Queen Elizabeth I, c. 1600. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Queen Elizabeth I, c. 1600. National Portrait Gallery, London. 

Politics

Volume V, Number 4 | fall 2012

Miscellany

The longest filibuster in U.S. Senate history lasted twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, a record set in 1957 by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to stall passage of the Civil Rights Act. Thurmond died in 2003, holding his same Senate seat.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

—Frederick Douglass, 1855