Latest news with #IndianRemovalAct
Chicago Tribune
28-05-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Today in History: President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act
Today is Wednesday, May 28, the 148th day of 2025. There are 217 days left in the year. Today in history: On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which forced nearly 50,000 Native Americans to relocate to designated territories west of the Mississippi River. Also on this date: In 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, made up of free Black men, left Boston to fight for the Union in the Civil War. In 1892, the Sierra Club was founded in San Francisco by naturalist John Muir. In 1918, American troops fought their first major battle during World War I as they launched an offensive against the German-held French village of Cantigny; the Americans succeeded in capturing the village. In 1959, the U.S. Army launched Able, a rhesus monkey, and Baker, a squirrel monkey, aboard a Jupiter missile for a suborbital flight which both primates survived. In 1972, burglars working on behalf of the Nixon White House broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., installing surveillance devices on telephones and taking photos of DNC documents. In 1977, 165 people were killed when fire raced through the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky. In 1987, to the embarrassment of Soviet officials, Mathias Rust, a teenage West German amateur pilot, landed a private plane near Moscow's Red Square without authorization. (Rust was held by the Soviets until he was pardoned and freed the following year.) In 2013, calling it perhaps the biggest money-laundering scheme in U.S. history, federal prosecutors charged seven people with running what amounted to an online, underworld bank, saying that Liberty Reserve handled $6 billion for drug dealers, child pornographers, identity thieves and other criminals around the globe. In 2021, officials announced that the remains of more than 200 children, some as young as 3 years old, had been found buried on the site of what was once Canada's largest indigenous residential school, in Kamloops, British Columbia. Today's Birthdays: Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is 81. Singer Gladys Knight is 81. Musician Billy Vera is 81. Musician John Fogerty (Creedence Clearwater Revival) is 80. Country singer-songwriter Phil Vassar is 63. Singer-actor Kylie Minogue is 57. Actor Justin Kirk is 56. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is 54. TV personality Elisabeth Hasselbeck is 48. Actor Jake Johnson is 47. Singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat is 40. Actor Carey Mulligan is 40.
Boston Globe
28-05-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Today in History: May 28, Jackson signs Indian Removal Act
Advertisement In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which forced nearly 50,000 Native Americans to relocate to designated territories west of the Mississippi River. In 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the most famous African-American regiment of the Civil War, left Boston with a heroes' parade and farewell before boarding a ship at Battery Wharf, headed for combat in the South. In 1892, the Sierra Club was founded in San Francisco by naturalist John Muir. In 1918, American troops fought their first major battle during World War I as they launched an offensive against the German-held French village of Cantigny; the Americans succeeded in capturing the village. In 1959, the US Army launched Able, a rhesus monkey, and Baker, a squirrel monkey, aboard a Jupiter missile for a suborbital flight which both primates survived. Advertisement In 1972, burglars working on behalf of the Nixon White House broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., installing surveillance devices on telephones and taking photos of DNC documents. In 1977, 165 people were killed when fire raced through the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Ky. In 1987, to the embarrassment of Soviet officials, Mathias Rust, a teenage West German amateur pilot, landed a private plane near Moscow's Red Square without authorization. (Rust was held by the Soviets until he was pardoned and freed the following year.) In 2013, calling it perhaps the biggest money-laundering scheme in US history, federal prosecutors charged seven people with running what amounted to an online, underworld bank, saying that Liberty Reserve handled $6 billion for drug dealers, child pornographers, identity thieves, and other criminals around the globe. In 2021, officials announced that the remains of more than 200 children, some as young as 3 years old, had been found buried on the site of what was once Canada's largest indigenous residential school, in Kamloops, British Columbia.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Helps Plant 'MAGAnolia' In Place Of Nearly 200-Year-Old White House Tree
