Final Project Script

Good morning/afternoon everyone. Over the past few weeks, I've had the chance to live, learn, and grow right here at High Point University through the Summer Advantage Camp. When I first signed up, I honestly didn't know what to expect. But looking back now, I can say this experience gave me so much more than I imagined — and today, I want to walk you through what made it special, and what I learned from the class along the way.

Let's start with the people. Walking into camp, I didn't know a single person. By the end of the first day, that had already changed. Between meals, dorm hangouts, and just walking to class together, I met people from completely different backgrounds and hometowns — and somehow we all clicked. Some of the friendships I made here genuinely feel like they're going to last well beyond this summer, and that's not something I expected to say after just a few weeks.

That same sense of connection carried over into the classroom. This camp gave me my first real taste of what college classes are actually like — sitting in a lecture hall, managing my own schedule, and being responsible for my own learning in a way high school never really asked of me. It was a low-pressure way to test the waters before I'm here full-time, and honestly, it made me feel a lot more confident about the transition ahead.

And speaking of being here full-time — this camp also gave me the chance to actually discover the campus I'll be calling home for the next four-plus years. I explored buildings I'll be taking classes in, found my favorite quiet study spots, and got comfortable navigating a campus that felt huge and unfamiliar on day one. By the end of camp, it didn't feel unfamiliar anymore. It felt like mine.

Now, I can't talk about campus without mentioning the food — specifically, the grilled cheese at The Point. I know that might sound like a small thing to bring up in a final presentation, but hear me out: little moments like grabbing a good meal with the friends I just made are part of what made this place feel less like a summer program and more like a community.

Which brings me to the bigger picture. Between the people, the classes, the campus, and yes, even the grilled cheese — I've genuinely felt at home here. That feeling matters a lot when you're about to spend the next four years somewhere. This camp didn't just prepare me academically; it made High Point feel like a place I already belong.

So that covers the overall camp experience, but I also want to take a moment to reflect specifically on the class itself, because it played a huge role in making this summer what it was.

If I'm being honest, movie days were my favorite part of the class. Once a week, we'd take a break from the usual routine and dive into a film together. It gave us a chance to slow down, watch something meaningful, and then actually talk about it as a class afterward. Out of everything we did, those days were the ones I looked forward to the most.

Beyond movie days, the class also had a real impact on my skills — specifically through the blog posts we wrote. Writing regularly forced me to organize my thoughts, develop my own voice, and get comfortable putting my ideas into words on a page. I can genuinely say my writing improved because of that consistent practice.

The class also pushed me outside my comfort zone in a good way, through the Each One Teach One presentations and our Mock Trials. Both of those gave me real opportunities to practice public speaking — researching a topic, standing up in front of my classmates, and communicating clearly and confidently. Those are skills I know I'll keep using long after this camp is over.

And I have to give a shoutout to my professor, Dr. Smith, for something that might seem small but that I really appreciated — always keeping the classroom stocked with chips and chocolate so none of us went hungry during class. It's a small gesture, but it made the classroom feel a little more comfortable, and it didn't go unnoticed.

So when I look back at my time in the Summer Advantage Camp, what stands out most isn't just one single thing — it's everything together. The friends I made, the taste of real college life, discovering the campus I'll call home, and a class that challenged me to write better, speak more confidently, and show up every day. This camp didn't just prepare me for college — it made me excited for it.

In the Heat of the Night

 

Title card

In the Heat of the Night was a great movie filled with action packed scenes and a good mystery that needed to be solved. My favorite character was easily the out-of-town detective, Virgil Tibbs. He is not my favorite just because he solved the mystery but because while he was juggling all of the things that had to do with the murder, he had to put up and deal with heavy racism in the rural town he just happened to find himself solving a mystery in. 

