Logos, Pathos, and Ethos...Kind of.The purpose of rhetoric is to make an argument, and a law isn't an argument. It's what happens after an argument. In this case, the argument was the election of 1...

Legal DocumentWell, technically, we have four legal documents. That's four for the price of one, folks.The Alien and Sedition Acts are made up of four different federal laws that get lumped togethe...

18th-Century LegaleseEver turn an essay into a teacher and get the dreaded highlighter with a note that says "run-on"? We all have. Except, apparently, the Founding Fathers. It's like these guys on...

Each of the four laws in the Alien and Sedition Acts is named after what it's intended to do. It's all pretty straightforward. The Naturalization Act modified existing naturalization laws, the Alie...

Yikes. The first lines of all four laws are massive run-on sentences. Unfortunately for people trying to understand laws, that's usually where they put the primary purpose of the law. The rest is c...

The final line of a law is usually how long it's intended to exist, like an expiration date for milk. The Alien Friends Act only lasted until 1800, and the Sedition Act only lasted until 1801. When...

(9) Mount EverestYikes. It's like they're intentionally hiding the purpose of the Acts from you…almost as if the writers knew eventually history would turn on them. These things are written in th...

In-Text ReferencesLiterary and Philosophical ReferencesNationalismNations are a super-recent invention. Like, around the same age as the USA. Before this time, people were loyal to larger groups, b...

John Adams was the first president to live in the White House (though it wasn't called that until Teddy Roosevelt named it in 1901). You might think Washington lived on his mom's couch, but it was...