Newer Than They Think / Laws and Politics

• Many Americans (conservatives and old-school (I.E. not social) liberals, mostly) will insist that the United States has always been a country committed to free enterprise and that restraints on trade are unconstitutional, if not socialistic. Funny, that didn't stop the U.S. from being one of the most rabidly protectionist economies on the face of the earth until well into the twentieth century. It was not until 1944, at the Bretton Woods economic summit in New Hampshire, that the U.S. (along with most other countries) finally committed itself to the principle of free trade. Prior to that, high tariffs were as American as apple pie, while free trade was something the hated British practiced. (Oh, and conservatives originally opposed free trade, as do some paleoconservatives even today.)
• Compulsory wearing of seat belts in cars? 1970 in Victoria, Australia. 1972 in New Zealand. 1983 in the UK, and another year before the first of the United States (New York) took it up. It's still not illegal in New Hampshire ("Live Free or Die, motherfuckers!").
  • The compulsory wearing of seat belts initially applied to the driver and front seat passenger only in many countries. Compulsory wearing for all passengers was introduced in 1989 in New Zealand and 1991 in the UK.
  • In Italy, they are compulsory only since 1st Jan 1993.
  • Philippines is very bad with seat belts, not passing a law mandating the use of seatbelts until 1999, and to this day, most people there still don't care for them. And this is in a country whose traffic is basically Bullet Hell in automotive form compared to what you'd expect in America.
• Switzerland gave women the vote in federal elections... in 1973! Liechtenstein waited until 1984.^note  Liechtenstein's excuse was that a huge fraction of its female citizens were foreign-born, because citizenship was automatic upon marrying a male Liechtensteiner.
  • The Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden didn't allow women to vote in local elections until 1991.
  • Kuwait extended suffrage to women in 2005.
  • Despite being a fairly early adopter of women's suffrage (Quebec excluded), Canada shamefully withheld the vote from large numbers of its aboriginal population until the mid '60s.
• In American politics, the consistent use of red to represent the Republican Party and blue for the Democratic Party (and the corresponding terms "Red State" and "Blue State") only goes back to the 2000 election. While the use of different colors for the two sides in an electoral contest dates back to at least the time of color television, previously the major networks and newspapers had alternated colors for the parties in each election cycle and different networks and publications would each use their own colors. However, in 2000 red for Republicans and blue for Democrats happened to be common, and the protracted count, recount, and court battle cemented the associations in the public consciousness. This is particularly inexcusable in 2016 because this happened within the lifetimes of everyone old enough to vote.
  • Specifically, blue was used for the incumbent party and red for the challenging party.
  • As many people have pointed out, this is something of a historical reversal given the association of red with the political left and blue with the political right. American sources and web sites that predate the 2000 election (such as the US Election Atlas) and that didn't apply the blue/incumbent and red/challenger method that the TV networks used tend to use the more traditional red/liberal and blue/conservative color scheme on their own maps. Some political commentators used the term "Lake Reagan" to describe the nearly all-blue electoral maps illustrating Republican Ronald Reagan's 1980 landslide win over Jimmy Carter.
  • Political commentators these days exploit different connotations that suit the new colour scheme: red with "redneck" and "red-blooded male" stereotypes of conservatives and their supporters; "blue", on the other hand, can comfortably stand in for the "blue humor" favored by supposedly promiscuous liberals^note The term "redneck" originally referred to a political faction within the Democratic Party, though it was also used to refer to the same group as its modern version (poor white Southerners, particularly farmers).
• The two-day weekend was invented in the eastern United States in the 1930s, as a way to let both Christian and Jewish workers observe the Sabbath. Previously, virtually all people worked 6 days a week. Likewise, the 40-hour work week didn't become widespread until the 1950s in the US, and not until later in many other countries.
• Although freeways date back to the 1920s, the Interstate Highway System (which set up the route numbering system designated by red, white, and blue shields) was not enacted until 1956. Freeways themselves were often used just for things like shipping war supplies until the 1940s.