Virgil getting threatened by racists

However, I do respect the police chief who seemed to be on Virgil's side since he stopped some folks from jumping Virgil as well as standing up for him in verbal matters. What I do not like about him is how quickly he jumps to conclusions in such a serious case. He accused one of his own deputies because he changed his route while taking him and Virgil on a relay of the night of the murder. Turned out he did this because he wanted to keep his sixteen-year-old girlfriend a secret which eventually came out to the public when her older brother found out and stormed into the police station. This was a blessing in disguise though because it opened the suspect seat back up for the actual murderer.

Chief Bill Gillespie

Virgil Tibbs is also considered the finest homicide detective belonging to the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania police department but still receives mistreatment after the fact he has told them that. I noticed that, in the film, they included both blatant racism and subtle remarks like a bad look or a whisper to show the prejudice. Secondly, I realized that racism is everywhere in this movie not just in specific scenes where it was blatant. It was in the diner when the waiter told the police chief he would not serve detective Tibbs. Another good example of this is when the big brother found out about the situation that the cop and his sixteen-year-old sister were in, he would not speak of it unless Tibbs dismissed himself from the room.

Moving on, I want to talk about the importance of the slap scene which was my favorite scene in the whole movie. Basically, Virgil was being chased by a group of racists that were planning on possibly killing him but probably just beating him up beyond measure. After Virgil was fending them off for what seemed like forever, the chief stepped in and broke them up. The boys were not having it though so they told the chief that if he does not get rid of Virgil, they would. This is where the slap comes in to play, the chief slaps him quickly twice and runs them off shortly after that. This shows that the chief's character is turning out to be not to be racist or prejudice.

Finally, I think this movie was trying to relay a message to all it's viewers. This movie was made in 1967 which means we were still in the time period of the Civil Rights Movement. I think the film is trying to show us that black men and maybe women I do not know had what it took to be functional and useful members of society and that they should be treated as such.

EOTO 3

Victims of the bombing

On the morning of September 15, 1963, a bomb tore through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. According to the National Park Service, the explosion killed four young girls — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Carol Denise McNair — as they prepared for Sunday service. The attack remains one of the most infamous acts of racial terrorism in American history.

Some of the bomb's aftermath

The church itself was no ordinary target. The Encyclopedia of Alabama, published through Auburn University, explains that it had long served as a gathering point for civil rights organizing in Birmingham, hosting meetings for leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Fred Shuttlesworth. A blog hosted by the National Archives adds that it was also where students were trained and organized for the 1963 Children's Crusade before demonstrating downtown.

That visibility made it a target.

By the early 1960s, Birmingham had become one of the most rigidly segregated cities in the South. BlackPast recounts that four members of the United Klans of America planted nineteen sticks of dynamite behind the church's basement after activists reached an agreement with city officials to begin integrating local schools. The church had already weathered months of bomb threats before that agreement was ever signed.

At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous caller phoned the church and warned of an impending detonation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recounts that less than a minute later, dynamite exploded in the back stairwell, killing the girls on the other side of the wall and injuring more than twenty other congregants.

The Encyclopedia Britannica identifies the four men eventually tied to the bombing as Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton, and Herman Cash, all local Klansmen. Despite this, justice was slow in coming.

Legal scholar Donald Q. Cochran, writing in the Michigan Journal of Race & Law, explains that FBI agents built a strong case within two years of the bombing but that Director J. Edgar Hoover blocked them from sharing their findings with prosecutors. The case then sat effectively dormant for years.

It would take more than a decade before anyone faced consequences.

The Civil Rights Digital Library, a project of the University of Georgia, notes that Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the investigation and finally secured a murder conviction against Robert Chambliss in 1977, fourteen years after the bombing. The remaining suspects would wait even longer for their day in court.

According to EBSCO Research Starters, the case was not fully resolved until Thomas Blanton was convicted in 2001 and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002, both receiving life sentences; Herman Cash died in 1994 without ever standing trial. The near-forty-year gap between crime and conviction has itself become a subject of legal analysis.

