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Solomon Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years before he was freed. This excerpt from his memoir of those years, Twelve Years A Slave, details a New Orleans slave auction.

This order was issued by the War Department in 1863, ending the long-standing federal law that banned African-American men from armed military service.

'Henry Brown left Richmond, Va. a slave and arrived in Philadelphia—in a freight box—a free man. Abolitionists who cheered Brown's 27-hour journey to freedom chose not to publicize it, fearing that others following in his path would be in danger.

This is the transcript of “On Indian Removal,” a message presented by President Andrew Jackson to Congress on December 6, 1830. In this address, Jackson makes the case for the policy set forth in the Indian Removal Act.

In this court case, the United States Supreme Court ruled Congress' act to ban slavery in federal territories unconstitutional and determined that no person of African descent was a citizen of the United States.

The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by a Federalist Congress and signed into law by President John Adams in 1798 at a time when Adams feared the possibility of war with France.

The German Reichstag passed the following version of Paragraph 175, which imposed harsher legal restrictions and penalties on sexual activity between men, in 1935. With this law came a dramatic increase in the number of individuals facing prosecution for homosexual activity.

Gov. Orval E. Faubus of Arkansas delivered this speech on Sept. 18, 1958. In this speech, Faubus justifies his decision to shut down Little Rock’s public high schools for the year rather than complying with the Supreme Court’s order to continue with integration.

Enacted in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, formally titled “An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese,” was one of the first laws limiting immigration into the United States.

Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a critical piece of that legally protected citizens from discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender or religion. The following is one title, or part, of the law.