Constitution, which required either banishment or death as a punishment for treason. Willis reported to president Cleveland that she had told him that the conspirators should be "beheaded"; the press inflamed the situation, reporting that the Queen intended to decapitate every white person in Hawaii. The reaction among white people in both Honolulu and Washington was riotous, Cleveland was forced to abandon his course of action, handing the matter over to Congress, tiring of the conflict and lacking the means to restore the Queen without risking a fiasco, recognized the Republic. Cleveland ended his support for the Queen, his own political position was shaky. His strong stances for the gold standard, for the upholding of treaties with Native Americans and against imperialism and involvement in Nicaragua, along with a multitude of personal controversies and his disastrous attempt at intervention in the Pullman Strike left him unable to engage in contentious action once the situation became volatile.
Dissatisfied with Blount's findings, pro-annexation elements in the U. S. Senate sought another viewpoint. In 1894, the U. S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent Senator John Tyler Morgan to make a second investigation. Morgan, a staunch segregationist and former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who had speculated on the use of Hawaii as an alternative site for relocation of Blacks, was sent to challenge Blount's findings. Interviewing Caucasian settlers, befriending coup organizer Lorrin Thurston and emphasizing the strategic value of Hawaii, Morgan's report exonerated the U. S. military of direct responsibility. Though the report was never accepted by the Senate, it was used in subsequent years to justify the U. S.' actions. Meanwhile, Minister Stevens had been reprimanded and forced into retirement by the Cleveland administration for his unauthorized role in the coup. Stevens did not oppose this action, having lost a child to drowning in Maine just three days after the Overthrow, which had plunged him into deep depression.
He was exonerated by Morgan's report shortly before his own death in 1895. Stevens received a silver tea service made of melted Hawaiian Kingdom coins in thanks from the new Provisional Government, still in curation by his descendants. In 1895, a small group of royalists led by Robert William Kalanihiapo Wilcox clashed with Republic forces on the slopes of Diamond Head, in Mōʻiliʻili. Casualties were minimal; the Republic, by this time, was well-armed: not only had Sanford B. Dole spent the Kingdom's money on armaments, he had borrowed additional money to arm and pay a formidable militia. Wilcox and the others, including two haole of prominent families, were arrested. Liliʻuokalani was accused of "conspiring" with and "aiding" them, although evidence was scanty, she was found guilty and imprisoned in a room in ʻIolani Palace for several months. Wilcox and five others were tried for treason, sentenced to be hanged; the imprisoned Queen was given an ultimatum: if she formally abdicated and the others would be pardoned.
Whether or not she supported
William McKinley
William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1897, until his assassination six months into his second term. During his presidency, McKinley led the nation to victory in the Spanish–American War, raised protective tariffs to promote American industry and kept the nation on the gold standard in a rejection of free silver. McKinley was the last president to have served in the American Civil War and the only one to have started the war as an enlisted soldier, beginning as a private in the Union Army and ending as a brevet major. After the war, he settled in Canton, where he practiced law and married Ida Saxton. In 1876, he was elected to Congress, where he became the Republican Party's expert on the protective tariff, which he promised would bring prosperity, his 1890 McKinley Tariff was controversial, which together with a Democratic redistricting aimed at gerrymandering him out of office led to his defeat in the Democratic landslide of 1890. He was elected governor of Ohio in 1891 and 1893, steering a moderate course between capital and labor interests.
With the aid of his close adviser Mark Hanna, he secured the Republican nomination for president in 1896 amid a deep economic depression. He defeated his Democratic rival William Jennings Bryan after a front porch campaign in which he advocated "sound money" and promised that high tariffs would restore prosperity. Rapid economic growth marked McKinley's presidency, he promoted the 1897 Dingley Tariff to protect manufacturers and factory workers from foreign competition and in 1900 secured the passage of the Gold Standard Act. McKinley hoped to persuade Spain to grant independence to rebellious Cuba without conflict, but when negotiation failed he led the nation into the Spanish-American War of 1898; the United States victory was decisive. As part of the peace settlement, Spain turned over to the United States its main overseas colonies of Puerto Rico and the Philippines while Cuba was promised independence, but at that time remained under the control of the United States Army; the United States annexed the independent Republic of Hawaii in 1898 and it became a United States territory.