• There was no "Divine Right of Kings" in the Middle Ages; the idea developed in the 17th century in reaction to the growing influence of presbyterian Protestantism, around the same time that absolute monarchy began to emerge as a political system in France and, to a lesser extent, England. It was developed as an ideology that would unify political and religious authority in the king, as opposed to medieval monarchy, which left religious matters to an independent church. Therefore, any projection of the "divine right" into premodern Europe, as if that is how monarchy was always viewed by all people before modern democracy, is a slight exaggeration driven by the fact that the two greatest anti-monarchical revolutions in France and Russia, did revolt against the Divine Right.
• The idea of banning drugs is actually a pretty modern one. Even in places where drug use was religiously prohibited (e.g. in the Muslim world vis-a-vis alcohol), nobody ever thought that the government should go after people who used intoxicants. Modern drug laws developed slowly in the 19th and 20th centuries, often for really vile reasons that had nothing to do with public health; you can see this particularly strongly in the US, where states on or near the Mexican border tended to ban cannabis use (because of the perception that only "dirty" Mexicans used it), while California (which had a long-running vendetta against its Chinese residents) banned opium (perceived to be a Chinese thing).
  • A particularly interesting one: the first time that LSD was banned was by California in 1966; it was later banned at the federal level in 1970. This was itself the result of long-term wrangling about the meaning and application of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs; when the treaty was first being negotiated in The '50s, the United States was one of the countries vehemently insisting that manufactured drugs like LSD should not be banned.
  • As recently as 1860, Britain and France were fighting wars with China in order to force them to legalise the opium trade.
• The PRC adopted the One-child Policy in 1979. For most of Mao Zedong's reign (1949-1976), Chinese were encouraged to have as many children as possible.
• Sodomy laws were still formally on the books in 14 US states until the Supreme Court struck them down in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. That said, they were virtually never enforced; the only reason that Lawrence reached the Supreme Court at all was (1) the particular cop who arrested the defendants in Lawrence had a personal grudge against one of them, and charged them with sodomy basically because he had nothing else to go on, and (2) the defendants were persuaded not to defend the charge on the merits or attempt to suppress the cops' evidence, the idea being that this was a one-in-a-million opportunity for gay-rights organizations to get sodomy laws struck down once and for all. Even then, when the case came up to the federal Supreme Court, only a bare 5-justice majority actually bought the idea that the law was unconstitutional because it dealt with what people could do in their own bedrooms—Justice O'Connor said that the law would've been fine if it had been forbidden anal and oral sex to everyone, rather than just to same-sex couples, while the other three justices were fine with the law's constitutionality (although Justice Thomas famously took time out of his day to write a short dissent calling the Texas sodomy statute "uncommonly silly").
• As late as the early 1990s, most Americans opposed interracial marriage, with opinion polls first showing a majority in favor in 1994. Sizable minorities of Americans over the age of 50 still oppose it, as do smaller minorities of younger people.
• The star-and-crescent didn't start becoming a pan-Islamic symbol until the 1950s; before then, it was an emblem of the Ottoman Empire specifically, and later of Turkish nationalism, and generally not associated with Islam. The Turks first adopted the flag after the conquest of Istanbul, but its origin is rather obscure; some attributed it to a legend about one sultan's dream, others said that it was a symbol of Istanbul borrowed from the Byzantines. The reason why the Turkish symbol is viewed as inseparable from Islam is because the Ottomans were the world's last widely recognized caliphate and protectors of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Prior to that, Islam was symbolized more by the color green, which represented the vegetation of Paradise. In many countries, it still does (many Muslim-majority countries today have flags with prominent green in it).
• Basic No-fault divorces (when a married couple mutually decide to split) is this and Older Than They Think.
  • The first time this was introduced was The French Revolution and it counted among the few pieces of pro-women legislation in that otherwise macho event, which arch-sexist Napoléon Bonaparte repealed. The next time it was brought into France was in the 1970s. Vladimir Lenin introduced this in Red October, but Josef Stalin repealed this.
