Academic Team Social Studies Study Material
Andrew Johnson
17th President, took over after Lincoln was assassinated (he was VP), tried to stop the Reconstruction Amendments (13th-15th) from passing but failed, first president to be impeached but was not removed from office. From Tennessee. Democratic Party.
Ulysses S. Grant
18th President, Union General in Civil War, worked for Reconstruction. From Ohio. Republican Party.
Rutherford B. Hayes
19th President, ended reconstruction by removing federal troops, disputed Tilden/Hayes election resulted in the Compromise of 1877. From Ohio. Republican Party.
George Washington
1st President of the United States; commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. From Virginia. No political party.
James Garfield
20th president, assassinated by Charles J. Guiteau because he wasn't given a political position. From Ohio. Republican Party.
Chester A. Arthur
21st President. Pendleton Civil Service Act, ending spoils system. From Vermont. Republican Party.
Grover Cleveland
22nd and 24th president, Interstate Commerce Commission, civil service reform, violent suppression of strikes, few honest politicians during the gilded age. From New Jersey. Democratic Party.
Benjamin Harrison
23rd President, introduced the McKinley Tariff and increased federal spending to a billion dollars, grandson of William Henry Harrison. From Ohio. Republican Party.
William McKinley
25th president, Spanish-American War, Philippine-American War, and the Annexation of Hawaii, imperialism, assassinated. From Ohio. Republican Party.
Theodore Roosevelt
26th President, rough rider, fought in Spanish-American War. From New York. Republican Party.
William Howard Taft
27th president, Payne-Aldrich Tariff. From Ohio. Republican Party.
Woodrow Wilson
28th president, World War I, created Federal Reserve, Federal Trade Commission, Clayton Antitrust Act, women's suffrage (reluctantly), Treaty of Versailles, 14 Points, League of Nations (but failed to win U.S. ratification), won Nobel Peace Prize. From Virginia. Democratic Party.
Warren G. Harding
29th President, kept US going after WWI, Prohibition. From Ohio. Republican Party.
John Adams
2nd President, George Washington's Vice President. From Massachusetts. Federalist Party.
Calvin Coolidge
30th President, known as "Silent Cal" for being so quiet, president for most of the Roaring 20s. From Vermont. Republican Party.
Herbert Hoover
31st President, Stock Market Crash of 1929, Great Depression, did not help the people, very disliked, "chicken in every pot and a car in every garage". From Iowa. Republican Party.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
32nd President, New Deal Program, Alphabet Agencies (TVA, CCC, WPA, etc), WWII. From New York. Democratic Party.
Harry S. Truman
33rd President, took over after FDR died, decided to drop atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, president during Korean War. From Missouri. Democratic Party.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
34th President, "I like Ike!" commanded Allied forces in WII, created Interstate Highway System, Brown v. Board of Education, Department of Health. From Texas. Republican Party.
John F. Kennedy
35th President, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Space Race, the early Civil Rights Movement and early events of the Vietnam War; assassinated in Dallas, TX in 1963. From Massachusetts. Democratic Party.
Lyndon B. Johnson
36th President, took over after Kennedy assassination, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Vietnam War, war on poverty, the Great Society, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Medicare and Medicaid, contributions to the Space Race. From Texas. Democratic Party.
Richard Nixon
37th President, Vietnamization (began pulling US out of Vietnam), Watergate Scandal, pardoned for crimes, avoided impeachment by resigning. From California. Republican Party.
Gerald Ford
38th President. Only president to never be elected president or vice president, elected by Congress after Nixon resigned, finished pulling US out of Vietnam/ended the war. From Michigan. Republican Party.
Jimmy Carter
39th President, Department of Energy and Education. Camp David Accords, embargo on USSR, boycotted 1980 Moscow Olympics, the American embassy in Iran was taken over, fuel shortages and USSR invaded Afghanistan. From Georgia. Democratic Party.
Thomas Jefferson
3rd President, Louisiana Purchase, Declaration of Independence, Lewis and Clarke Expedition. From Virginia. Democratic-Republican Party.
