From today's featured article
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The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of American federal legislation that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Act into law (pictured) during the height of the Civil Rights Movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended it five times. The Act allowed for a mass enfranchisement of racial minorities across the country, especially in the South. Section 2 of the Act prohibits state and local governments from imposing any voting law that has a discriminatory effect on racial or language minorities, and other provisions specifically ban literacy tests and similar discriminatory devices. Some provisions apply only to jurisdictions covered by the Act's "coverage formula", which was designed to encompass jurisdictions that engaged in egregious voting discrimination. Chiefly, Section 5 prohibits these jurisdictions from changing their election practices without first receiving approval from the federal government that the change is not discriminatory. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula as unconstitutional, reasoning that it no longer responded to current conditions. (Full article...)
Recently featured: Southern Rhodesia in World War I – The Blind Leading the Blind – Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians
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Did you know...
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In the news
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On this day...
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August 6: Feast of the Transfiguration (Gregorian calendar); Independence Day in Jamaica (1962)
- 1806 – The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by its last emperor, Francis II (pictured), during the aftermath of the War of the Third Coalition.
- 1890 – At Auburn Prison in Auburn, New York, US, William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in an electric chair.
- 1964 – American researcher Donald Currey had a bristlecone pine tree known as Prometheus cut down, only to find that it was the oldest known non-clonal organism ever discovered, at least 4,862 years old at the time.
- 1991 – British computer programmer Tim Berners-Lee first posted files describing his ideas for a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessible via the Internet, to be called a "World Wide Web".
- 2010 – A cloudburst and heavy overnight rains triggered flash floods, mudslides, and debris flows across a large part of Ladakh, a region of the northernmost Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, leaving at least 255 people dead.
More anniversaries: August 5 – August 6 – August 7
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