  • In America, it wasn't legalized until the then-Governor of California, Ronald Reagan (who, it so happened, was divorced), signed it into state law in 1969. It was then legalized in 49 of the 50 states by 1985, with New York being the last to legalize it in 2010. Before then, couples wishing to split had to prove a reason for the divorce. Usually the wife would claim "cruelty" and greatly exaggerate abusive scenarios before a judge (saying her husband hit her, swore at her, etc), or the wife would claim adultery by allowing/encouraging her husband to date other women, frequently to the point where a couple which mutually desired divorce would hire a private detective and arrange with them to have the husband "caught" in a place where it would be conveniently easy to take a few photos to document the event. In a few places where abandonment/desertion was a possible grounds for divorce and the parties weren't especially urgent to get the papers through, one of the partners might agree to quietly set everything up for a move and then make a show of cursing the other spouse out over something ludicrously petty, storming out of the house, moving to the new place, and carefully avoiding going anywhere near the marital home for the next year or two. Usually there was lots of perjury involved (an old legal story is about a judge who would always say, at the beginning of his days earmarked for divorce proceedings, "Let the perjury commence"), and this was a key reason for no-fault divorces finally being legalized.
• For most of history, "democracy" has been a pejorative term; in ancient Greece, Rome, all of medieval Europe, and the early United States, "democracy" was synonymous with mob rule, the boorish masses attempting to force their way on the civilized elite. The Founding Fathers of the US often went out of their way to specify they were not creating a democracy; the word did not start to gain positive connotations in the US until the Jacksonian populist movement of the 1820s, and later still in Europe. Furthermore, the states of the classical world and the late 18th/early 19th centuries now retrospectively (and anachronistically) referred to as "democracies" were, at best, oligarchies with limited suffrage. First only people who had the right by birth could vote (the citizens of Ancient Greek poleis and Rome - very exclusive groups, all of them), later, wealthy people could vote, (the szlachta of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), then this devolved to people who owned property and had tax records, in both England and the United States. Naturally women, non-Christians^note in the case of England, non-Protestants, and minorities need not apply. This meant that for most of history in the Western World, the vast majority of people did not have any voice and representation in political office. Voting was seen as a privilege and not a right.
  • It was The French Revolution which first advanced universal male suffrage^note That is all men, regardless of wealth and property, regardless of race and religion: which meant French blacks, French Jews, French Protestants, which they put into effect in 1792 (and enshrined by law in the 1793 Constitution, which was never implemented on account of the Reign of Terror) after the Storming of the Tuileries, when France was in the middle of Civil War and instability, which meant that only a small part of the population voted anyway (mostly the Paris Basin area). The Second French Revolution of 1848, which brought back universal male suffrage after the Directory and Napoleonic reversal, had greater voter turnout but since the Forty-Eighters had no support base across France^note They were a mix of Centrists, Nostalgic Neo-Jacobins and Socialists, and the centrists (such as Alexis de Tocqueville) wanted nothing to do with the others and backed efforts to suppress the other parties, which prevented any broad republican consensus on the Left and lacked a proper candidate, the man who got voted in was Napoleon III, cue comedian Karl Marx: "First time as tragedy, second time as farce."
  • Universal male suffrage was actually a hot button issue in the US and much of Europe during most of the 19th century. And that's before you take into account "rotten boroughs"^note  A borough is the British term for a Parliamentary district that sent two members to the House of Commons. Rotten, or pocket, boroughs were districts that had been enfranchised by the King (some as far back as Norman times) but had lost their population or importance due to migration and regular demographic change (in one case, half the town had fallen into the sea). Thus a very small electorate, easily open to bribes and influence, could send two members to Parliament. One of the most notorious was Old Sarum, which had 20 eligible voters and was controlled by a landowner, while large cities like Manchester were effectively unrepresented. The Reform Act of 1832 effectively abolished this system, and only because the King flooded the House of Lords with enough new peerages to pass the Act. , and gerrymandered districts that basically cheated those few working class people who could vote out of any meaningful say and gave the power to the landed gentry. In fact, one party that campaigned against the ridiculous property-based voting law in Prussia still exists: the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of today's Germany. In England, incremental changes led to the Chartist Movement and the 1867 Reform Act, before a final Reform act after World War I decisively expanded the franchise. Otto von Bismarck allowed male suffrage and limited welfare (with the aim of bribing people away from radicalism) in a Reichstag which nonetheless gave the Kaiser most of the power.