Thomas Blanton in handcuffs forty years after the tragedy 

The human toll of the bombing extended beyond the four girls killed inside the church. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History preserves a contemporary account describing at least seven other bombings and a dozen instances of police brutality against Birmingham's Black residents in the six months surrounding the attack.

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church's own historical archive recalls that later that same evening, one Black youth was killed by police and another was murdered by a mob of white men elsewhere in the city.

The bombing's cultural and political impact proved lasting. The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University observes that the public's revulsion at the killing of children in a place of worship helped build support within the Kennedy administration for the civil rights legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Today, the church stands as a National Historic Landmark, and the Equal Justice Initiative notes that the site continues to serve as a place of remembrance for the four girls whose deaths helped reshape the nation's conscience.

For students of American history, the bombing offers a stark case study in how domestic terrorism, institutional negligence, and delayed justice intersected during the civil rights era. It also illustrates how a single act of violence can reshape national political will in ways its perpetrators never intended.

AI DISCLOSURE: I used Claude AI to generate everything above except for the images and image descriptions. I asked Claude to only use academic sources and to embed their links within the text. I also asked if Claude could split the text up into a professional blog post containing shorter paragraphs and a couple of one-liners to give emphasis. 

Gone With the Wind

Scarlett enjoying her company.

I never have had the chance to watch Gone With the Wind until our movie day last week. This film checked all the boxes for me, it kept me engaged through its action-packed first Act and all the different types of characters they displayed. One that keened my interest was the troublemaker from Charleston, Rhett Butler. I liked the kind of mysterious vibe he gave off and how clever he was when he spoke. His character gives the viewer a opportunity to wonder what his backstory could have been. 

Rhett Butler

To add on to this interested character, despite being a troublemaker wherever he goes, he seems to have somehow accumulated enough wealth to keep showing up at all the grand events shown throughout the film. He is most known for the interest he shows towards Scarlett O'Hara, the next character I am going to talk about. 

Rhett was also considered to be a big gambler which is where people have rumored his wealth comes from which I think is a pretty reasonable guess. Within his direct family, he was the black sheep. What caused that is his expulsion from his college, West point, for disorderly conduct. 

Next character I would like to talk about is the film's protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara. The movie makes it known early on that Scarlett is desired by most of the men in her area for her beauty and status. But she only has eyes for one man, Ashely Wilkes. This cause a major love triangle early on in the film between Scarlett, Ashley, and his cousin in which he was going to marry via southern tradition, Melanie Hamilton. 

Scarlett O'Hara

That drama fortunately ended whenever Ashley finally made it clear to Scarlett that he was without a doubt int he world, marrying Melanie. Although Scarlett now despised Melanie because of that. Then Ashley went off to fight in the Civil War, leaving Melanie to give birth to their child without him but with assistance from her ex-enemy Scarlett. Scarlett, to me. always seemed to never be with the same man for long but then again never got to watch the second half of the film. The night where Ashley told her he would marry Melanie is when Scarlett met Rhett. At first she hated him but I know through research they end up getting together later in the film.

She was born into a wealthy plantation family and took pride in that fact. She adored her southern way of life and i would say one of her goals was to preserve it for the duration of her life. That dream took a wrecking ball to it though after the Union soldiers came through and ransacked and burnt her old plantation home. That sparked her determination to revive her home later on.

 

Overall, Gone With the Wind is an amazing classic movie that was very impressive for the time period in which it was filmed. It is well renown for having spectacular scenes, for example, the burning building scene or the hundreds of actual people lined up near railroad tracks acting as wounded Civil War Confederate soldiers. 

EOTO Reflection

 This week's EOTOs were unique, as in I have never heard of these stories before people talked about them. Francesca went up first and talked about a post-slavery, charity movement, kind of thing called Forty Acres and a Mule. It was put into place in 1865 when General William Tecumseh met with twenty African American ministers in Georgia and talked about how they will use the 400,000 confiscated acres of confederate coastal land. 

