Admin

The Trial of John Peter Zenger 1735

by

The Trial of John Peter Zenger 1735

The Trial of John Peter Zenger 1735
The Trial of John Peter Zenger 1735 –

John Peter Zenger (1697–1746), William Cosby (1690–1736), Andrew Hamilton (c. 1676–1741)

New York Governor William Cosby, a dishonest and greedy robber, had control of the city’s sole established newspaper, which, of course, backed him against his critics. A leader of the opposition commissioned John Peter Zenger, a printer, to create a new publication in which they could air their grievances.

The Weekly Journal was founded, with its first editorials aimed at exposing the governor’s political ineptitude. Cosby, desperate to put a stop to the fledgling publication, had all copies destroyed. For his attacks on the government, he had Zenger arrested and accused with seditious libels.

Read more

The Bubble Act – 1720 – A Royal Charter

by

The Bubble Act – 1720

The Bubble Act - 1720
The Bubble Act – 1720 – James Carter’s engraving of Edward Matthew Ward’s painting of London’s Exchange Alley captures the speculative excitement created by the South Sea Bubble.

Financial crises are not unique to any one economic or financial system, but they all arise from human greed.

The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), a struggle primarily between England, the Dutch Republic, and France for succession to the Spanish monarchy and access to lucrative trading possibilities in the Spanish colonies, had proven costly, and Parliament needed to raise cash.

It did so in a variety of ways, including selling its debt to merchants. The South Sea Company was founded in 1711 by a group of investors as a joint-stock company with transferable shares, and Parliament granted it a charter. The firm was offered a trading monopoly on Spanish territories in the Caribbean and South America in exchange for taking on war debt.

Read more

The Statute of Anne 1710

by

The Statute of Anne 1710

The Statute of Anne 1710
The Statute of Anne 1710 – Under Queen Anne, the Act of Union joined the kingdoms of England and Scotland, and the statute that bears her name established the first copyright law.

Queen Anne (1665–1714)

The right of ownership in a creative work, often known as the right to duplicate it or copyright, generally belongs to the author or creator, but he or she can assign, license, or sell it.

Authors and other creators, on the other hand, haven’t always had statutory protection for their work. Prior to Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type and the printing press, documents were generally copied by hand by monks serving as scribes for the Church.

“The age of ‘authorship,’ as former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin characterized it, had not yet come.” Following the introduction of commercial printing in England, Mary I granted the Stationers’ Company, a long-standing trade guild, a royal charter in 1557, granting them a publishing monopoly. Individual printers of the Stationers’ Company, not the authors of the books it produced, were recognized as the rights-holders in the works under the law.

Read more

Lapse of the Licensing Act 1695

by

Lapse of the Licensing Act 1695

Lapse of the Licensing Act 1695
Lapse of the Licensing Act 1695 – English scholar and poet John Milton (1608–1674), as painted by Solomon Alexander Hart (1806–1881), wrote the polemical tract Areopagitica (1644) to protest the Licensing Order of 1643, which ultimately expired in 1695.

Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398–1468), John Locke (1632–1704)

With the development of moveable type by Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century, Europe was faced with a new problem: regulating the written word. When William Caxton established a press at Westminster in 1476, the new technology arrived in England, but progress was slow. The Stationers’ Company was awarded a royal charter — and hence a monopoly on printing — by Mary I in 1557.

Elizabeth I, her sister, imposed the Star Chamber Decree on printing in 1586, which severely limited printing. Charles I issued a second Star Chamber Decree against printing in 1637, and further acts and ordinances restricted the practice over the years.

Read more

The Salem Witchcraft Trials 1692

by

The Salem Witchcraft Trials 1692

The Salem Witchcraft Trials 1692
The Salem Witchcraft Trials 1692 – This 1892 lithograph by Joseph E. Baker (1837–1914) dramatically depicts one of the witchcraft trials held in Salem, Massachusetts

William Phips (1651–1695), Cotton Mather (1663–1728)

The law isn’t always up to the task. The Salem witchcraft trials are one of the most severe examples of the rule of law being overwhelmed by public hysteria, culminating in a complete failure of impartial justice.

More than two hundred persons were accused of practicing witchcraft in colonial Salem, Massachusetts, and were subjected to court-ordered torture, long jail sentences, or execution.

Read more

The Black Code of Louis XIV 1685

by

The Black Code of Louis XIV 1685

The Black Code of Louis XIV
The Black Code of Louis XIV – Louis XIV ruled France for more than seventy years.

Louis X (1289–1316), Louis XIV (1638–1715), Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), and Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821) are some of the most famous French monarchs. Slavery was outlawed in France by Louis X in 1315, but his proclamation did not extend to French colonies created centuries later. Columbus and those who followed him enslaved indigenous Americans, initially as translators, but eventually as slaves in the West Indies alongside African slaves. Slavery’s immense economic worth became increasingly important to many European governments as the decades passed. In 1625, the French built their first permanent Caribbean settlement on St. Kitts, and African slaves began to arrive two years later. Slavery had spread across the French colonies by 1685, including Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Domingue (Haiti), and other islands. In the same year, Louis XIV signed the Code Noir, or Black Code, which is considered one of the most important documents in the heinous history of slavery.

Read more

The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679

by

The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679

The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679
The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 – King Charles II of England, shown in this c. 1683 portrait by John Reilly (1646–1691), presided over the passage of the Habeas Corpus Act.

The common-law writ of habeas corpus, sometimes known as the “Great Writ,” was first used in England in the Assize of Clarendon in the eleventh century to surrender a prisoner to court.

“Habeas corpus” literally translates to “you may have the body.” Originally, only the monarch could give a high prerogative writ, which was known as a high prerogative writ. Although first ineffectual, the writ eventually evolved into a tool that allowed a prisoner to contest the legality of his or her detention.

“Delays and evasions almost negated the effect of the writ,” historian Helen Nutting explains, because “courts had no means of forcing obedience to the first writ” and penalties “only accompanied the third… so that a jailer was perfectly within the limits of accepted procedure in not bringing the prisoner to court until he received the third writ.” The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 was enacted in the hopes of resolving that tangled issue.

Read more

  1. Pages:
  3. 1
  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
  7. 5
  8. 6
  9. 7
  10. 8
  11. 9
  12. 10
  13. 11
  14. 12
  15. 13
  16. 14
  17. 15
  18. 16
  19. 17
  20. 18
  21. 19
  22. 20
  23. 21
  24. 22
  25. 23