  • Female suffrage will see its centenary in the 21st century in most of the world. Some Scandinavian, Eastern European and Commonwealth countries gave women the vote before England and the United States (at the federal level) did in 1920. As for France, well women didn't get the vote until 1945, the Liberation of France, which means that women's suffrage in France has a slightly longer history than India (which gave universal suffrage, male and female, upon independence).
    • Peculiarly, women having the right to vote is also Older Than They Think. In the Holy Roman Empire, high-ranking Abbesses in the Catholic Church were allowed to vote in assemblies alongside the various princes, and there are plenty of instances of conditional women's suffrage throughout the 1700s and 1800s. (New Jersey notoriously allowed women property owners the right to vote by accident in the late 18th century, though this was reversed as soon as a woman actually tried to exercise her voting rights.) As for universal suffrage, the Corsican Republic allowed women to vote in 1755, though it was revoked when it was annexed by France in 1768, and the Pitcairn Islands granted it in 1838. And France wasn't the last Western European country to give women the vote, as Switzerland and Lichtenstein only allowed it in 1971 (at the federal level) and 1984, respectively, meaning that North Korea gave women the right to vote earlier than they did (1946, and yes, they do actually hold elections).
  • The problem of course comes from the shifting definition of Democracy and Republic. While everyone agrees that democracy and representative government existed in some form in Athens, Rome and other city-states, the modern form of republic was anathema to the classic world (which brutally crushed any attempts to expand suffrage). England and the United States still took Rome as a model, which meant that they understood "liberty" as perfectly consistent with slavery and exclusion of women, after all the Romans did it, and they expanded suffrage only in the wake of global movements and intellectual challenges (which did not exist for Greece and Rome). Democracy was equated with "mob rule" and was seen as impractical, while Republic government was essentially an oligarchical plutocracy. The historian R. R. Palmer credits Maximilien Robespierre with defining modern democracy: Only a democratic or republican government— these two words are synonyms despite the abuses in common speech—because an aristocracy is no closer than a monarchy to being a republic. Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are of their own making, do for themselves all that they can do well, and by their delegates do all that they cannot do for themselves.
• Legal slavery, as in there is a law on the books that says people can be slaves, was banned at different times in different places. You might have heard that Lincoln freed the slaves (he did, just not in 1863, rather in 1865 — at least if we are talking about Maryland, Kentucky, West Virginia and Delaware), but of course the United States were neither the first country to ban slavery nor the last. Both Britain and France actually banned slavery before the US. The French did it twice (1793, 1848, both times by Republican governments), but only France and the United States abolished without compensating slaveowners (which the English did, naturally^note The famous "liberal" William Gladstone was the son of a slaveowner who owned 2039 slaves in the Caribbean and successfully lobbied for compensation for himself and other slaveowners on the 1833 emancipation). Brazil did not ban slavery until 1888, China until 1906, and Turkey until 1924. Some Arab countries had slavery well into the late 20th century, and Mauritania, the last country on Earth to abolish the institution, did not do so until 1981. And this of course does not even take into account the not exactly "laws on the books" forms of slavery in existence today. Some estimates say there have never been more slaves in the world than today.
  • That is, Britain and France abolished it nationally before the United States did. Vermont abolished slavery in its Constitution, so 1777 (if you go by when they wrote it) or 1791 (when they managed to get the federal government to accept them and their Constitution as the first non-original state and first free state).
  • The US actually didn't abolish slavery with the 13th Amendment - that just abolished it except as a punishment for crimes, and led immediately to southern states outlawing things like being unemployed (as "vagrancy") and then leasing convicts to the very plantations that used to own slaves directly. This practice was only ended in that form during WWII, when it was seen as being bad form for a country whose war propaganda was tied to being on the side of freedom (and even now prison labor is a very profitable industry). To put it another way, the Civil Rights Movement wasn't a distinct thing from abolition - plenty of people who marched with MLK had been legally enslaved.