Liberal Party and Conservative Party
acts as ideological checks on Democrats and Republicans respectively, generally cross-endorsing their candidates when they are found acceptable, but occasionally running alternative candidates when they deem the mainstream parties' nominees too moderate or compromising. James Buckley served a Senate term from 1971 to 1977 as a _____ from New York after defeating both a Republican and Democrat in the 1970 election.
Assyria
was a region located along the Upper Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq. Its major cities included Aššur and Nineveh. _____ was ruled at various times by the Akkadian, Neo-Sumerian and Babylonian empires. In 911 BC, the Neo-_____ Empire was founded by Ashur-Dan II; it lasted until 612 BC. Some of the empire's greatest rulers were Tiglath-Pileser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib, and Ashurbanipal. At its height, the Neo-_____ Empire ruled over all of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant (the eastern shore of the Mediterranean).
Sumer
was one of the first civilizations to arise in Mesopotamia. _____ was a collection of city-states including Eridu, Uruk, and Ur. This civilization created cuneiform, the first known writing system, which was made by putting wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets.
The Akkadian Empire
was the first empire in the world, and consisted of Sumerians and _____-speaking Semites. The empire was founded by Sargon the Great, who conquered all of Mesopotamia in the 24th and 23rd centuries BC.
Franklin Pierce
14th President, Kansas-Nebraska Act. From New Hampshire. Democratic Party.
The Anti-Masonic Party
(established 1828) became America's first third party by riding the tide of _____ sentiment following the 1826 disappearance of Freemason whistleblower William Morgan. For the 1832 election, the _____ selected William Wirt in the first presidential nominating convention in United States history. Running against eventual winner Andrew Jackson, a Democrat seeking re-election, and Henry Clay, a National Republican, Wirt managed to receive 8% of the popular vote and 7 electoral votes from Vermont. Vermont and Pennsylvania both elected _____ as governors, and Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont and other states all sent _____ to the U.S. House of Representatives.
The American Party or Know-Nothing party
(established 1843), was formed from the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant nativism of early America. Secret societies like the Order of the Star Spangled Banner had been sprouting up since the 1840s, but the _____ was not a unified entity until the 1854 elections, when it won 52 of the 234 seats in the House, including the position of Speaker of the House. The 1856 presidential election was the first one for both the _____ behind Millard Fillmore and the Republican Party behind John C. Frémont. Fillmore received 22% of the popular vote but only eight electoral votes from Maryland; Frémont won eleven states with 33% of the popular vote. Strong Southern support, however, allowed Democrat James Buchanan an easy win.
The Free Soil Party
(established 1848) was created through a union of anti-slavery factions from the two major parties, the Barnburner Democrats and Conscience Whigs. Its platform, unlike that of James G. Birney's earlier Liberty Party (established 1840), did not aim to abolish slavery, but rather to cease its expansion. As a result, _____ backed the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the Democratic Party on using popular sovereignty to decide slavery's status. In its first year, 1848, the party ended up with two senators and 14 Representatives in Congress. _____ presidential candidate Martin van Buren managed to capture 10% of the popular vote, and his influence may have secured Whig candidate Zachary Taylor's close victory over Democrat Lewis Cass.
The People's Party or the Populist party
(established 1891) , had its roots in the same farmer-labor partnership that created the Greenback Party (established 1874). Opposed to the elites of the banking and railroad industries, the _____ movement promised agrarian and labor reform. Its first presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, captured 22 electoral votes from six western states with 8.5% of the vote in 1892, as Democrat Grover Cleveland won his rematch against Republican Benjamin Harrison. Also in the West, multiple _____ governors, senators, and representatives held power throughout the decade. The _____ nominated the same presidential candidate as the Democrats in 1896, William Jennings Bryan, because of his stance on a silver bi-metal currency, though the _____ vice-presidential candidate — party leader Thomas E. Watson — differed from the Democratic candidate. Bryan's failure to defeat Republican William McKinley spelled the decline of the _____.