Historians regard McKinley's 1896 victory as a realigning election in which the political stalemate of the post-Civil War era gave way to the Republican-dominated Fourth Party System, which began with the Progressive Era. McKinley defeated Bryan again in the 1900 presidential election in a campaign focused on imperialism and free silver, his legacy was cut short when he was shot on September 6, 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, a second-generation Polish-American with anarchist leanings. McKinley died eight days and was succeeded by his Vice President Theodore Roosevelt; as an innovator of American interventionism and pro-business sentiment, McKinley's presidency is considered above average, though his positive public perception was soon overshadowed by Roosevelt. William McKinley Jr. was born in 1843 in Niles, the seventh of nine children of William McKinley Sr. and Nancy McKinley. The McKinleys were of English and Scots-Irish descent and had settled in western Pennsylvania in the 18th century, tracing back to a David McKinley, born in Dervock, County Antrim, in present-day Northern Ireland.
There, the elder McKinley was born in Mercer County. The family moved to Ohio, he married her later. The Allison family was of English descent and among Pennsylvania's earliest settlers; the family trade on both sides was iron-making, McKinley senior operated foundries throughout Ohio, in New Lisbon, Niles and Canton. The McKinley household was, like many from Ohio's Western Reserve, steeped in Whiggish and abolitionist sentiment, the latter based on the family's staunch Methodist beliefs. William followed in the Methodist tradition, becoming active in the local Methodist church at the age of sixteen, he was a lifelong pious Methodist. In 1852, the family moved from Niles to Poland, Ohio so that their children could attend the better schools there. Graduating from Poland Seminary in 1859, he enrolled the following year at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, he was an honorary member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He remained at Allegheny for only one year, returning home in 1860 after becoming depressed.
He spent time at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio as a board member. Although his health recovered, family finances declined and McKinley was unable to return to Allegheny, first working as a postal clerk and taking a job teaching at a school near Poland, Ohio; when the Southern states seceded from the Union and the American Civil War began, thousands of men in Ohio volunteered for service. Among them were McKinley and his cousin William McKinley Osbourne, who enlisted as privates in the newly formed Poland Guards in June 1861; the men left for Columbus where they were consolidated with other small units to form the 23rd Ohio Infantry. The men were unhappy to learn that, unlike Ohio's earlier volunteer regiments, they would not be permitted to elect their officers. Dennison appointed Colonel William Rosecrans as the commander of the regiment, the men began training on the outskirts of Columbus. McKinley took to the soldier's life and wrote a series of letters to his hometown newspaper extolling the army and the Union cause.
Delays in issuance of uniforms and weapons again brought the men into conflict with their officers, but Major Rut
Thirteen Colonies
The Thirteen Colonies known as the Thirteen British Colonies or the Thirteen American Colonies, were a group of British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America founded in the 17th and 18th centuries. They formed the United States of America; the Thirteen Colonies had similar political and legal systems and were dominated by Protestant English-speakers. They were part of Britain's possessions in the New World, which included colonies in Canada, the Caribbean, the Floridas. Between 1625 and 1775, the colonial population grew from 2,000 to over 2.5 million, displacing American Indians. This population included people subject to a system of slavery, legal in all of the colonies prior to the American Revolutionary War. In the 18th century, the British government operated its colonies under a policy of mercantilism, in which the central government administered its possessions for the economic benefit of the mother country; the Thirteen Colonies had a high degree of self-governance and active local elections, they resisted London's demands for more control.
The French and Indian War against France and its Indian allies led to growing tensions between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies. In the 1750s, the colonies began collaborating with one another instead of dealing directly with Britain; these inter-colonial activities cultivated a sense of shared American identity and led to calls for protection of the colonists' "Rights as Englishmen" the principle of "no taxation without representation". Grievances with the British government led to the American Revolution, in which the colonies collaborated in forming the Continental Congress; the colonists fought the American Revolutionary War with the aid of France and, to a smaller degree, the Dutch Republic and Spain. In 1606, King James I of England granted charters to both the Plymouth Company and the London Company for the purpose of establishing permanent settlements in America; the London Company established the Colony and Dominion of Virginia in 1607, the first permanently settled English colony on the continent.
The Plymouth Company founded the Popham Colony on the Kennebec River. The Plymouth Council for New England sponsored several colonization projects, culminating with Plymouth Colony in 1620, settled by English Puritan separatists, known today as the Pilgrims; the Dutch and French established successful American colonies at the same time as the English, but they came under the English crown. The Thirteen Colonies were complete with the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, although the term "Thirteen Colonies" became current only in the context of the American Revolution. In London beginning in 1660, all colonies were governed through a state department known as the Southern Department, a committee of the Privy Council called the Board of Trade and Plantations. In 1768, a specific state department was created for America, but it was disbanded in 1782 when the Home Office took responsibility. Province of New Hampshire, established in the 1620s, chartered as crown colony in 1679 Province of Massachusetts Bay, established in the 1620s, a crown colony 1692 Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, established 1636, chartered as crown colony in 1663 Connecticut Colony, established 1636, chartered as crown colony in 1662 Province of New York, proprietary colony 1664–1685, crown colony from 1686 Province of New Jersey, proprietary colony from 1664, crown colony from 1702 Province of Pennsylvania, a proprietary colony established 1681 Delaware Colony, a proprietary colony established 1664 Province of Maryland, a proprietary colony established 1632 Colony and Dominion of Virginia, proprietary colony established 1607, a crown colony from 1624 Province of Carolina, a proprietary colony established 1663 Divided into the Province of North-Carolina and Province of South Carolina in 1712, each became a crown colony in 1729 Province of Georgia, proprietary colony established 1732, crown colony from 1752.