• The "working-class right-wing bigot" has probably existed for as long as the liberal/conservative divide itself. However, it didn't start to become a political phenomenon until the 1950s, and didn't become a cultural phenomenon until about the early '70s, when the Archie Bunker character popularized it.
  • A less America-centric view would suggest that the working-class right-wing bigot character first became a cultural phenomenon in 1966. with Alf Garnett in the BBC series Till Death Us Do Part, on which All in the Family was modelled.
• The ubiquitous I Approved This Message disclaimer at the end of U.S. political ads was mandated by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. When first used in the 2004 election, George W. Bush actually put the disclaimer at the beginning of his ads while John Kerry put it at the end. Kerry might have lost the election, but putting the disclaimer at the end has since become the standard.
• The conservative hatred for socialized medicine in the US. While there were instances such as Ronald Reagan, in his early political career, going as far as recording a LP of spoken word against it, in 1971, Richard Nixon (yes, "Tricky Dick") proposed a health care reform plan that was way more liberal than Obama's Affordable Care Act ended up being. It didn't pass because Democrats were against it — Ted Kennedy wanted a single-payer system.
• When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, the Republican party was ambivalent towards the legalization of abortion. Nixon and Ford both supported it and the decision came from a conservative majority Supreme Court. Hell, Reagan liberalized abortion laws when he was governor of California in the '60s. It's not until the GOP got slaughtered in the 1974 midterms that the party decided to use it to go after evangelical voters.
• In the US, nudity was required for boys and men at most single-sex swimming pools until the 1960s. The rationale was founded in the American Public Health Association's recommendation. Until the introduction of nylon bathing suits, most — for men and women — were made of wool. Pool filters were easily clogged by shed wool fibers. Nylon swim trunks, improvements in pool filters and heavier use of stronger chlorine allowed the APHA to drop the recommendation in 1962, but some didn't stop the practice until the 1980s. As gender-integrated swimming pools became the norm, male nudity was phased out.
  • It wasn't until the late 1940s that men were widely allowed to go topless at pools and beaches.
• At-will employment—i.e, the right of an employer to fire a worker for any reason at any time—does not predate the late nineteenth century, with the principle first formulated in Horace Gray Wood's 1877 treatise Master and Servant. American courts gradually ruled in at-will employment as law during the 1880s and 1890s, reversing centuries of precedent from English common law that employees were assumed to be hired under a minimum one-year contract unless the worker agreed otherwise at the time of hiring. During the early and mid-nineteenth century, American courts had gradually whittled this convention down, ruling that a worker must be given at least one pay period's worth of notice (i.e, one week, one month, or one year) before dismissal, before ultimately stripping workers of any rights in the matter at the century's end.
• Spousal rape (i.e., the right of a man to rape his wife) was legal virtually everywhere until the 1970s, with the Soviet Union (1922) being one of the very few exceptions. For instance, all 50 US states permitted it until the 1970s, when state courts gradually started ruling against it. Oregon v. Rideout (1978) was the first spousal rape trial in the US. Oklahoma and North Carolina didn't outlaw it until 1993. Below are the years in which several other countries prohibited the practice:
  • Canada in 1983.
  • Ireland in 1990.
  • England in 1991.
  • France in 1992.
  • Finland in 1994.
  • Germany in 1997.
  • Thailand in 2007.
  • And it's still legal in dozens of other countries, including India and China.
    • Note that while merely being technically legal, an act of spousal rape could still be prosecuted as battery combined with sexual violence, especially if the victim had been wounded in the act. In most cases the spousal rape had not been outlawed in fear of false prosecutions.