The Socialist Party
(established 1901) is usually associated with Eugene V. Debs, the face of the American _____ movement at its peak. He ran for president five times from 1900 to 1920, and managed to increase his vote counts with each successive campaign. He attracted over 900,000 votes twice: in 1912 with 6% of the vote, almost making it a four-way race, and in 1920, when Debs famously ran his campaign while imprisoned. Starting in 1928, his successor, Norman Thomas, ran for president six consecutive times, though the party was not quite able to replicate Debs's success.
Progressive Party
(established 1912),Teddy Roosevelt, better known as the Bull Moose Party, was created after he was unable to reclaim the Republican nomination from his former ally William Howard Taft. Roosevelt pitted his platform of New Nationalism, which promised reforms inspired by the _____ movement, against Democrat Woodrow Wilson's more conservative New Freedom. In the most successful American third-party campaign ever, Roosevelt's 27% was still only enough to win six states; the split of the Republican voter base between him and Taft ensured a dominant victory for Wilson even though Wilson received only 42% of the vote.
The Communist Party of the United States of America
(established 1919) is notable mainly for attempts to outlaw it, such as the 1940 Smith Act which criminalized organizations advocating the violent overthrow of the government, the _____ Control Act of 1954, and the inquiries of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senators Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. Though the 1951 Supreme Court case Dennis v. U.S. ruled that there is no First-Amendment right to advocate the overthrow of the government, general concerns about freedom of speech and overreach in investigations of _____ put an end to prosecutions of individuals solely for belonging to the _____ Party by the early 1960s. The CPUSA ran Gus Hall for President four times, but was never a significant force at the ballot box. In 1995, a cache of Soviet documents known as VENONA was published, revealing that the CPUSA was controlled by Moscow. Like the Socialist Party, the CPUSA has splintered into several similarly named successor organizations.
The States' Rights Democratic Party
(established 1948), better known as the Dixiecrat Party, was founded by Southern _____ to oppose President Truman's re-election bid, in response to his actions advancing civil rights. When Truman was nominated by the _____ in 1948, members from the South stormed out of the convention, creating a further divide within the party. With South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond as its candidate, the Dixiecrats — while receiving the same amount of votes as Henry Wallace — won 39 electoral votes from four southern states. Though it was a temporary split, the issue of civil rights did not disappear.
James Buchanan
15th President, South Carolina succeeded just before he left office, only president to never marry. From Pennsylvania. Democratic Party.
The American Independent Party
(established 1967) was a sort of spiritual successor to the Dixiecrats from two decades before. In an effort to combat the desegregation being pushed by a pro-civil rights federal government, George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, ran for president on the ticket of the AIP, led by Bill and Eileen Shearer. Running on a platform of segregation once again proved appealing to the South, as Wallace won 46 electoral votes from five states, and 13% of the vote with nearly ten million votes. Many Wallace supporters, including the organizers of the AIP, later joined the U.S. Taxpayers Party, which was renamed the Constitution Party, and still exists as a small party to the right of the Republicans.
The Green Party
(established 1991) never attracted as large of a share of the vote as the other third parties, but the ticket of Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke pulled 2.7% of the popular vote in the infamous 2000 presidential election, possibly influencing Republican George W. Bush's extremely narrow victory over Democrat Al Gore, the winner of the popular vote. The _____ Party continues to nominate candidates for presidential elections, and cites ecological sustainability, social justice, and fair democracy among its goals.
The Reform Party
(established 1995) was created to follow up on Ross Perot's 1992 independent campaign for President, in which he won 19% of the popular vote but no electoral votes, making him the most successful alternative candidate by vote count since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. _____ members agreed on the need for a balanced budget and changes to the electoral process, and were generally opposed to free trade agreements and immigration. The lack of a unified platform on other issues led to constant infighting over the party's goals and an inability to capitalize on Perot's initial success. Perot ran under the _____ banner again in the 1996 election, taking 8% of the vote. The _____ Party is perhaps best known for candidate Jesse Ventura's surprise victory in the 1998 election for governor of Minnesota. In the 2000 election cycle, a conservative faction led by Pat Buchanan took over the party, leading to the departure of many Perot supporters and effectively ending the party. Ventura left the party midway through his governorship. Buchanan received several disputed votes under the _____ Party line on the infamous 2000 Florida "butterfly ballot."