Example of 40 Acres and a Mule

They ended up dividing the 400,000 acres into forty acres per family. These families were only to be made of recently freed slaves. The Army pitched in later and gave each family animals, hence the mule, to help them work the land. After a couple months around 40,000 families moved to the area, they even got to the point of setting up their own self-governed communities. 

However, all good things must come to an end eventually. After Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson took Presidency and almost immediately overturned the order in late 1865. This dispossessed the tens of thousands of African Americans who settled there and it forced the majority of them to go back to their previous owner's plantation to do sharecropping to pay off their debts they owed to their previous master.

I learned from Preston about the first African American Senator Hiram Rhodes Revel and the first African American Representative, Joseph Hayne Rainey. They both miraculously resigned from those prestigious titles to go back to their regular jobs as a teacher and banker. 

Representative Joseph H. Rainey

I also learned about the Freedman's Bureau from Rylo. It was established the same year as the Forty Acres and a Mule was. It basically served around four million freed slaves and helped each of them with good education, proper food, and other necessities people need to live comfortably. Unfortunately, it was chronically underfunded and shut down later on.

Reaction Post

Francesca's case study on State vs. Mann taught me some interesting things I have not known before. She opened her speech by asking the Court not to rule on the morality of this case but to apply the economic logic that one Justice invoked. I thought that was interesting because this case is based on the moral decision of someone else.

Her first argument looked at a really good angle of the situation that I had never thought of until she brought it up. She stated that a slave is owned by someone, that someone can do whatever he/she wants to do with the slave. If they were to kill the slave, they would just have to take that loss themselves since the slave was a investment. But, Mr. Mann did not own the slave he harmed therefore it was not his property and he did not take the loss. The owner, Elizabeth Jones did instead. 

Lydia's killer, Mr. Mann

In her next argument she brings up how this was already thought of amongst slave owners who lend their slaves to people who need them. This means the market had already built a safeguard around that possibility. To add on, she told the Court that it should not remove that safeguard when the contract failed.

I thought the fifth point she made was really something to take into account. This very case would be considered a precedent for future cases like this one in the future. This means that if the Court decides to dismiss the charge for the murder of a slave committed by a hirer, all the cases in the future will follow the same ruling. This gives the hirer equal amount of immunity than the actual owner of the slave which is crazy. 

Francesca concluded her speech by saying that if the economic reasoning is applied correctly then it will shape a sharp line between the abilities of the hirer versus the owner.

Mock Trial

 In 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting in a railway car reserved for white passengers, in violation of Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890. His attorneys argue that the law violates the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

This brief lays out why, as a matter of settled law in 1896, Judge Ferguson's ruling should be upheld.

States have long held broad "police power" — the constitutional authority to pass laws protecting public health, safety, order, and welfare. The Louisiana legislature determined that requiring separate railway cars for white and colored passengers promotes public order and reduces friction between the races on common carriers. Courts have consistently held that such regulatory judgments belong to state legislatures, not to federal courts, so long as the law is reasonable and applies equally to both races.

The Separate Car Act meets that standard. It punishes white passengers who sit in colored cars just as it punishes colored passengers who sit in white cars.

That reasonableness matters because the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection of the laws, not identical or commingled accommodations. So long as the accommodations provided to colored passengers are substantially equal in quality to those provided to white passengers, the constitutional requirement is satisfied. Separation, standing alone, does not brand either race as inferior in the eyes of the law. Any feeling of inferiority, if it exists, arises — as the doctrine holds — from how members of the excluded race choose to interpret the distinction, not from anything inherent in the statute itself.

