What Happened Today

Durig the Civil War, the Union shifted its aim from a war for Union to a war that would end slavery and reunite the Union. The key act which marked this change was the Emancipation Proclamation, but it only freed slaves in rebel territory. Worse, it was a war measure that had little effect after the war would end. By 1864, the idea became clear that what was needed was a Constitutional amendment, not only for its permanence but also to override the laws that enabled slavery. The text of the Amendment was quite simple, and it easily passed the Senate with the necessary two-thirds majority. After a large legislative battle in the House of Representatives, the Amendment would go to the states. Between that moment and its ratification less than a year later, Abraham Lincoln would be assassinated, the Confederacy would surrender, and the former slave states had to ratify the amendment.

The Twenty-First Amendment is a special amendment. Not only is it the only constitutional amendment that repeals another amendment, it is also the only one to be passed through state conventions, rather than by state legislatures. The amendment repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment was the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the sale, manufacture, and consumption of alcohol. Prohibition proved to be a disaster almost immediately, with an uptick in organized crime and violence, without a noticeable decrease in actual consumption of alcohol. These problems would be further exacerbated by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, as funds for enforcement ran out and the revenues from liquor taxes looked more appealing. Yet the political influence of the temperance movement had not waned in conjunction with prohibition's failure, so the people seeking repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment tried a different strategy.

In 1783, George Washington was the popular head of a large army. Throughout history, this had usually meant that George Washington could have had whatever power he wanted. Instead, he told his officers goodbye, dissolved his army, and went back to his plantation Mount Vernon in Virginia. It was a truly astonishing act which allowed America to become a stable republic, a very rare thing in the world. George Washington made himself unlike Julius Caesar or Oliver Cromwell, but instead like the Ancient Roman icon Cincinattus, who had renounced absolute authority to retrun to his plough. Nothing says more about how important Washington's act was than that people had to stretch back more than 2,000 years for a comparison.

Dr. Christiaan Barnard achieved a medical breakthrough by becoming the first surgeon to successfully perform a human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. He was not supposed to be the surgeon to achieve this feat, as a few others appeared better poised to perform a transplant. Barnard got to the first transplant because he got lucky, in a morbid way, by having the exact conditions, a patient dying of heart disease willing to have the surgery and a heart donor who had recently suffered a terrible accident. When Denise Darvall was hit by a car, Barnard was able to convince Louis Washkansky he could get a heart transplant. Barnard's efforts in successfully performing this tread on some ethically gray areas. Barnard would nontheless become internationally famous, which showed he was a less than wonderful person. There were also multiple issues with the operation because of Apartheid. Nonetheless, Christiaan Barnard was the doctor who first successfully transplanted a human heart.

James Monroe took his Seventh Annual Address to Congress to send a message to the great powers of the world. He asserted that the United States of America would not allow interference by European powers into newly emergent independent nations in the Americas. This statement would become known as the Monroe Doctrine. Largely crafted by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, The Monroe Doctrine would become foundational for American foreign policy almost immediately. Yet it also had no teeth when it was announced as the American military had no ability to enforce the claim. The real significance of the Monroe Doctrine was actually rhetorical. By proclaiming America as being on an equal footing with the great powers, Monroe boosted America's place in the world and its role as a leading democracy.

Officially under Jim Crow, when a bus began to fill up in Montgomery, Alabama and all over the South, black passengers were required to move to the back of the bus to allow white passengers to sit. Rosa Parks refused to do so on a Montgomery city bus and was subsequently arrested and charged with a crime. Parks was the Secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP and was the most recent in a series of African-Americans arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus. So Parks' act sparked widespread outrage and immediate action, making the leaders of the black community form the Montgomery Improvement Association and launch a widespread boycott of Montgomery's bus service. The leader of the MIA was a young minister, new to town, named Martin Luther King, Jr. More broadly, the Montgomery Bus Boycott launched the Civil Rights Movement and launched King to national fame. Segregation on Montgomery buses would officially end after a Supreme Court case in December 1956, over a year after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.

When a representative England side and a representative Scotland side faced off in a football match, they were breaking new ground. There were previous "England" vs. "Scotland" matches, but the Scottish sides were really any Scots living in London who wanted to show up to face England footballers. With the larger spread of football from English public schools to young professionals, football had become quite popular throughout Britain, with the establishment of the Football Association in 1863 crystallizing a common set of rules. Yet the first international match between England and Scotland established a pattern that would be replicated around the world as the game of Association Football would go from country to country, even if ended in a scoreless draw.

Pong was not the first video game, nor even the first one released as an arcade game, but it was the first widespread success. Before Pong, video games were for computer geeks and almost nobody else. Pong, however, was an ingeniously simple game, featuring knobs that controlled two little bars that served as paddles and the players had to use to return a ball. So Pong was a social game anyone could play in a time before personal computers were available to the public. It would become insanely popular, with a devotion that would seem to belie a game with such simplistic gameplay. It would also help launch more arcade video games and even lead Atari to launch the first successful home video game console.

The Kingdom of Hawai'i had been unified and ruled by one monarch from 1810, with the Kamehameha dynasty asserting its authority on an international level. So when an Anglo-Franco Proclamation recognized Hawai'i's sovereignty in 1843, the act might have seemed a bit overdue. Actually, though, King Kamehameha III carefully cultivated this proclamation through diplomatic efforts in order to guarantee the safety of his nation after a handful of international incidents. Part of the larger effort by Kamehameha III was the creation of a new constitution, providing for a constitutional monarchy rather than his predecessors' absolute monarchy. Kamehameha III also guaranteed religious liberty for Catholics in Hawai'i and worked to have actual international diplomacy. So even though Hawai'i did not need to declare indpendence, the Anglo-Franco Proclamation ensured exactly what Kamehameha III had been working to achieve.

Dan White did not fit the typical profile of an assasin. Most strikingly, he was a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, serving under one victim, Mayor George Moscone, and alongside his other victim, Supervisor Harvey Milk. This fact would make the act shocking with no other context, but actually every other context made the killing of Moscone and Milk more bizarre. Most importantly, Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician elected to a seat for the first time when he became a Supervisor. Moscone's death led to San Francisco gaining its first female mayor, Dianne Feinstein, who would later become a Senator from California. More notably, White would only be convicted of "involuntary manslaughter," due to a successful argument by his lawyers that White was in a diminished mental state. The verdict would cause riots in San Francisco, and White would later commit suicide after he served his jail sentence.