The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

On a dreary May day in Washington D.C. in 1972, 10,000 people took to the streets despite the drizzle. They were protesting what they saw as an out-of-control Supreme Court that had undermined and betrayed America. They denounced the Court for “banning” God and His word from schools. By reversing the Court’s decision to take God out of schools, the 10,000 protestors believed America could be saved from “the disaster of dope” engulfing the country. The feeling that the Supreme Court had betrayed and undermined its duty to uphold white supremacy, the alleged religious nature of America, and the Constitution is what compelled most conservatives to anathematize the institution.

This article examines the conservative reaction to five cases: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Engel vs. Vitale (1962), Abington vs. Schempp (1963), Roe v. Wade (1973), and Bob Jones University vs. United States (1983). By examining these cases together, the role of emotion in shaping political behavior is evident. We see common rhetorical tropes about the Court’s betrayal of America repeated in all of these cases. We also see how the rhetoric of betrayal and subversion circulated among different factions of conservatism. A caveat for my thesis is that most of my sources came from non-scholars who may have relied on emotional rhetoric more than their scholarly counterparts. However, even if this is true, the words of angry conservatives in journals from the Atlantic to the Christian Beacon show an important and understudied thread of anti-Court rhetoric.

This paper, which compared and contrasted the various characteristics of the Qin empire in two computer games, tried to find the connection between the empire’s ruling ideology and its multi-aspect effects displayed in turn-based strategy games. With a closer look at Strategy games, readers may find how Qin’s ruling ideology- the legalism that emphasizes “agriculture and war” was a powerful engine for Qin’s conquering performance in both history and strategy games. Besides specific features in the games, readers may also find the interaction between players and their virtual empire echoes the sense of “oneness” within the legalist political blueprint.

The Cherokee Nation of present-day Oklahoma adopted Euroamerican practices of slaveholding in the late 18th century to demonstrate to white Europeans that they were deserving of legitimate and respected citizenship in the United States. In the early 1800s, the Cherokee faced pressures to cede their lands, but even this became widely contested by anti-removalists. Though abolitionists’ main objective was to bring about the end of slavery, they also respected the Indigenous peoples living in North America and were active participants in the struggle for the rights of Indigenous tribes. This contradiction calls to question the political dispositions of anti-removalist abolitionists. How did Northern abolitionists reconcile their support of Cherokee Civil Rights with Cherokee slaveholding practices? Did abolitionists of the mid-1800s struggle with conflicting sentiments surrounding the slaveholding practices of the Cherokee?