President Donald Trump's White House revamp has officially reached the landscaping. A nearly two-century-old magnolia tree said to have been planted by President Andrew Jackson was removed from the South Lawn on Monday, amid concerns the ailing evergreen could pose a safety risk if it fell. The next day, Trump was on hand to celebrate its replacement: a 12-year-old sapling descended from the original Jackson tree, which he dubbed the 'MAGAnolia.' President Donald J. Trump planted a new MAGAnolia sapling at the White House — a direct descendant of the historic "Jackson Magnolia." 🌳🇺🇸 — The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 8, 2025 'We have a beautiful tree now at the White House,' Trump declared in a video posted to the official White House X account. Believed to be the oldest tree on the grounds, the Jackson Magnolia had long outlived the breed's typical 100-year lifespan. Historians say the original was transplanted from Jackson's Tennessee home in honor of his late wife, Rachel, sometime during his 1829 to 1837 tenure in office. The decision to cut it down followed an assessment from professional arborist Peter Hart, who determined the tree had 'surpassed the time of serving as an aesthetic and historic landmark,' according to a White House press statement. Trump addressed the move in a Truth Social post last week, saying, 'The bad news is everything must come to an end, and this tree is in terrible condition, a very dangerous safety hazard, at the White House Entrance, no less, and must now be removed.' In his post, the president noted that officials will be preserving parts of the magnolia's wood, which 'may be used for other high and noble purposes.' The symbolism behind swapping one Jackson tree for another also seems fitting, given Trump's well-documented admiration for the 7th president. The wartime general's legacy has long been criticized for his racist policies, especially the Indian Removal Act, which led to the forced displacement of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears. White House Confirms Trump Is Exploring Ways To 'Deport' US Citizens German Romantics Climb Oak Tree Instead Of Scrolling Tinder MrBeast Reveals How Tariffs Are Hitting His Chocolate Bars – And It Might Not Taste So Good To Trump
New York Times
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Facebook Insider's Exposé Alleges Bad Behavior at the Top
The publisher of 'Careless People' kept the existence of this memoir a secret until a few days ago — with good reason, it turns out. For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book's author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes. 'Careless People' is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses' ire. Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods. During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They're this book's Tom and Daisy — the 'careless people' in 'The Great Gatsby' who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, 'smashed up things and creatures' and 'let other people clean up the mess they had made.' Wynn-Williams was so eager to work at Facebook that she pitched herself to the company for months before it eventually hired her. Born and raised in New Zealand, she had been working as a diplomat at her country's embassy in Washington and, before that, at the United Nations. She was drawn to human rights and environmental issues. Relying on Facebook to stay connected with her friends back home, she believed the platform 'was going to change the world.' As governments realized what Facebook could do, she sold herself to the company by telling its officials they could use a diplomat. When they finally hired her, she was elated: 'I can't believe I have the opportunity to work on the greatest political tool of my lifetime.' What follows is a book-length admonishment to be careful what you wish for. Any idealism about Facebook's potential as 'the greatest political tool' sounds bitterly ironic now, 14 years later. By the end of her memoir, Wynn-Williams is told that her superiors have 'concerns' about her performance; she feels so beaten down by her tenure at the company that she describes getting fired as a 'quick euthanasia.' Wynn-Williams sees Zuckerberg change while she's at Facebook. Desperate to be liked, he becomes increasingly hungry for attention and adulation, shifting his focus from coding and engineering to politics. On a tour of Asia, she is directed to gather a crowd of more than one million so that he can be 'gently mobbed.' (In the end, she doesn't have to; his desire is satisfied during an appearance at a Jakarta shopping mall with Indonesia's president-elect instead.) He tells her that Andrew Jackson (who signed the Indian Removal Act into law) was the greatest president America ever had, because he 'got stuff done.' Sandberg, for her part, turns her charm on and off like a tap. When Wynn-Williams first starts at Facebook, she is in awe of Sandberg, who in 2013 publishes her best-selling corporate-feminism manifesto, 'Lean In.' But Wynn-Williams soon learns to mistrust 'Sheryl's 'Lean In' shtick,' seeing it as a thin veneer over her 'unspoken rules' about 'obedience and closeness.' Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them, budget be damned. (The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other's laps, stroking each other's hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams 'come to bed.' Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed. Sandberg isn't the only person in this book with apparent boundary issues. Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg's from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook's vice president of U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-Williams's manager. A former Marine who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and who was part of the 'Brooks Brothers riot' of 2000, which helped bring George W. Bush into office, Kaplan went on to serve as a deputy chief of staff in his administration. Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks 'sultry' and making 'weird comments' about her husband. When she delivers her second child, an amniotic fluid embolism nearly kills her; yet Kaplan keeps emailing her while she's on maternity leave, insisting on weekly videoconferences. She tells him she needs more surgery because she's still bleeding. 