• Face-to-face debating as a routine part of American politics is an invention of the television age. The first time presidential candidates debated each other was when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon did so in 1960, and even then, the practice didn't immediately catch on, and a second set of presidential debates didn't happen until 1976^note LBJ had refused to debate Goldwater in 1964, and Nixon — who naturally blamed the debate for losing him the election in 1960 — refused to participate in one in either 1968 or 1972, and in 1980 a single debate barely happened. It's only been since the 1984 election that presidential debates have been a standard part of the process. 1984 was also the first time a debate between vice presidential candidates took place. Even for lower offices, there had been only a scant few debates before 1960, most notably the Lincoln/Douglas Senate debates in 1858.
  • In the 19th century, presidential candidates did not openly seek the presidency at all. The ideal in American politics was for politicians to not seek office, but to be humble and virtuous pillars of their community, who only reluctantly accepted the nominations of their peers. Thus, to keep up this appearance, candidates made no public appearances during election season, gave no speeches, etc. The first major-party candidate to openly campaign on their own behalf was William Jennings Bryan in 1896.
• The interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment is a controversial issue, but it wasn't until District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 that the Supreme Court extended it to mean that individuals in the United States have a right to own a personal firearm for self-defense (as opposed to a right to own a firearm for militia service). Since D.C. is not a state itself, it wasn't determined until two years later that this right had to be applied to the individual states as part of the due process clause.
• Homebrew beer was illegal in the United States until 1978.
• The idea of having border fortifications between the US and Mexico is a product of the Great Depression. Prior to then, Mexican migrant workers were welcome to come and go as they pleased across the border as the seasons changed. Even then, most of the border apparatus we know today didn't really come to fruition until the Bush Jr. administration, though Clinton started the process.
• The city of London didn't have a democratically elected mayor until 2000. In fact, no cities or towns in the United Kingdom had democratically elected mayors before that point; before a local London referendum in 1998, and a later act of Parliament in 2000, cities and towns in the UK were generally run by city councils.
• Heavily partisan politics in America have only been the norm since around the 1980s. Prior to then, both major political parties had liberal and conservative wings, and it wasn't uncommon for Americans to vote for different parties from one election to the next. As recently as the 1976 presidential election, many people believed that Democrat Jimmy Carter was actually more conservative than his Republican opponent, Gerald Ford. This can mostly be chalked up to the heavily Democratic generation that grew up during the FDR administration (since one of the biggest indicators of your partisan lean comes from how successful the president of your early adulthood is), beginning to die off and being replaced in the electorate by their more conservative kids. Since Democrats controlled pretty much everything from the FDR administration until the Carter administration (Eisenhower and Nixon were both incredibly moderate, at least on economics), Republicans had no other choice but to have separate factions and to play ball with Democrats. When Republicans controlled everything from the Civil War to the FDR administration, large swathes of the population were still disenfranchised and Republicans could do whatever the hell they want. The '80s was the first time the parties had very different electoral makeups because it was the first time anything was competitive when women and ethnic minorities could vote. Now that the parties' voters are so different ^note  Republicans are increasingly white, married, non-college educated Christians who live in rural/exurban places while Democrats are people of color, religious minorities, city dwellers, college educated white people, and unmarried women, they don't need to have different wings.
• Seniors being a reliable Republican voting bloc is a recent phenomenon. As recently as the 2000 presidential election, Democrats' best age group was those over the age of 65. This is due to the generational turnover as explained above.
• The modern American political parties' development can be traced back to the Woodrow Wilson administration but didn't really start taking shape until the FDR administration. For the second half of the 19th Century and well into the 20th, there wasn't much difference between the parties other than support for tariffs (Republicans for, Democrats not so much). There were only two Democratic presidents between the Civil War and World War I since so many people supported Republican trade policies. By the time of the Depression, people voted for Roosevelt to just try something different since tariffs had so exacerbated the suffering. Roosevelt really only started experimenting with what would become of the modern party's economic principles (like adopting Keynesian economics) out of desperation more than anything. He was willing to throw everything against the wall in the hope that something would stick.
