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Landmark Redistricting Cases in the Supreme Court and their Influence on U.S. Electoral Equality
By Steven Yang
Landmark Redistricting Cases in the Supreme Court and their Influence on U.S. Electoral Equality
Editor’s Note: This paper was completed as a part of the History Research Fellowship, a one-semester course available to sixth form students.
Student-Submitted Note: This paper was completed as part of the VI Form History Fellowship class, and focuses on the history of the Supreme Court’s involvement in redistricting, the process by which areas are broken up into political districts for each representative to serve. It starts with a summary of the parts of the Constitution pertinent to understand the topic, then chronologically understands the history of redistricting in the context of Supreme Court cases.
The Constitution of the United States begins with “We the People,” a famous phrase expressing the democratic principles of equality and power derived from the people; yet, there lies a dissonance between these principles and contemporary American politics, particularly within elections. Electoral laws can greatly influence results; controversial practices like strict voter ID laws and eliminating the ability to vote early or use mail-in ballots can lower voter turnout and heavily sway elections. One of the most egregious examples of these democratic principles, however, is called gerrymandering. Because state legislatures are tasked by the Constitution to draw districts elected officials represent, politicians can “entrench” themselves in office by drawing maps favorable to them. The process of drawing these districts on a decennial basis is known as redistricting, and redistricting that is aimed to benefit a certain group of people is called gerrymandering. While the most common form of modern gerrymandering is partisan gerrymandering, where politicians draw maps to benefit their party, other types of gerrymandering like racial gerrymandering have occurred in the past.3 At its worst, gerrymandering can be the equivalent of rigging elections. An antithesis to the core democratic principles the United States was built upon, gerrymandering is a flagrant violation of democracy so widespread that it has become synonymous with American life.
Legal challenges to unfair redistricting began in the 1940s, and redistricting has been a routine issue for the court to address up to the modern day. Many cases escalated to the Supreme Court, whose rulings on redistricting can have momentous effects. Early cases through the 1960s largely focused on malapportionment, a form of unfair redistricting where some voter’s voices are diluted because they live in political districts that were much larger in population than others. The court was generally willing to impose more requirements of redistricted maps to ensure equality, like mandating political districts must be roughly the same population. The 1980s to 2000s saw the court rule on other types of unfair redistricting, notably racial and partisan gerrymandering. However, when encountering questions of partisan gerrymandering, partisan bias of the court became increasingly evident. Combined with increased political polarization, the makeup of the consistently conservative courts during at the turn of the 21st century quickly became overwhelmingly partisan, favoring the Republicans who appointed justices in their roles. This represented a drastic departure from precedent and from democratic values as a whole. The court’s decisions are monumental, and by essentially deregulating partisan gerrymandering in recent cases, gerrymandering has become even more widespread than before.
This paper explores the history of redistricting and gerrymandering chronologically, starting with clauses and amendments within the U.S. Constitution that are vital to understanding the abundant litigation that occurred later. Next, it examines the United States’ approach to solving the issue of apportionment; a closely related issue to redistricting that determines how many Congressional representatives each state receives. Finally, the history of apportionment is contrasted with redistricting, answering the question: why can’t a similar solution be found for redistricting?
(more…)How Unions Struggle: The 1913-1914 Copper Strike in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
By Avery King
How Unions Struggle: The 1913-1914 Copper Strike in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
Editor’s Note: This paper was completed as a part of the History Research Fellowship, a one-semester course available to sixth form students.
Student-Submitted Note: This is my History Research Fellowship paper. I took the fall semester to research the Michigan Copper Strike of 1913-1914.
The small piece of copper my grandmother kept in her kitchen fascinated me as a child. When she saw me staring at its glowing hues masked by green verdigris, she would smile, explaining that it was shaped like Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. My dad’s side of the family immigrated to the Upper Peninsula from Finland in the 1880s. I was enthralled by stories about my great-grandfather, who worked for General Motors, and his dad, my great-great-grandfather, who worked in the copper mines. It was only when I got older, however, that I began to realize how important her stories about the copper mines are, not only for my family but for organized labor everywhere.