B. F. Skinner (American, 1904-1990)
- - ----- was one of the leading proponents of behaviorism in works like Walden II and Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He argued that all human actions could be understood in terms of physical stimuli and learned responses and that there was no need to study — or even believe in — internal mental states or motivations; in fact, doing so could be harmful. Guided by his ideas, he trained animals to perform complicated tasks, including teaching pigeons to play table tennis.
Baker v. Carr (William J. Brennan Jr., Earl Warren, 6-2, 1962)
----- - -----, a Tennessee citizen, sued the Tennessee secretary of state, ----- -----, claiming that the state's electoral districts had been drawn to grossly favor one political party. The defendant argued that reapportionment issues were political, not judicial, matters, but the court disagreed and declared the issue justiciable before remanding the case to a lower court. Two years later, in Reynolds v. Sims, the court-mandated the principle of "one man, one vote."
Plessy v. Ferguson (Henry B. Brown, Melville Fuller, 7-1, 1896)
----- ----- (who was legally classified as an "octoroon," meaning one-eighth black) bought a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railway. He sat in the whites-only car in violation of an 1890 Louisiana law mandating separate accommodations. He was convicted, but appealed to the Supreme Court against John Ferguson, a Louisiana judge. The court upheld the law provided that "separate but equal" facilities were provided. John Marshall Harlan issued a famous dissent claiming "Our constitution is color-blind." ----- was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
Gideon v. Wainwright (Hugo Black, Earl Warren, 9-0, 1963)
----- ----- ----- was accused of breaking into a pool hall in Florida. Because his crime was not capital, the court declined to provide him with an attorney. He was convicted, sued ----- ----- — the director of the corrections office — and took his case to the Supreme Court. The court overruled Betts v. Brady and held that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments required appointed counsel in all trials. Gideon was retried and found innocent. The case is the subject of the book Gideon's Trumpet.
Gibbons v. Ogden (John Marshall, 6-0, 1824)
----- ----- and ----- ----- were partners in a steamboat business that ferried people between New York and New Jersey. ----- had purchased a license granting him a monopoly under New York law. After the partners suffered a disagreement and split up, ----- applied for and received a federal permit to run a similar business. ----- sued ----- for violating ----- monopoly. In a unanimous decision, Marshall held that Congress' interstate regulatory power under the Commerce Clause had "no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution." -----' federal permit trumped ----- state-granted monopoly.
Erik Erikson (German-born American, 1902-1994)
----- ----- is best known for his theories on how social institutions reflect the universal features of psychosocial development; in particular, how different societies create different traditions and ideas to accommodate the same biological needs. He created a notable eight-stage development process and wrote several "psychohistories" explaining how people like Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi were able to think and act the way they did.
Jean Piaget (Swiss, 1896-1980)
----- ----- is generally considered the greatest figure of 20th-century developmental psychology; he was the first to perform rigorous studies of the way in which children learn and come to understand and respond to the world around them. He is most famous for his theory of four stages of development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. His most famous works are The Language and Thought of a Child and The Origins of Intelligence in Children.
Abraham Maslow (American, 1908-1970)
----- ----- is principally known for two works, Motivation and Personality and Toward a Psychology of Being, that introduced his theory of the hierarchy of needs (food, shelter, love, esteem, etc.) and its pinnacle, the need for self-actualization. Self-actualized people are those who understand their individual needs and abilities and who have families, friends, and colleagues that support them and allow them to accomplish things on which they place value. The lowest unmet need on the hierarchy tends to dominate conscious thought.
Abraham Lincoln
16th President, Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, worked to pass 13th Amendment. From Illinois. Republican Party.