Af. American waiting on his train

This is not a novel theory invented for Louisiana's benefit. The single most important precedent supporting this position is Roberts v. City of Boston, 59 Mass. 198 (1850), as collected in Harvard Law School's open casebook archive. In that case, five-year-old Sarah Roberts, represented by attorney Charles Sumner, challenged the Boston School Committee's policy of maintaining separate primary schools for Black and white children. Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled against Roberts, holding that the school committee had the lawful authority to maintain separate schools, and that doing so did not violate the state constitution's guarantee of equality before the law.

As the National Park Service's summary of the case explains, Shaw found that maintaining separate schools served the good of both racial groups and reflected the honest judgment of the committee — not an act of legal discrimination. Shaw further reasoned that racial prejudice, if it exists in society, is not created by law and cannot be cured by forcing integration through the courts. This reasoning has since been adopted well beyond Massachusetts.

According to legal-history scholarship collected in the vLex law journals database, courts of at least ten states relied on Roberts as precedent for upholding segregated education, and the U.S. Supreme Court in Hall v. DeCuir (1878) cited it directly for the rule that "equality does not mean identity." Notably, this precedent was decided before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, yet it addressed the identical legal question the Amendment is meant to answer — whether separation by race, on its own, denies equal protection. It did not. If separate but substantially equal schools satisfy constitutional equality, separate but substantially equal railway cars must satisfy it as well.

Homer Plessy photograph

 Courts examining transportation specifically have likewise     distinguished equality from identity of treatment. This distinction       —  that a state may lawfully classify and separate passengers by     race so long as accommodations remain comparable — has been   applied directly to common carriers in cases arising after Roberts,   extending its schoolroom logic to railcars, streetcars, and   steamboats.

 Taken together, this authority resolves the question before the   Court. The Separate Car Act does not deny Homer Plessy equal   protection of the law. It classifies passengers reasonably, in the   legitimate exercise of Louisiana's police power, and it requires —   under penalty of law — that the accommodations for both races be   kept substantially equal. Under the binding logic of Roberts v. City   of Boston and the decades of precedent following it, this Court   should affirm that "equal" has never meant "identical," and that   Judge Ferguson's ruling was correctly decided.

AI DISCLOSURE: I used Claude AI to write this blog post as well as provide links from academic sources within the text. I also used Claude to format it as a blog post and to add a precedent case. Finally, I used Claude to generate a four minute script on strictly legal arguments to speak of in front of the class on Monday.

America after the Civil War documentary

Watching this documentary, I kept coming back to one question: who actually counts as a citizen, and what rights come with that?

It sounds simple. It wasn't.

After the Civil War ended, the North and South couldn't even agree on what "Reconstruction" meant. And the status of four million formerly enslaved people was left hanging in the balance.

Book on this documentary

 Lincoln's assassination changed everything. Just two days after   Appomattox, he'd floated the idea of voting rights for Black veterans and   "very intelligent" Black men. Then Booth shot him, and Andrew   Johnson, a Southern Unionist who despised the planter class but wasn't   exactly a champion of Black rights either, took over.

 What struck me most was watching freed people's first priority after   emancipation. It wasn't politics. It was family. People placed newspaper   ads and walked for miles just trying to find relatives sold away from   them years earlier.

 Then there was the land question. The Freedmen's Bureau controlled   over 850,000 acres of Confederate land, and for a moment, "40 acres   and a mule" felt real. Johnson crushed that by ordering the land handed   back to pardoned Confederates.

 I found the Black Codes genuinely infuriating to learn about. Laws that only applied to African Americans, forcing them into labor contracts or risking arrest, even letting children be taken and apprenticed out. It's hard not to see that as slavery wearing a new outfit.

And then the violence. The Klan. The Memphis riots, where 46 Black residents were killed and every Black church and school in the area was burned to the ground.

What gives me hope, honestly, is what came next. Black male voter turnout jumped from under 1% to over 80% in 1867. Half a million Black men voted in 1868 despite open intimidation.

The documentary called those three years some of the most hopeful, momentous, and frightening in American history.

I believe that.

