The Establishment Clause of the Constitution states that the government can make no law establishing a state religion, and the Free Exercise Clause says that the government cannot stop any American group or individual from freely practicing their religious beliefs.

Plessy v. Ferguson was a case that focused on the matter of racial segregation policy in the city of New Orleans, Louisianna. Homer Plessy, a man of Creole descent, and his allies on the New Orleans Committee of Citizens staged an act of civil disobedience when Plessy attempted to ride on a white's only railroad car within the city. At the time, New Orleans had implemented a number of policies aimed at keeping whites separate from people of color in public. In Plessy, the court ruled against Homer Plessy and held that racial segregation was legal as long as people of color were provided with equal accomodations while being held separate in public. Over 50 years later, in Brown v. Board of Education, the court reversed precedent and ruled that separate facilities were inherently unequal, especially in the case of schools.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in American history. Certainly it is the most famous case of the civil rights era. It overturned the 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, which had originally ruled that segregation was legal under the "separate, but equal" idea. The Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate but equal" segregation was inherently not equal and violated the Equal Protection Clause established in the Fourteenth Amendment.

The case of the Scottsboro boys centered around a group of African-Americans who were found guilty of raping two white teenage girls on a train in 1931 and were sentenced to the death penalty. The case was appealed on numerous occasions on the grounds that the boys had been denied a fair and equal trial process. It has come to represent the extent of institutionalized racism in the American legal system during the first half of the twentieth century.

The revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, was written by Thomas Paine in 1776. It is considered to be the most important document for galvanizing public support for the cause of the Revolutionary War that was published in the early years of the American War for Independence.

Common Sense was written by Thomas Paine during the early stages of the Revolutionary War with Britain. The pamphlet argued that America had both the right to seek independence from Britain and the means to achieve this goal. It was important for swaying countless individuals to side with the revolutionaries and for convincing common Americans that their goal could be achieved.

The Gettysburg Address was a speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, during the height of the Civil War conflict. It is generally considered one of the greatest speeches in American history.

The Gettysburg Address was a speech given in the middle of the Civil War by President Abraham Lincoln. It is a very short speech, but one that focuses on reaffirming the ideas of universal equality that are espoused in the American Constitution, while also framing the Civil War as a conflict to protect these rights and to preserve the unity of the young American republic.

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions were written, in secret, by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, in response to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 and 1799. What they essentially stated was that the states have the right to nullify Federal laws they deem unconstitutional. Many American politicians at the time, including George Washington, considered this to be a very dangerous precedent, and although the nullification issue continued to be problematic in the early years of the American republic, it is now considered not to be right reserved for the states.

The Federalist Papers is the name given to a collection of essays, written in 1787 and 1788, advocating the ratification of the United States’ Constitution. Many of the essays are considered of great historical importance, including Federalist No. 10 and Federalist No. 51.