U.S. Congressional Documents

Occasionally, the scientific community undertakes a task that is so large and so important that it requires an international effort. Developing a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus was one of them. The creation of the International Space Station was another. Yet another was the Human Genome Project—an effort to identify and sequence all of the 3 billion base pairs that make up human DNA. The results of this project, which took 13 years and nearly $3 billion, have been essential for learning more about diseases such as cancer and the nature of evolution.

Between 1930 and 1931, near the town of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, 3,000 men worked in ten-hour shifts drilling a three-mile tunnel through the side of a mountain. Within five years, more than 750 of those men would die of a deadly and preventable disease. Keep reading to learn more about the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster, the single deadliest industrial incident in American history, and its influence on the struggles for worker’s rights and safety regulations in the United States.

On December 1, 2023, George Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives by a 311-114 vote, telling reporters, “To hell with this place!” as he exited the United States Capitol for the final time. It was a dramatic moment, fitting for such a rare occasion—expulsion is the most severe disciplinary act in Congress, and only 21 members in history have ever been expelled. So how exactly does a lawmaker get expelled from Congress? And what happens now?

If you have never seen Frank Capra’s 1946 classic starring James Stewart and Donna Reed, move it to the top of your holiday watchlist. When you do, which version will you watch? It’s a Wonderful Life was originally filmed in black and white. But colorized versions of the film also exist; you can actually choose whether to stream the original black and white or a colorized version on Amazon Prime Video. Colorizing black and white movies was all the rage in the 1980s. It was also a controversial technology that made its way from the Hollywood archives to the United States Senate.

On October 25, Representative Mike Johnson was elected the new Speaker of the House after Kevin McCarthy was removed from the position—marking the first time that a Speaker has been voted out in U.S. history. However, the journey to replace the Speaker was arduous and emphasizes the various schisms that currently exist within the House of Representatives, and even within the Republican party itself. But what does the Speaker of the House do, how are they elected, and why did it take three weeks to replace McCarthy?

Dred Scott v. Sandford, a Supreme Court decision made in 1857, is largely regarded as one of the most infamous decisions in the Supreme Court’s history. This case determined that people of Black African descent were not entitled to citizenship via the U.S. Constitution, and therefore, they did not have any of the rights granted to white Americans, including the right to sue in court.

The term “cult” is a controversial one—often, we use the word to describe belief systems that we think are “weird,” or that don’t align with the more standard world religions. For the purpose of this blog, we use “cult” to refer to groups with a leader who exerted an excessive and dangerous amount of control over their followers that resulted in deaths.

Barbenheimer defined Summer 2023 and even the HeinOnline Blog couldn’t escape the movie event of the year. We gave Barbie the HeinOnline treatment last month, and so this month it’s Oppenheimer’s turn, with a special focus on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing in 1954.

In 2020, former President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting transactions with the China-based company ByteDance, owners of TikTok, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. TikTok later filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, but the ban was later fully blocked by Judge Nichols. In 2021, TikTok became the world’s most visited website and the most downloaded app in 2022. As 2023 unfolds, concerns persist within the Biden Administration regarding the potential for Beijing to gain access to sensitive data of American users or exploit its algorithm to disseminate propaganda via TikTok.

The East Palestine tragedy has brought heightened attention to the railroad industry, the role of the EPA, and what duty companies have to communities impacted by their actions. In today’s post, we are exploring one of the worst environmental disasters in American history, when another rustbelt community was exposed to toxic chemicals—the Love Canal disaster.