• African Americans being almost monolithically (about 90%) Democrats only really dates back to the Civil Rights legislation of the Lyndon Johnson administration. When black men were granted the right to vote in the 1870s, they were almost exclusively Republicans because they were so oppressed by the solidly Democratic governors in the south and to support the party of Lincoln. Republican Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to have an official meeting with a black person and he made a point to start appointing more black people to federal positions. Things began to start to shift as more time passed from slavery and as they started leaving the south en masse and moving to the cities of the north in the early 20th century. It picked up throughout the New Deal Era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With urban Democrats supporting Unions in the North, there was an upward mobility for emigrants not seen back home. Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican (who was incredibly moderate and really more of an Independent) to really try to reach out to black voters and court their support but by that point the damage had started to really take effect. The shift really took hold as the Democrats took the mantle of the party of Civil Rights in the '60s. No Republican presidential nominee has gotten more than 13% of the black vote since Richard Nixon in 1968.
• Although some of its related agencies were already established in the 20th century, the US government's Department of Homeland Security didn't exist until 2002; it was created in response to 9/11.
  • The US Department of Education was established by the Carter administration in late 1979.
• The term "Overton window" — meaning the range of opinions considered politically acceptable in mainstream discourse — is named after Joseph P. Overton, who, according to his colleague Joseph G. Lehman, first described it in the mid-1990s. However, the idea was never published or made known to the wider world until after Overton's death in 2003, at which point Lehman began to publicize it; the first appearances of the term "Overton window" in the press date to 2006.
• The Conservative Party of Canada—currently one of the two most powerful political parties in the country—has only existed since 2003, when it was formed from a union of several smaller conservative and right-wing parties. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister from 2006 to 2015) was actually the first member of the party to serve as Prime Minister, and previously helped found the party. For perspective: the Liberal Party of Canada (their primary rival) has been around since 1867.
  • However, this is also Older Than They Think, as the name "Conservative Party of Canada" was one of the many names used from 1867 onward by one of the major parties of Canadian politics, and is the name most commonly used to refer to them historically. This Conservative Party of Canada merged with the Progressive Party of Canada in 1942, becoming the Progressive-Conservative party, which was one of the major parties involved in the 2003 union.
• In the United States, credit cards were not issued to women in their own name until the passing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Most banks did not give loans to women until then, either.
• The first election in Great Britain to take place on a single day was in 1918; before then, elections took place over a four-week period.
  • Similarly, American presidential elections took place over the 34 days preceding the first Wednesday in December, until 1845, when a federal law established a uniform, single election day in November. This change was due to the invention of the telegraph and its potential to influence results during the course of an election in areas that had not voted yet.
• American elections did not use secret ballots until after the 1884 presidential election (between then and 1891, all states made the switch). Before then, votes were publicly declared at the voting booth, and voters presented pre-printed ballots that were distributed in partisan newspapers. The UK switched to secret ballots only slightly earlier, in 1872.
• There were no primaries in American presidential elections until 1912, and even as late as 1968, only 12 states used them. Furthermore, primaries were not binding until the 1972 election season, following party reforms by both the Democrats and the Republicans. Before then, presidential candidates were chosen at the national party conventions, which were real contests (albeit rife with back-room deals), unlike the formalities they have become today.
• The notion of journalistic objectivity—i.e., that reporters should be "fair" and present all sides of an issue as equally valid, and not express their opinion—first emerged in the 1920s United States, being particularly influenced by the work of Walter Lippman. Before then, newspapers were openly and proudly partisan, and were expected to be.
• Flogging as a criminal punishment wasn't outlawed in the UK until 1961.
• In England, translating The Bible into English (or any language other than Latin) was a crime punishable by death until the approval of the Tyndale Bible in 1535. Before then, the only complete English Bible was Wycliffe's Bible (completed c. 1395), which the English authorities ruthlessly suppressed.
• The gold standard may seem like a ridiculously outdated mercantilist policy, but in the 19th century, it was actually seen as a modern replacement for the silver standard. Britain was the first nation to switch to the gold standard, in 1821; Canada in 1853; Germany in 1873; the United States also in 1873; and the rest of the world followed over the next few decades, with China being the last holdout, switching from silver to gold in 1935.
  • Japan was on the rice standard until 1871, when it switched to gold.