The first successful English colony was Jamestown, established May 1607 near Chesapeake Bay. The business venture was financed and coordinated by the London Virginia Company, a joint stock company looking for gold, its first years were difficult, with high death rates from disease and starvation, wars with local Indians, little gold. The colony flourished by turning to tobacco as a cash crop. In 1632, King Charles I granted the charter for Province of Maryland to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. Calvert's father had been a prominent Catholic official who encouraged Catholic immigration to the English colonies; the charter offered no guidelines on religion. The Province of Carolina was the second attempted English settlement south of Virginia, the first being the failed attempt at Roanoke, it was a private venture, financed by a group of English Lords Proprietors who obtained a Royal Charter to the Carolinas in 1663, hoping that a new colony in the south would become profitable like Jamestown.
Carolina was not settled until 1670, then the first attempt failed because there was no incentive for emigration to that area. However, the Lords combined their remaining capital and financed a settlement mission to the area led by Sir John Colleton; the expedition located fertile and defensible ground at what became Charleston Charles Town for Charles II of England. The Pilgrims were a small group of Puritan separatists who felt that they needed to physically distance themselves from the corrupt Church of England. After moving to the Netherlands, they decided to re-establish themselves in America; the initi
Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg Address is a speech that U. S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg, it is one of the best-known speeches in American history. Although not the day's primary speech, Lincoln's crafted address came to be seen as one of the greatest and most influential statements of American national purpose. In just 271 words, beginning with the now iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," referring to the signing of the Declaration of Independence eighty-seven years earlier, Lincoln described the USA as a nation "conceived in Liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and represented the Civil War as a test that would decide whether such a nation, the Union sundered by the secession crisis, could endure.
He extolled the sacrifices of those who died at Gettysburg in defense of those principles, exhorted his listeners to resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Despite the speech's prominent place in the history and popular culture of the United States, its exact wording is disputed; the five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's hand differ in a number of details, differ from contemporary newspaper reprints of the speech. Neither is it clear. Modern scholarship locates the speakers' platform 40 yards away from the traditional site in Soldiers' National Cemetery at the Soldiers' National Monument, which means that it stood within the private, adjacent Evergreen Cemetery. Following the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1–3, 1863, the removal of the fallen Union soldiers from the Gettysburg Battlefield graves and their reburial in graves at the National Cemetery at Gettysburg began on October 17.
In inviting President Lincoln to the ceremonies, David Wills, of the committee for the November 19 Consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, wrote, "It is the desire that, after the Oration, you, as Chief Executive of the nation, formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks."On the train trip from Washington, D. C. to Gettysburg on November 18, Lincoln was accompanied by three members of his Cabinet, William Seward, John Usher and Montgomery Blair, several foreign officials, his secretary John Nicolay, his assistant secretary, John Hay. During the trip Lincoln remarked to Hay. Hay noted that during the speech Lincoln's face had "a ghastly color" and that he was "sad, mournful haggard." After the speech, when Lincoln boarded the 6:30 pm train for Washington, D. C. he was weak, with a severe headache. A protracted illness followed, it thus seems likely that Lincoln was in the prodromal period of smallpox when he delivered the Gettysburg address. The program organized for that day by Wills and his committee included: Music, by Birgfeld's Band Prayer, by Reverend T. H. Stockton, D.
D. Music, by the Marine Band, directed by Francis Scala Oration, by Hon. Edward Everett Music, Hymn by B. B. French, Esq. music by Wilson G Horner, sung by Baltimore Glee Club Dedicatory Remarks, by the President of the United States Dirge, sung by Choir selected for the occasion Benediction, by Reverend H. L. Baugher, D. D. While it is Lincoln's short speech that has gone down in history as one of the finest examples of English public oratory, it was Everett's two-hour oration, slated to be the "Gettysburg address" that day, his now seldom-read 13,607-word oration began: Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed, and ended two hours with: But they, I am sure, will join us in saying, as we bid farewell to the dust of these martyr-heroes, that wheresoever throughout the civilized world the accounts of this great warfare are read, down to the latest period of recorded time, in the glorious annals of our common country, there will be no brighter page than that which relates the Battles of Gettysburg.