My great-great-grandfather on the paternal side of my family was a member of the Western Federation of Miners, a prominent mining union that operated in both the Colorado Coal Mines and the Michigan Copper Mines. On the night of Christmas Eve, 1913, my great-great-grandmother, Ida K. Putansu, took her six children (including my great-grandfather Richard Putansu, who was seven years old at the time) to a Christmas Party at Italian Hall in Calumet, Michigan. Italian Hall was a public meeting place and, this night, its second floor was the site of a Union supported Christmas celebration. This meant that one had to show proof of membership in the union or have another union member vouch for them to enter the hall. The party was a nice diversion for the union members, who had been involved in a bitter strike, and their families. The crowded party was full of laughter and celebration until an unknown person shouted, “Fire!” The ensuing chaos left seventy-three people dead.
My family survived because of my great-great grandmother’s practicality. Instead of rushing into the mass of crushed bodies on the staircase, Ida kept her children upstairs in a corner. My Grandma claims that Ida said that she would “rather burn alive than get trampled to death.” The Italian Hall Massacre gained national attention because the large death toll made Americans aware of the strike. In the early twentieth century, unions allowed miners who worked in dangerous conditions the opportunity to gain power through collective bargaining. Although the wealthy mining companies tended to abuse their power, unions acted as a resource for laborers and fought hard to prevent the hierarchical abuse that existed in this capitalistic labor system. Learning about this incident made me wonder more about the copper strike and how unions operated. Why was there so much conflict between unions and the companies? Why did workers join unions? Did doing so have any impact on their working conditions?
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Nazi Propaganda and its Effect on the United States
By Cadence Summers, VI Form
Nazi Propaganda and its Effect on the United States
An unknown man heils a banner of President George Washington and two banners embroidered with the Swastika on either side. On February 20, 1939, seven months before the start of World War II and George Washington’s birthday, 20,000 Americans gathered in Madison Square Garden, the world’s most famous arena, in support of the Nazi party. For decades, the narrative that the United States was a strictly anti-Nazi nation in the years leading up to and during World War II has eclipsed that of the much more sinister truth. In the years immediately prior to the United States entrance into World War II on December 7, 1941, there were at least 100,000 Nazi sympathizers in the United States. White supremacist groups such as the KKK, who’s numbers were near four million in the 1920s, guaranteed millions more American antisemites and possible Nazi sympathizers. Nazi Germany ruled much of American society, in addition to the entire population of Germany, with an iron fist of deception and its most dangerous weapon: Propaganda.
Hitler regarded propaganda as a “truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.” The man he appointed to oversee the creation and dispersion of propaganda proved that it can be as lethal as machine guns and torpedos. Joseph Goebbels headed the Reich Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment (RMVP) for the entirety of the Holocaust. The Third Reich’s prolific propaganda was due to his shrewd and wicked genius. His tactics for propaganda creation and dispersion increased its efficacy as he, and his team, including visual artists, writers, and filmmakers, created propaganda that would appeal to each man, woman, and child in Germany. The RMVP targeted German adults with countless antisemitic newspapers and posters that vilified everyone who did not fit the ideal Nazi narrative, from Jews to communists to the Allies. Nazis isolated and indoctrinated children using a system of altered school curriculums, children’s books, summer camps, and youth organizations. Often children were indoctrinated before their parents because they were young, naïve, and impressionable and would therefore mold more easily to the new onslaught of Nazi ideology. Nazi propagandists believed that if children were indoctrinated, then hesitant parents who grew up with Jews and were friends with them would be persuaded to align themselves with Nazi ideology in order to protect themselves and their children from the regime.
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Cultural Assimilation and Preservation in Boston’s Chinatown
By Lina Zhang, VI Form
Cultural Assimilation and Preservation in Boston’s Chinatown
Since its founding, Boston’s Chinatown has stood at a linguistic and cultural crossroads between English and Cantonese, American and Chinese. When the first Chinese immigrants arrived in Massachusetts in the 1870s, driven out of California by discimination and violence, they settled in a neighborhood that had already housed multiple immigrant groups before them. In the mid-twentieth century, anglicized names such as Hong Far Low Restaurant, Ruby Foo’s Den, Quong Wah Long and Company soared on wooden or neon signs above the groups of people filling the streets and speaking southern Chinese dialects, occasionally interrupted by the foreign English words of a gawking, white tour group. To the outsiders, Chinatown with its opium dens and gangs was sensational, exotic, lawless, and profoundly unAmerican. Today, however, a paifang stands at the entrance of Boston’s Chinatown with the words 天下为公, or “The world is equally shared by all.” Mandarin has replaced Taishanese, stores advertise hotpot and milk tea in Chinese, and it is common to see people of all races inhabiting this space. After more than a hundred years of coexistence, Chinatowns are still not fully American, but they are not fully Chinese either.
