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Jun 15, 1215
Magna Carta
A charter of liberty and political rights was obtained from king john of England by his rebellious barons at Runnymede in 1215, which came to be seen as the seminal document of English constitutional practice. -
Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence the founding document of the United States was approved by the continental congress on July 4, 1776. -
Articles of Confederation
After the Lee Resolution proposed independence for the American colonies, the Second Continental Congress appointed three committees on June 11, 1776. One of the committees was tasked with determining what form the confederation of the colonies should take. This committee was composed of one representative from each colony. John Dickinson, a delegate from Delaware, was the principal writer. -
Constitutional Convention
The Constitutional Convention took place from May 14 to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The point of the event was to decide how America was going to be governed. Although the Convention had been officially called to revise the existing Articles of Confederation, many delegates had much bigger plans. -
Judiciary Act of 1789
The Judiciary Act of 1789, officially titled "An Act to Establish the Judicial Courts of the United States," was signed into law by President George Washington on September 24, 1789. Article III of the Constitution established a Supreme Court, but left to Congress the authority to create lower federal courts as needed. -
Plessy V. Fergusion
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". -
President Trump exits the Paris Agreement
The U.S.’s exit from the historic 2015 Paris climate agreement takes effect today, capping four years of President Donald Trump aggressively rolling back the Obama administration’s climate-change-mitigation policies. On June 1, 2017, United States President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would cease all participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, contending that the agreement would "undermine" the U.S. economy, and put the U.S. "at a permanent disadvantage." -
U.S. joins the Paris Agreement
In April 2016, the United States became a signatory to the Paris Agreement, and accepted it by executive order in September 2016. President Obama committed the United States to contributing US$3 billion to the Green Climate Fund. The Fund has set itself a goal of raising $100 billion a year by 2020. -
President Biden rejoins Paris Agreement.
On January 20, on his first day in office, President Biden signed the instrument to bring the United States back into the Paris Agreement. Per the terms of the Agreement, the United States officially becomes a Party again today. The Paris Agreement is an unprecedented framework for global action. Now, as momentous as our joining the Agreement was in 2016 and as momentous as our rejoining is today — what we do in the coming weeks, months, and years is even more important.