AI DISCLOSURE: I used Claude AI to generate this blog using my notes I wrote myself, alone. I added first person views and links within the blog. 

William Lloyd Garrison Roleplay Script

 Friends, neighbors, fellow citizens —

I did not come here tonight to soothe you. I came to trouble you.

There are men in this hall, I am certain, who believe I ask too much, too fast. They will tell you: be patient, be moderate, let slavery die a slow death of its own accord, a generation from now, a century from now. I say to you plainly — I will not counsel moderation on this question, not now, not ever. You do not tell a man whose house is burning to sound a moderate alarm. You do not tell a mother to gradually pull her child from the flames. And I will not gradually plead for the freedom of three million human beings held in bondage this very hour, in this very country, under this very flag we are told to revere.

William Lloyd Garrison

I was not always so certain. I confess to you, as I confessed in the first issue of my paper, The Liberator, that I once lent my voice to the doctrine of gradual emancipation — the comfortable notion that slaveholders might be coaxed, in their own time, toward justice. I was wrong. I ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren in chains for ever having uttered so timid and unjust a sentiment. Slavery is not an inconvenience to be phased out. It is a sin — a heinous crime in the sight of God — a sin against nature, against the very words this nation was founded upon, that all men are created equal and endowed with an unalienable right to liberty.

Some of you will point to the Constitution and tell me it is our sacred compact, beyond reproach. I tell you that any compact which sanctions the buying and selling of human souls is no covenant of liberty — it is, in its protection of slavery, a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. I will not swear allegiance to a document that counts a man as three-fifths a person. Let the Union be shaken to its foundations before I call that justice which is built upon another man's chains.

Now — I know what is said of men like me. That we are extreme. Fanatical. That we endanger the peace by refusing to whisper what we ought to shout. To this I say: on this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation... I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard.

Garrison giving a speech

I do not ask you to take up arms tonight. I ask something harder — I ask you to take up conscience. Slavery persists not merely because of the men who hold the whip, but because of the silence of good men and women who look away. Moral suasion and nonviolent resistance — the relentless, unyielding appeal to the conscience of this nation — is our weapon, and it is a mighty one, if only we refuse to lay it down.

I have been assaulted in the streets of this very city for saying what I say tonight. I have watched my press threatened, my name cursed from pulpits and in newspapers, by men who call themselves Christian and patriot both. It has not moved me an inch, and it will not.

So I ask you plainly, neighbors: will you stand for gradual justice, which is to say, no justice at all — or will you join those of us who demand, without compromise, without delay, the immediate and unconditional emancipation of every enslaved man, woman, and child in this republic?

The chains will not break themselves. But they will break. I mean to see it done — and I will not rest, and I will not be silent, until it is.

Thank you.

AI DISCLOSURE: For this assignment, I used Claude AI to generate the speech above, as well as the links. I made sure to tell Claude to make it at least 500 words and to get the links from high academic sources.

Eight Views of Free Expression Reflection

 8 Values of Free Expression

I chose number six, promote tolerance, as my speech theory because to me, it is the most important. Since the beginning of any kind of public communication was invented, there has always been instances of people ending up in the news because of something they said. This is important though because it teaches us what is acceptable to say and what is not. 

News article example

The government allows us to do this because of our first amendment right to free speech. If they did not, I feel like people would end up not learning because they would not have any examples to learn from. For example, racial slurs. Nobody knew they were a bad thing to say until it reached the point where almost everyone knew what they meant. Nonetheless, people still say those words all the time and end up getting in trouble for it. 

A good example of that exact scenario would be a makeup Youtuber known as Kathleen Lights. A video of her saying a racial slur was leaked online unexpectedly and people were outraged to the point where they wanted to boycott the nail-polish company she started. She issued an apology shortly after to her community and it all settled down but this is a great example of how we can learn from our right of free speech. 

That just about wraps up my thoughts on promote tolerance so I am going to talk about one that comes second on my priority list.