Munn v. Illinois (Morrison Waite, 7-2, 1877)
----- ----- owned a set of Chicago grain elevators and charged oppressively high fees for their use. In 1871, the ----- legislature passed a law setting maximum rates for grain storage. On appeal to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the business claimed that the ----- statute violated Fourteenth-Amendment due process rights regarding private property. Chief Justice Waite's opinion upheld the ----- law, and proclaimed that "when private property is devoted to a public use, it is subject to public regulation." The decision was a landmark in the history of government regulation of businesses, especially railroads.
Carl Jung (Swiss, 1875-1961)
----- ----- was a close associate of Freud's who split with him over the degree to which neuroses had a sexual basis. He went on to create the analytic psychology movement and introduced the controversial notion of the collective unconscious — a socially shared area of the mind. Quiz bowlers should be familiar with anima, animus, introversion, extroversion, and archetypes, all terms that occur frequently in questions on Jung. (Of course, being familiar with them entails knowing what specifically they mean, and how they relate to Jung's work.)
Dred Scott v. Sandford (Roger Taney, 7-2, 1857)
----- ----- was a slave purchased by John Emerson in the 1820s, who lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory at various points of which prohibited slavery. In 1853, ----- sued his then-owner ----- ----- for his freedom. The Supreme Court ruled that no African-American — slave or free — was a citizen of the United States, and that therefore ----- lacked standing to initiate a lawsuit in the first place. In addition, the Court found the Missouri Compromise to be unconstitutional, holding that Congress lacked authority to prohibit slavery in any new territory that was not originally part of the United States.
Ivan Pavlov (Russian 1849-1936)
----- ----- was more of a physiologist than a psychologist, but questions about him are more often classified as psychology than biology by question writers. He is largely remembered for his idea of the conditioned reflex, for example, the salivation of a dog at the sound of the bell that presages dinner, even though the bell itself is inedible and has no intrinsic connection with food. He won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for Physiology or Medicine for unrelated work on digestive secretions.
John B. Watson (American, 1878-1958)
----- ----- was the first prominent exponent of behaviorism; he codified its tenets in Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, arguing that psychology could be completely grounded in objective measurements of events and physical human reactions. His most famous experiment involved conditioning an eleven-month-old boy to be apprehensive of all furry objects by striking a loud bell whenever a furry object was placed in his lap.
Sigmund Freud (Austrian, 1856-1939)
----- -----founded the extremely influential discipline psychoanalysis, which used the free-association technique to identify fears and repressed memories. He argued that many problems were caused by mental states rather than by biochemical dysfunction — a purely materialist viewpoint then in vogue. He separated the psyche into the id (illogical passion), ego (rational thought), and superego (moral and social conscience). His best-known works are The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
Alfred Adler (Austrian, 1870-1937)
----- -----was another close associate of Freud who split with him over Freud's insistence that sexual issues were at the root of neuroses and most psychological problems. ----- argued in The Neurotic Constitution that neuroses resulted from people's inability to achieve self-realization; in failing to achieve this sense of completeness, they developed "inferiority complexes" that inhibited their relations with successful people and dominated their relations with fellow unsuccessful people, a theory given the general name "individual psychology."
Loving v. Virginia (Earl Warren, 9-0, 1967)
----- Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was an anti-miscegenation law that criminalized marriages between whites and non-whites. In 1958, V ----- residents ----- ----- (a white man) and Mildred Jeter (a woman of both African-American and Native American heritage) were married in Washington, D.C., which did not have such a statute. After returning to their Virginia home, they were arrested and convicted under the Racial Integrity Act. Striking down that Act as violating both the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, Chief Justice Warren wrote that "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."
Thorstein Veblen (American, 1857-1929)
----- is primarily remembered for his The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which introduced phrases like "conspicuous consumption." He is remembered for likening the ostentation of the rich to the Darwinian proofs of virility found in the animal kingdom.
