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Smith Act

(Encyclopedia)Smith Act, 1940, passed by the U.S. Congress as the Alien Registration Act of 1940. The act, which made it an offense to advocate or belong to a group that advocated the violent overthrow of the gover...

Dawes Act

(Encyclopedia)Dawes Act or General Allotment Act, 1887, passed by the U.S. Congress to provide for the granting of landholdings (allotments, usually 160 acres/65 hectares) to individual Native Americans, replacing ...

Canada Act

(Encyclopedia)Canada Act, also called the Constitutional Act of 1982, which made Canada a fully sovereign state. The British Parliament approved it on Mar. 25, 1982, and Queen Elizabeth II proclaimed it on Apr. 17,...

Patriot Act

(Encyclopedia)Patriot Act: see USA PATRIOT Act. ...

Nonimportation Act

(Encyclopedia)Nonimportation Act: see Embargo Act of 1807. ...

Nonintercourse Act

(Encyclopedia)Nonintercourse Act: see Embargo Act of 1807. ...

Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr.

(Encyclopedia)Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 1908–72, American politician and clergyman, b. New Haven, Conn. In 1937 he became pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, and he soon became known as a m...

Preemption Act

(Encyclopedia)Preemption Act, statute passed (1841) by the U.S. Congress in response to the demands of the Western states that squatters be allowed to preempt lands. Pioneers often settled on public lands before th...

Wolfe, Thomas Clayton

(Encyclopedia)Wolfe, Thomas Clayton, 1900–1938, American novelist, b. Asheville, N.C., grad. Univ. of North Carolina, 1920, M.A. Harvard, 1922. An important 20th-century American novelist, Wolfe wrote four mammot...

Federal Trade Commission

(Encyclopedia)Federal Trade Commission (FTC), independent agency of the U.S. government established in 1915 and charged with keeping American business competition free and fair. The FTC has no jurisdiction over ban...