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Congress asserts the federal government’s right to seize all property of individuals participating in or aiding the insurrection against the U.S. government.

In this letter, Lincoln offers his argument in favor of finishing the war rather than reaching a peace agreement with the Confederate government.

The Fugitive Slave Law, passed September 18, 1850, denied a jury trial to any individual accused of escaping from slavery.

This is the text of New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s speech given when the final Confederate monument in the city was taken down.

In Boston, widely regarded as the center of the abolitionist movement, black leaders called on citizens to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 in order “to make Massachusetts a battlefield in defense of liberty.”

One of the earliest assaults on segregated transit in the South occurred in Louisville, Ky., in 1870-71. There, the city’s black community organized a successful protest that relied on nonviolent direct action, a tactic that would give shape to the modern civil rights movement nearly a century later.

On April 14, 1947, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the lower court decision in Mendez v. Westminster, which required the school to integrate and set the stage for Brown v. Board of Education.

“In response to legislation that would have criminalized immigrants, thousands of high school students from across the country walked out of their classrooms and into history.”

In this excerpt from his book, Walking with the Wind, John Lewis describes his involvement in the sit-ins in Nashville, Tenn., in the spring of 1960.

Juni teaches her friend Michael all she knows about the first Memorial Day—the day when thousands of black people marched to remember their loved ones who had died in the Civil War.