Muller v. Oregon (David Brewer, Melville Fuller, 9-0, 1908)
----- laundry owner ----- ----- was fined for violating an ----- law that limited the working hours of female employees; he appealed, claiming the law was an unconstitutional restriction of freedom of contract. Arguing on behalf of -----, future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis invoked scientific evidence to support the notion that excessive working hours were deleterious to a woman's health. ----- statute was upheld on the grounds that the state had a compelling interest in protecting the health of its female workers. One side effect of the decision was the judicial justification of sex discrimination in legislation.
Francois Quesnay (French, 1694-1774)
----- was the undisputed leader of the Physiocrats, the first systematic school of economic thought. Among its tenets were the economic and moral righteousness of laissez-faire policies and the notion that land is the ultimate source of all wealth.
David Ricardo (English, 1772-1823)
------ is best known for their Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, which introduced more-or-less modern notions of comparative advantage and its theoretical justification for unfettered international trade. He also put forth the so-called iron law of wages.
John Tyler
10th President, annexation of Texas. From Virginia. Whig Party.
James K. Polk
11th President, Mexican-American War, Manifest Destiny, Darkhorse president. From Tennessee. Democratic Party.
Zachary Taylor
12th President, general in Mexican-American War. From Virginia. Whig Party.
Millard Fillmore
13th President, Compromise of 1850, took office after Taylor died so only President for 3 years. From New York. Know Nothing Party.
Ronald Reagan
40th President. President for most of 1980s, originally an actor, participated in Red Scare/McCarthyism, Iran hostages released during presidency, Reagannomics, cut welfare/public work programs, told Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, responsible for Iran-contra Affair, AIDS/HIV epidemic during presidency. From California. Republican Party.
George H. W. Bush
41st U.S. President. Gulf War, Panama, former founder of Oil Company, NAFTA. From Texas. Republican Party.
Bill Clinton
42nd President. Don't Ask Don't Tell, Operation Desert Fox, Lewinsky scandal, impeached and acquitted, husband of Hillary Clinton. From Arizona. Democratic Party.
George W. Bush
43rd President. 9/11, Great Recession began under him, Hurricane Katrina, son of George H. W. Bush. From Texas. Republican Party.
Barack Obama
44th President. First African American president, Obamacare, Gulf of Mexico oil spill, stimulus to help Great Recession, removed troops from Iraq, repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell, Gay Marriage legalized during his presidency, Sandy Hook Shooting. From Hawaii. Democratic Party.
Donald Trump
45th President. Travel ban, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter protests, #MeToo Movement, Parkland School Shooting, US leaves World Health Organization, two impeachments but not removed from office, ended NAFTA and began USMCA, January 6th Insurrection. From New York. Republican Party.
Joe Biden
46th President. First female Vice President (Kamala Harris), US rejoins WHO, withdraws from Afghanistan, Uvalde School Shooting, Queen Elizabeth II died, invasion and war in Ukraine, Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, Respect for Marriage Act. From Delaware. Democratic Party.
James Madison
4th President, War of 1812, Father of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers. From Virginia. Democratic-Republican Party.
James Monroe
5th President, Monroe Doctrine, Missouri Compromise, gained Florida from Spain. From Virginia. Democratic-Republican Party.
John Quincy Adams
6th President, helped to create Monroe Doctrine, son of John Adams (2nd President), great diplomat. From Massachusetts. Whig Party.
Andrew Jackson
7th President, fought in War of 1812 at Battle of New Orleans, Trail of Tears, ended National Bank, started Spoils System. From Tennessee. Democratic Party.
Martin Van Buren
8th President, faced economic crisis. From New York. Democratic Party.
William Henry Harrison
9th President, "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," got sick and died 31 days after taking office. From Virginia. Whig Party.
McCulloch v. Maryland (John Marshall, 9-0, 1819)
After the Second Bank of the United States began calling in loans owed by the states, ----- passed a law taxing out-of-state banks. The federal bank refused to pay, so the state sued its Baltimore cashier, ----- -----. The court ruled that the federal government had the right to establish the bank even though it was not expressly enumerated in the Constitution and also noted that since "the power to tax was the power to destroy," ----- could not tax the bank without destroying federal sovereignty.