For as long as the Chinese lived in the United States, Chinatowns have risen and disappeared in different parts of the country. These neighborhoods often decline when they encounter a wide range of challenges, including financial hardship, ageing and out-migration, and cultural assimilation. After the disappearance of Chinatowns in Providence and Maine, Boston’s Chinatown became the last Chinatown in New England, serving the Chinese communities of all six states. Compared with the vibrant Chinatowns in San Francisco and New York, Boston’s Chinatown is relatively small and unknown. Neither the first point of contact for Chinese immigrants in the United States nor a current center of tourism and activism, its first residents lived in pre-constructed apartment complexes that had already housed prior immigrant groups. The population of Boston’s Chinatown reached just over ten thousand residents in 2020. Despite these limitations, Boston’s Chinatown has constantly adapted over the years, developing its own culture without the renown that other Chinatowns enjoy. However, it is interesting to consider whether Boston’s Chinatown still possesses a unique ethnic identity or if it is simply a declining residential pocket of Chinese Americans in a rapidly gentrifying, urbanizing environment.
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Accountability for the 400,000 Deaths: The RICO Act’s Application in the Legal Opioid Industry
By Holden LeBlanc, VI Form
Accountability for the 400,000 Deaths: The RICO Act’s Application in the Legal Opioid Industry
Carolyn Markland, a grandmother from Jacksonville, Florida, was a lover of animals and spent years fostering rescue pets after retiring as an environmental engineer. Markland, however, struggled with back pain due to a degenerative disc disease for years. After trying different medications with little relief, a doctor prescribed Markland the fentanyl-based drug Subsys to subdue her pain. Markland took a dose of Subsys before going to sleep on July 2, 2014. When Markland’s daughter went to check on her mother the next day, she discovered her dead in her bed with a Subsys canister lying at her side. Although Markland’s overdose was the first death connected to Subsys, many more were looming. Along with thousands of others, Markland died from overdosing on prescription opioids, but to understand how this happened, it is essential to recognize the changes in the United States’ policy towards opioids.
Opium, the active ingredient in opioids, is a substance that blocks pain by stimulating the release of the chemical dopamine in the body. Opium is a naturally occurring substance found in poppy plants, which humans have cultivated for centuries seeking their medicinal effect. For most of America’s history, up until the mid-twentieth century, doctors utilized opioids like morphine and later heroin as a crude form of anesthesia for surgery and for managing debilitating pain. After soldiers who received these powerful opioids became addicted in the early twentieth century, however, the United States government banned heroin and severely limited morphine use in 1924. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, opioid use in the U.S. remained relatively low, as much of the population viewed partaking in drug culture as morally wrong and deviant.
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The Causes of Silicon Valley’s Success
By Kartik Donepudi, VI Form
The Causes of Silicon Valley’s Success
There are 472 million entrepreneurs in the world. Each year, those entrepreneurs found a total of 305 million startups, and 1.35 million of those startups are tech related. However, entrepreneurship is a risky business; in 2019, approximately 90% of startups, defined as businesses with fewer than 500 employees, failed. With such a high failure rate, it is imperative that tech startup founders do whatever is necessary to ensure the survival of their companies. They must have funding, talent, space, and proximity to resources like academic research and laboratories. Accordingly, it is of great importance that tech startup founders find the right location to set up shop.
Imagine you are a tech startup founder with the next big idea in your back pocket. You know your startup’s product will be wildly successful. You simply need the funding to get started, talented employees to begin research and development, and a place to open company headquarters where you can find a wide customer base and easy access to resources. Where do you go? The answer is the home of today’s greatest startup ecosystem: Silicon Valley.
Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley has been a center of technological innovation since the late 1800s and produces many of the world’s largest tech firms. Modern giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook find their homes in the Valley alongside pioneer companies of previous eras in technology; older firms like Lockheed Martin, Intel, and HP have blossomed in the region since their foundings in the mid 1900s. An abundance of local talent stemming from schools like Stanford University has fueled the region’s startups for more than a century, and in the modern age, talent from the best colleges around the world flocks to Silicon Valley to make it big as the next tech leaders.
