Government Story Briefs

Governments can be constitutional monarchies, dictatorships, federal republics, parliamentary democracies, constitutional republics. More than a system of rules and regulations, they help civilized people to live together peacefully. These stories explore different forms of government.

Kobie Coetsee, in charge of South Africa's prisons in the mid-80s, began a dialogue with Mandela which eventually freed the prisoner from his life sen...

This image—part of the U.S. military art gallery maintained at the U.S. Army Center of Military History—depicts American soldiers, during 1950, at...

The ancient Laws of Eshnunna, which scholars believe predate the Code of Hammurabi, contain a "mad dog law" specifying compensation if a rabid dog kil...

On the evening of March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson requested broadcast time. No one expected what he had to say.

On the 7th of June, 1776, Richard Henry Lee proposed a resolution to assert the independence of Britain's "United Colonies" in America.

During July of 1917, demonstrators in Petrograd (including sailors from Kronstadt) were met with fierce opposition by soldiers of the provisional gove...

Jean Valjean was imprisoned nineteen years - at hard labor - for breaking into a bakery, stealing a loaf of bread, then trying to escape from his life...

Marion Post Wolcott took thousands of pictures for the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration. This image, made in 1939, depicts a migrant c...

Thousands of Irish children were sent to places called "Industrial Schools" throughout the 1950s. Many of these "schools" were not suitable for childr...

Shortly before his inauguration as America's 16th President, Abraham Lincoln visited Philadelphia.

The Emancipation Proclamation is still debated today, what did it say and how did the country react?

Louis Dembitz Brandeis (18561941) was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. He was known as a strong supporter of civil rights.

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