Karl Marx (German, 1818-1883)
Also a historian and social philosopher, ----- principal contribution to economic thought were extending the labor theory of value to its logical conclusion, his theory of surplus value. This theory, along with his defense of economic materialism, appeared in Das Kapital (1867, 1885, 1894).
John Stuart Mill (English, 1806-1873)
Also a social philosopher, ----- is mainly known in economic circles today for his work extending the ideas of Ricardo in Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844) (for example, the relationship between profits and wages), and also for exhaustively examining the necessity of private property in his Principles of Political Economy (1848).
Milton Friedman (American, 1912-2006)
Conservative thinker famous for his advocacy of monetarism (a revision of the quantity theory of money) in works like A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (1963). He is strongly associated with the ideals of laissez-faire government policy.
Chisholm v. Georgia (No majority opinion, Chief Justice John Jay, 4-1, 1793)
Following the death of Robert Farquhar, his estate's executor, ----- ----- — who, like Farquhar, was a South Carolina resident — sued the state of ----- to collect money ----- owed Farquhar for goods it purchased during the American Revolution. ----- claimed that sovereign immunity protected it from ----- suit. However, the Supreme Court held that Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution gave citizens the right to sue a state, finding against -----. The Court's ruling proved so controversial that it resulted in the 1794 passage of the Eleventh Amendment, which specifically prohibited U.S. or foreign citizens from filing a lawsuit against a state (with certain exceptions).
John Maynard Keynes (English, 1883-1946)
He is most famous for The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), which judged most the classical economic analysis to be a special case (hence "General Theory") and argued that the best way to deal with prolonged recessions was deficit spending.
John Kenneth Galbraith (Canadian, 1908-2006)
His liberal popular writings like The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State (with their emphasis on public service and the limitations of the marketplace) ensure his coming up again and again.
Fletcher v. Peck (John Marshall, 6-0, 1810)
In 1795 the Georgia legislature corruptly sold land along the Yazoo River (now in Mississippi) to private citizens in exchange for bribes. The legislators were mostly defeated in the next elections and the incoming politicians voided the sales. In the meantime, ----- ----- sold some of the land in question to ----- -----, who then sued him, claiming that he did not have clear title. The Supreme Court held that the state legislature did not have the power to repeal the sale. This was one of the earliest cases in which the Supreme Court struck down a state law.
Griswold v. Connecticut (William O. Douglas, Earl Warren, 7-2, 1965)
In 1879, ----- outlawed the use of contraception. In 1961, ----- ----- and Lee Buxton, who were directors of the Planned Parenthood League of -----, was charged with violating that ban after they opened a birth control clinic. Justice Douglas' majority opinion held that "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras," and that "emanations" of those guarantees create a Constitutional right to privacy that protects intensely personal decisions, such as the right of married couples to choose whether to use birth control. ----- law was struck down.
Miranda v. Arizona (Earl Warren, 5-4, 1966)
In 1963, Phoenix police arrested ----- ----- on suspicion of kidnapping and rape; he subsequently confessed to those crimes. During his initial interrogation by police, ----- was never informed of his Fifth or Sixth Amendment rights. Writing for a thin majority, Chief Justice Warren stated that "[p]rior to any questioning, [a] person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed," laying the groundwork for the iconic " ----- warnings."
Lawrence v. Texas (Anthony Kennedy, William Rehnquist, 6-3, 2003)
In 1998, a false police report led Houston police to the apartment of J ----- -----; upon entering, deputies claimed they found -----having sex with another man, Tyron Gardner. Both men were charged with homosexual conduct, still a misdemeanor in -----. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion held that the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause protected a person's "liberty" to engage in consensual homosexual activity, and declared the ----- law unconstitutional. The decision in ----- overturned Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) — in which the court upheld a similar Georgia law — and has been cited as a key predecessor of both U.S. v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges.