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Questioning the Criminalization of Gangsta Rap: How Explicit Lyrics Reflect Economic and Racial Inequality in the Wake of Deindustrialization and the War on Drugs
By Frances Hornbostel, VI Form
Questioning the Criminalization of Gangsta Rap: How Explicit Lyrics Reflect Economic and Racial Inequality in the Wake of Deindustrialization and the War on Drugs
In 1992, rapper Tupac Shakur carved the powerful mantra he had created across his torso: “Thug Life.” In bold, unfading, blue ink, the message would last forever on his body and resonate off of it. The message of “Thug Life,” however, did not convey one, coherent story. As with anything celebrities do, the media, political figures, and the general public began to weave another section of the messy web that is Tupac’s legacy. The word “thug” inspired images of criminals who are violent, malicious, and crude.2 Many snatched the opportunity of Tupac’s branding himself with the public’s negative usage of “thug” as confirmation that he was accepting the media’s labelling of him. Some took it as permission to call Shakur a criminal before he was ever accused of a crime.
Many thought the way of life he depicted in his lyrics incited violence, holding him responsible for some real, criminal acts of violence that followed the release of his music. Linda Davidson, the wife of Officer Bill Davidson, would sue Time Warner, Interscope Records, and Tupac Shakur, blaming them for the fatal shooting of her husband. In April 1992, Officer Davidson pulled over Ronald Howard, a teenager from Houston, for a broken headlight. As the officer walked up to Howard’s window, the teen shot Davidson, who would die three days later. How could Tupac be responsible if it was Ronald Howard who was convicted of the crime? At the time of the shooting, the music of Tupac Shakur’s album, 2Pacalypse Now, blasted through an audio cassette in Howard’s car. Linda Davidson claimed the music’s obscenity and violent imagery directly encouraged illegal behavior, like the shooting that led to her husband’s death.3 Although the Judge eventually dismissed the lawsuit against Time Warner, Interscope Records, and Tupac, criticism of the rapper and the genre of gangsta rap was still very much alive.
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Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine’s Influence on Modern Medicine
By Cara Mulcahey, VI Form
Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine’s Influence on Modern Medicine
An elderly woman stumbles into a hospital’s waiting room. She is short of breath, feverish, and coughing uncontrollably. The hospital admits this woman, and a physician sees her. The physician may run a physical exam to check her oxygen saturation and breath sounds. This exam would also check her differential blood count, immunoglobulin levels, and sputum cultures. The physician may also ask for a chest CT to assess lung damage. These tests would indicate to the physician that this woman suffers from bronchiectasis. Bronchiectasis occurs when the bronchial tubes in the lungs are permanently damaged, widened, or thickened, enabling mucus and bacteria to accumulate in the lungs. This accounts for this woman’s difficulty breathing, as the mucus and bacteria were blocking her airways. With this diagnosis, the physician could treat the woman with chest physiotherapy to clear the mucus from the lungs, antibiotics, bronchodilators, medications, and oxygen therapy. She would leave with some relief and be able to live her life relatively normally.
But, what if this occurred over 2,000 years ago in ancient Greece? Ancient Greek physicians did not have access to fancy labs or equipment, such as CT machines, so could this woman receive treatment? The answer is yes. Although Greek physicians did not have the technology and knowledge modern physicians do, they were capable of diagnosing and treating patients. In this case, similar to a modern physician, the iatros (the Greek word for physician) would press his ear to the elderly woman’s back and listen to the sound of her breath. The iatros would hear “boiling inside [her chest] like vinegar,” which would lead him to diagnose correctly that the woman had fluid inside her lungs. Additionally, the iatros would notice the woman’s swollen fingers, which is a sign of lung disease. From this diagnosis, the iatros would prescribe the woman some medications to take and keep a close eye on her. Should her condition worsen, the iatros would drill a hole in her chest to drain some of the fluid. This procedure had numerous known risks, such as infection, which is why the iatros would try less-invasive treatments first. Overall, the woman would benefit from seeing the iatros, displaying that even though the iatros did not have access to modern technologies, he would be able to relieve some of her symptoms.
The earliest records of medicine come from Babylonia, Egypt, India, and China. Historians are able to study medicine from these ancient civilizations by examining drawings, bones, and surgical instruments. Initially, folk medicine was prominent. Folk medicine consisted of treating diseases with herbs and plants. Historians believe that ancient physicians used trial and error methods to deduce which plants and herbs had healing properties. Physicians utilized folk medicine and herbal remedies to treat common and mild illnesses, such as colds. However, these ancient civilizations linked more serious illnesses to supernatural origins, which physicians treated with incantations, potions, or spells. Therefore, the first physicians were primarily witches or sorcerers.
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