My second most important value of free expression is number four, individual self-fulfillment. I believe that everyone in all countries not just America should be given their God given right to become whoever they want to be in their own lives. For example, our university President, Dr. Nido Qubein, who has shown the world what one person is capable of, even when they lived in struggle all their life. 

Another reason this hit home is that my family is basically one long line of entrepreneurs. My grandpa created his own exporting/importing business as well as other ventures, my uncle owns a business remodeling company based in Charlotte and is currently expressing this value of free expression by going to France to start a business, and my mom runs a staffing franchise back in my home town. So if our government did not allow us to use our abilities to create new things, our country would be awful.

I mean look at communist or dictator led countries, they look desolate compared to the United States and other democratic countries. 

My top three concludes with number five, checking on governmental power. This is my third most important value because keeping up with everything the government is doing in our country is a key role us citizens must do. If nobody keeps track of what our leaders are doing then they can do whatever they like as long as it does not change a citizen's life noticeably. I know that some aspects are confidential but it is usually just research projects or building new defense weapons that will be released to the public once the study is finished and the weapon is made.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

The Bill That Broke a Compromise — And Set the Stage for War

Missouri Compromise

In January 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced a bill he believed would settle, once and for all, the question of slavery in the western territories. Instead, the Kansas-Nebraska Act did the opposite. It reopened a wound stitched shut for three decades, and within a few years, it helped push the country toward civil war.

The act organized two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska, out of land west of Missouri and Iowa. Its central idea was "popular sovereignty": rather than Congress deciding whether slavery would be legal there, the settlers themselves would vote on it. On paper, this sounded like democracy in action. In practice, it meant repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had banned slavery in that region for thirty-four years. President Franklin Pierce signed the bill into law on May 30, 1854.

Douglas had several reasons for pushing the bill. He wanted a transcontinental railroad routed through Chicago, and organizing the territory was a necessary first step. He also needed southern votes to get there, and southern senators would not support organizing any territory that closed the door on slavery. According to the U.S. Senate's own historical office, Douglas pleaded with colleagues not to "fetter the limbs of this young giant," framing westward expansion as too important to delay. But the political cost was steep. Ohio Senator Salmon Chase called the bill a betrayal of a long-standing national promise, and abolitionist leader Charles Sumner warned it would turn the territories into grounds for masters and slaves.

Republican Party's birthplace

The backlash reshaped American politics almost        immediately. The Whig Party, already strained by years of sectional disagreement, splintered apart. Its    northern wing regrouped into a new political party built specifically around opposing the spread of slavery: the Republican Party. Within a few years, that party would put Abraham Lincoln in the White House.

The most immediate and violent consequences played out in Kansas itself. Proslavery and antislavery settlers rushed in, each side hoping to win the vote popular sovereignty had promised. Elections were marked by fraud and intimidation, and the disagreement soon turned deadly. Historians call this period "Bleeding Kansas," and it produced years of guerrilla violence before Kansas was finally admitted to the Union as a free state in 1861.

Bleeding Kansas fight

Historian Nicole Etcheson, in her book Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era, offers a useful twist on the standard story. Rather than framing the conflict purely as slavery versus freedom, she argues that most settlers on both sides believed they were defending their political liberty, the same principle their revolutionary ancestors had fought for. That reframing matters because it shows how a single piece of legislation could convince ordinary people, most of whom owned no slaves at all, that they were fighting for their own rights. For more on how historians' views of the act have shifted over time, see Roy F. Nichols's 1954 historiography essay.

Looking back, the Kansas-Nebraska Act is a reminder of how a bill designed to keep the peace can do the exact opposite. Douglas thought he was offering a democratic solution to a divisive problem. Instead, he handed both sides a reason to fight, and the country spent the rest of the decade paying for it. For further reading, see the History.com overview and this scholarly review in the *American Historical Review*.