Alfred Marshall (English, 1842-1924)
Marshall's magnum opus, 1890's Principles of Economics, introduced the notions of consumer surplus, quasi-rent, demand curves, and elasticity, all fundamental concepts in introductory macro- and microeconomics.
Roe v. Wade (Harry Blackmun, Warren Burger, 7-2, 1973)
Norma McCorvey (under the alias ----- -----), a rape victim, sued Dallas County attorney ----- ----- for the right to an abortion. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the plaintiff depended on the growing recognition of a "right to privacy," which began with the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut. The court struck down state anti-abortion laws as "unconstitutionally vague," held that the word "person" in the Constitution "does not include the unborn," and legalized abortion in the first trimester. McCorvey later joined the pro-life movement and claimed that she was not actually raped and that she was pressured into filing the case by her ambitious attorney Sarah Weddington.
Marbury v. Madison (John Marshall, 4-0, 1803)
On his final day in office in 1801, John Adams signed commissions for 42 federal judges (the so-called "midnight judges"). His successor, Thomas Jefferson, opted to not deliver most of the commissions. One appointee, ----- -----, sued the new secretary of state, ----- -----, to force the delivery of his commission. The Judiciary Act of 1789 had granted the court original jurisdiction in such cases, but the Constitution did not. The court ruled that the Judiciary Act conflicted with the Constitution and was therefore void. Therefore ----- request was denied for lack of jurisdiction. This case established the principle of judicial review, the power of the court to nullify unconstitutional laws.
Schenck v. United States (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Chief Justice Edward White, 9-0, 1919)
The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited — among other things — any attempt to inhibit recruitment by the U.S. Armed Forces. ----- ----- was a Socialist who opposed conscription and distributed literature urging readers to resist the draft. Follwing his arrest and conviction, he appealed, claiming that his advocacy was protected speech covered by the First Amendment. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Holmes claimed the First Amendment does not protect speech that creates a "clear and present danger," and that "the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting 'fire' in a theatre."
Hammer v. Dagenhart (William R. Day, Edward Douglass White, 5-4, 1918)
The Keating-Owen Act prohibited the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor, leading ----- ----- to sue U.S. attorney - - ----- in Charlotte since his two sons would be put out of work. The court ruled that the federal government did not have the right to regulate child labor; Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a notable dissent focusing on the lack of proper state regulation. The case was overturned by the 1941 case U.S. v. Darby Lumber Company case upholding the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (Earl Warren, 9-0, 1954)
The suit was filed on behalf of ----- -----, a third grader, who had to walk a mile to a blacks-only school when a whites-only school was much closer. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued the case for the plaintiff. The court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and ruled that "separate but equal" facilities were not constitutional. A second case in 1955 required that desegregation proceed "with all deliberate speed" but Southern schools were notoriously slow in complying; it was not until 1970 that a majority had complied with the ruling.
Ex Parte Merryman (Roger Taney, 1861)
This was not actually a Supreme Court case, but a federal court case heard by Chief Justice Roger Taney while "circuit-riding" when the court was not in session. Lieutenant ----- ----- of the Maryland cavalry took an active role in evicting Union soldiers from Maryland following the attack on Fort Sumter. Abraham Lincoln declared a secret suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and had a number of opposition leaders, including -----, arrested. Taney found the president had acted unconstitutionally (only Congress can suspend the writ), but Lincoln simply ignored his ruling.
Stanley Milgram (American, 1933-1984)
Though he did the work that created the idea of "six degrees of separation" and the "lost-letter" technique, he is mainly remembered for his experiments on obedience to authority that he performed at Yale in 1961-1962. ----- found that two thirds of his subjects were willing to administer terrible electric shocks to innocent, protesting human beings simply because a researcher told them the experimental protocol demanded it.
Adam Smith (Scottish, 1723-1790)
Though he wrote on nearly every subject of moral and social philosophy, he is basically remembered as the author of An Inquiry into the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) and as the creator of the metaphor of the "invisible hand." This work more-or-less single-handedly founded the Classical school of economics.