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History human past . Historians analyse and interpret primary and secondary sources to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. They engage in source criticism to assess the authenticity, content, and reliability of these sources. It is controversial whether the resulting historical narratives can be truly objective and whether history is a social science rather than a discipline of the humanities . Influential schools of thought include positivism , the Annales schoolMarxism , and postmodernism . Some branches of history focus on specific time periods , such as ancient history , particular geographic regions, such as the history of Africa , or distinct themes, such as political , social , and economic history . History emerged as a field of inquiry in antiquity to replace myth-infused narratives, with influential early traditions originating in Greece , China , and later in the Islamic world . (Full article...
Today's featured picture
Dred Scott (
c. 1799 – 1858) was an
enslaved African American who, along with his wife,
Harriet Robinson Scott , unsuccessfully sued for the freedom of themselves and their two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, in the 1857 legal case
Dred Scott v. Sandford . The Scotts claimed that they should be granted freedom because Dred had lived for four years in Illinois and the
Wisconsin Territory , where slavery was illegal, and laws in those jurisdictions said that slave holders gave up their rights to slaves if they stayed for an extended period. The
Supreme Court of the United States ruled against Scott in a
landmark decision that held the
Constitution did not extend
American citizenship to people of black African descent, and therefore they could not enjoy the
rights and privileges that the Constitution conferred upon American citizens . The
Dred Scott decision is widely considered the worst in the Supreme Court's history, being widely denounced for its overt
racism ,
judicial activism , poor legal reasoning, and crucial role in
the events that led to the
American Civil War four years later. The ruling was later superseded by the passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution , which abolished slavery, in 1865, followed by the
Fourteenth Amendment , whose first section
guaranteed birthright citizenship for "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof", in 1868. This posthumous oil-on-canvas portrait of Scott was painted by Louis Schultze, after an 1857 photograph by John H. Fitzgibbon, and now hangs in the
Missouri History Museum in
St. Louis .
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Today's quote
«The Gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools».
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