'But where are you bleeding from?' he repeatedly presses her. An internal Facebook investigation into her 'experience' with Kaplan cleared him of any wrongdoing. Such scenes of personal degradation are lurid enough, but Wynn-Williams also had a front-row seat to some of Facebook's most ignominious episodes. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Facebook employees embedded with the Trump campaign helped it micro-target potential voters, feeding them bespoke ads filled with 'misinformation, inflammatory posts and fund-raising messages.' (The Clinton campaign declined Facebook's offer to embed employees.) The following year, in Myanmar, a country heavily reliant on Facebook, hateful lies propagated on the platform incited a genocide against the minority Rohingya ethnic group. Wynn-Williams says she started raising the alarm about Myanmar several years earlier, trying to persuade Facebook to beef up its monitoring operations when she learned that hate speech was circulating on the platform. Content moderation was painfully (and lethally) slow, she writes, because the company relied on one contractor who spoke Burmese: a 'Burmese guy' based in Dublin, multiple time zones away from both Myanmar and Facebook's California headquarters. 'Myanmar demonstrates better than anywhere the havoc Facebook can wreak when it's truly ubiquitous.' The book includes a detailed chapter on 'Aldrin,' the code name for Facebook's project to get unblocked in China. According to Wynn-Williams, the company proposed all kinds of byzantine arrangements involving China-based partnerships, data collection and censorship tools that it hoped would satisfy China's ruling Communist Party. Knowing that Zuckerberg would probably face questions about China from Congress, his team gave him cleverly worded talking points. 'There seems to be no compunction about misleading Congress,' Wynn-Williams writes. 'Senators will need to ask exceptionally specific questions to get close to any truth.' When Zuckerberg eventually appears before a Senate committee in 2018, a senator asks him how Facebook is handling the Chinese government's unwillingness 'to allow a social media platform — foreign or domestic — to operate in China unless it agrees to abide by Chinese law.' In his reply, Zuckerberg states, 'No decisions have been made around the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China,' to which Wynn-Williams comments: 'He lies.' Wynn-Williams has filed a whistle-blower complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Professionally, she has moved on, to work on policy issues related to artificial intelligence and to pour her gallows humor into this book. 'Careless People' may contain a cast of careless people, but it's ultimately Zuckerberg who 'wants to be the decider.' She shows him replacing the imperfect system of checks and balances that her policy team developed over the years with his decrees, which typically coincide with his business interests: 'Facebook is an autocracy of one.' And autocracies aren't bound by term limits. In 2016, during a summit of world leaders in Peru, Wynn-Williams noticed that many faces were familiar; a number of other leaders were gone. 'I'm struck by the impermanence of importance,' she writes. 'Yet Mark could conceivably continue to hold his place chairing world leaders for another 50 years. He'll see these leaders off and the generations of leaders that follow them. Like the queen.'
USA Today
28-01-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
President Jackson: A villain to Indigenous peoples and hero to President Trump
President Jackson: A villain to Indigenous peoples and hero to President Trump Shekóli ('hello' in Oneida) and yaw^ko ('thank you') for reading the First Nations Wisconsin newsletter. As he did in his last term, President Trump hung a portrait of his presidential hero, Andrew Jackson, prominently in the Oval Office. Trump has expressed admiration of Jackson for his populist style of politics. Jackson served as the nation's seventh president from 1829 to 1837. Trump also said Jackson was the most politically attacked president before him, weathering all of it and still emerging triumphant. In Indian Country, Jackson is seen by Indigenous peoples as probably the most villainous of all past U.S. presidents. He enacted and enforced the Indian Removal Act forcing Indigenous peoples from their lands east of the Mississippi River to make room for slave plantations. And when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the government had no right and no enforcement power in Cherokee Nation lands in Georgia, Jackson ignored the ruling and said: 'John Marshall has made his decision. Now, let him enforce it.' The quote is apocryphal but sums up Jackson's belief that the Indigenous population was an obstacle to American success, an violence against tribes was preferable to friendship. The ensuing forced removal became know as the Trail of Tears in which many Indigenous people, including children, died on the forced march by foot to Oklahoma. 'That those tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizens is certain,' Jackson said about Indigenous peoples. 'Established in the midst of another and superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.' If you like this newsletter, please invite a friend to subscribe to it. And if you have tips or suggestions for this newsletter, please email me at fvaisvilas@ About me I'm Frank Vaisvilas, the Indigenous affairs reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin based at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I cover Native American issues in Wisconsin. You can reach me at 815-260-2262 or fvaisvilas@ or on Twitter at @vaisvilas_frank.