 AI DISCLOSURE: For this AI assisted assignment, I used Claude AI to do historical research on my topic. After prompting the tool to do research based only on academic and other high quality sources, I asked Claude to shape the material in the form of a script for an oral presentation of four minutes. I then asked Claude to shape the material in the form of a blog post of between 500 and 600 words, I edited the Ai output for readability. I also policed the linked sources for quality control. To the blog post, I added visual elements and links to sources. I also made sure the paragraphs were shorter and in a professional style. Finally, I asked Claude to make a list of the works it used to create

Supreme Court Video Reflection

In this blog, I will be talking about my individual reflection on a Supreme Court video I watched and what I learned. 

Exterior of the Supreme Court building 

To begin, I always thought of America as the most powerful country in the world. In this video it states that the Supreme Court is considered the most powerful court in the world so that thought for me has been set in stone. 

The Supreme Court is nothing like the state or appellate courts, unlike those two, the Supreme Court gets 

to pick and choose which cases they want to take on. Within the cases they do take, their only goal is to find if the situation is constitutional or not. The justices MUST strictly follow the guidelines of the Constitution justice's rule list which requires the highest amount of mental honor because no matter what they personally think, justices must go by what the Constitution says. 

Supreme Court justices (present day)

A fact that I found to be really neat was that throughout all two-hundred and fifty years of our country being established we have only had one-hundred total justices. This shows how rare it is for a new justice to be sworn into a seat. One of the justices in the video mentioned that when he first achieved his seat his fellow justices told him a variety of different amounts of time it takes to really get used to this role. It makes me think about how challenging the job can get at times, especially with the pressure of the public wanting a specific outcome that could not be the Constitutional way. 

Lastly, I want to mention how busy these justices are. They receive about seven-thousand cases to consider annually and only accept one-hundred of those so they are always busy with a case 24/7. 

Anti v. Pro Slavery in the Bible

 The Bible's take on anti-slavery

The Bible has over one-hundred references of slavery but the majority of them proclaim that slavery is wrong, both in the Old and New Testament slavery Bible verses. Looking into the Old Testament first, in Exodus 21:16 it says, “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.” This verse is identical to how slavery worked all throughout history so I think it is safe to say the Bible was not fond of the idea of it. 

slave in the process of being sold

Most of what was known as slavery was actually indentured servitude meaning that people willingly went into unpaid services to a “master” to pay off any debt or wrong actions they may have. The scriptures did have a say in this though, they state that it is required for slaves to be freed six years after they were enslaved. Finally, it says in Deuteronomy 23:15-16 that slaves who successfully run away should not be returned to their owners. 

slaves being forced to haul a statue

A good point of the New Testament is one of the Ten Commandments being resurfaced in Matthew 22:39, love your neighbor as yourself. This shows more evidence that the Bible does not recommend slavery to exist. I would say that all of this is enough evidence to say the Bible is anti-slavery. 

Affirmative argument for slavery from the bible

In favor of slavery from the Christian Bible, I hereby make an argument that it is acceptable as it is stated in scripture that: Ephesians 6:5 commands slaves to obey their earthly masters with respect, fear, and sincerity of heart, just as they would obey Christ Slavery bible quotation

rounding out the slaves

As well as from Levictius 25:44-46   “You may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you... they may be your property... you may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever." making it clear that the ownership of those beneath, is morally tolerable. As well as the prominent argument that those of dark skin are the descendants of Ham’s son Canaan. This curse is one of the key religious justification for the Atlantic slave trade. 

Transitioning, it is important to decipher that those who may own slaves could and may treat them with care, meaning the property of the masters are being treated with the appropriate amount of care and being given free housing and food all at the small cost of labor that is up to the discretion of the master.

slaves hard at work

By United States law, a master is permitted to do what he pleases with his property. Meaning he is consented to sex, lashings in the case his possession does not obey, and any form of disciplinary action.