Lengthy dedication addresses like Everett's were common at cemeteries in this era. The tradition began in 1831 when Justice Joseph Story delivered the dedication address at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts; those addresses linked cemeteries to the mission of Union. Lincoln's address followed the oration by Edward Everett, who subsequently included a copy of the Gettysburg Address in his 1864 book about the event (Address of the Hon. Edward Everett At the Consecration of the National Cemetery At Gettysburg, 19th November 1863, with the Dedicatory Speech of President Lincoln, the Other Exercises of the Occasion.
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst Sr. was an American businessman, newspaper publisher, politician known for developing the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His flamboyant methods of yellow journalism influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human interest stories. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 with Mitchell Trubitt after being given control of The San Francisco Examiner by his wealthy father. Moving to New York City, Hearst acquired the New York Journal and fought a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Hearst sold papers by printing giant headlines over lurid stories featuring crime, corruption and innuendo. Acquiring more newspapers, Hearst created a chain that numbered nearly 30 papers in major American cities at its peak, he expanded to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world. Hearst controlled the editorial positions and coverage of political news in all his papers and magazines, thereby published his personal views.
He sensationalized Spanish atrocities in Cuba while calling for war in 1898 against Spain. He was twice elected as a Democrat to the U. S. House of Representatives, he ran unsuccessfully for President of the United States in 1904, Mayor of New York City in 1905 and 1909, for Governor of New York in 1906. During his political career, he espoused views associated with the left wing of the Progressive Movement, claiming to speak on behalf of the working class. After 1918 and the end of the Great War, Hearst began adopting more conservative views, started promoting an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regarded as corrupt European affairs, he was at once a militant nationalist, a fierce anti-communist after the Russian Revolution, suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French and Russians. He was a leading supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932–34, but broke with FDR and became his most prominent enemy on the right. Hearst's empire reached a peak circulation of 20 million readers a day in the mid-1930s.
He was a bad manager of finances and so in debt during the Great Depression that most of his assets had to be liquidated in the late 1930s. Hearst managed to keep his magazines, his life story was the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane. His Hearst Castle, constructed on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon, has been preserved as a State Historical Monument and is designated as a National Historic Landmark. William R. Hearst was born in San Francisco to George Hearst, a millionaire mining engineer, owner of gold and other mines through his corporation, his much younger wife Phoebe Apperson Hearst, from a small town in Missouri; the elder Hearst entered politics, served as a US Senator, first appointed for a brief period in 1886 elected that year. He served from 1887 to his death in 1891, his paternal great-grandfather was John Hearst of Ulster Protestant origin. John Hearst, with his wife and six children, migrated to America from Ballybay, County Monaghan, Ireland, as part of the Cahans Exodus in 1766, settled in South Carolina.
Their immigration to South Carolina was spurred in part by the colonial government's policy that encouraged the immigration of Irish Protestants, many of Scots origin. The names "John Hearse" and "John Hearse Jr." appear on the council records of October 26, 1766, being credited with meriting 400 and 100 acres of land on the Long Canes, based upon 100 acres to heads of household and 50 acres for each dependent of a Protestant immigrant. The "Hearse" spelling of the family name never was used afterward by the family members themselves, or any family of any size. A separate theory purports that one branch of a "Hurst" family of Virginia moved to South Carolina at about the same time and changed the spelling of its surname of over a century to that of the immigrant Hearsts. Hearst's mother, née Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson, was of Scots-Irish ancestry, she was appointed as the first woman regent of University of California, donated funds to establish libraries at several universities, funded many anthropological expeditions, founded the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
Hearst attended prep school at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, he enrolled in the Harvard College class of 1885. While there he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the A. D. Club, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, of the Lampoon before being expelled, his antics had ranged from sponsoring massive beer parties in Harvard Square to sending pudding pots used as chamber pots to his professors. Searching for an occupation, in 1887 Hearst took over management of his father's newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, which his father had acquired in 1880 as repayment for a gambling debt. Giving his paper a grand motto, "Monarch of the Dailies," William R. Hearst acquired the best equipment and the most talented writers of the time, including Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Jack London, political cartoonist Homer Davenport. A self-proclaimed populist, Hearst reported accounts of municipal and financial corruption attacking companies in which his own family held an interest. Within a few years, his paper dominated the San Francisco market.
Early in his career at the San Francisco Examiner, Hearst envisioned running a large newspaper chain, "always knew that his dream of a nation-spanning, multi-paper
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