• Cremation was illegal everywhere in the Western world until the late 19th century; for instance, the United Kingdom did not legalize the practice until 1902.
• In 2021, Dr. Jill Biden became the first First Lady ever in the history of the US to hold an outside job while her husband was in office. When she was Second Lady from 2009-2017, she was also the first one to hold a job. Although her successors, Karen Pence and Doug Emhoff (the first Second Gentlemen) work(ed) part time. Coincidentally, all three held teaching jobs. Biden teaches English at a community college, Pence is an elementary school art teacher, and Emhoff quit his job practicing law and took a lecturer position at Georgetown Law. Until the early 20th century, the First Lady was more of a hostess and didn't have any staff or an official office. Edith Roosevelt first hired a staff and set up an office in 1901. It wasn't until the mid part of the century that the First Lady had a specific "cause", a tradition that began with Edith's niece Eleanor. Lucy Hayes (b. 1831) was the first First Lady to have an undergraduate degree (and also the youngest ever) and since Jacqueline Kennedy, every one except for Barbara Bush and Melania Trump has had a degree. Every one since Hillary Clinton, also save for Trump, has had a postgraduate degree.
• The US may be the world's biggest copyright crusader today, but for most of its history, it had exactly the opposite reputation, as a shameless piracy hub that paid zero respect to foreign copyrights. The first US law to acknowledge the copyrights of foreign works, at all, was passed in 1891, and its scope and enforcement were spotty at best until after World War II. The US did not join the Berne Convention until 1988, and was the last industrialized nation to do so.
• Membership to the United Nations:
  • Neither North nor South Korea were members of the United Nations until 1991, when they joined simultaneously.
  • European microstates Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino all joined between 1990 and 1993, even though they had been sovereign for decades or even centuries by the time the UN was created.
  • Most Pacific countries also didn't join the United Nations until after the end of the Cold War. This includes the Marshall Islands (1991), the Federated States of Micronesia (1991), Palau (1994), Kiribati (1999), Nauru (1999), Tonga (1999), and Tuvalu (2000).
  • Switzerland, while being host to many official agencies of the United Nations, was itself not a full member until late 2002.
  • On the flip side, the Republic of China was a member of the United Nations until 1971, when it was forced to give up its seat to its much larger rival, the People's Republic of China. As in, the most populous country in the world, and one of the world's current superpowers, was not a member of the United Nations until 1971.
• The supposed maritime tradition of "women and children first" has never been much of a tradition. The earliest attestation of the phrase, as well as the first application of the "law", dates to the 1840 sinking of the American packet boat Poland. After this, there were only about six or so other ship-sinkings where the principle was ever invoked. But one of those few instances was during the RMS Titanic disaster of 1912, and so the public was left with the false impression that "women and children first" was standard practice. For pretty much all of maritime history, the usual course of action was more like "women and children last"; sailors were not keen to use up precious resources and lifeboat space on people who could not row.
  • The notion that "the captain goes down with the ship" is even newer, being first expressed in 1901, just 11 years before Edward Smith perished with the Titanic. This is one of the very few times a captain has ever deliberately gone down with his ship, but the fame of the incident gave the wider world the impression that it was normal.
• The first casino on a Native American reservation opened in 1980, and even then, it was illegal, and forcefully shut down. Native American casinos were legalized by the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
• Travelers between the US and Canada generally didn't need any identification at all, much less a passport, to cross the border until after 9/11.
• The first country to completely ban smoking on airplanes was Canada, which did so in 1990. The US followed suit in 2000.
• There were no appeals in federal court cases in the United States until the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1889, which established the US Court of Appeals.
  • Courts in the United Kingdom did not have appeals of any kind until 1873 for civil cases and 1907 for criminal cases.
• Speaking of American courts, the modern notion of federal question jurisdiction (i.e., the ability of federal courts to hear civil cases alleging the violation of the Constitution, federal law, or a treaty to which the US is a party) dates only to 1875. It had been introduced in 1801, but repealed the next year.
  • And even then, federal question cases also required the plaintiff to meet the required amount in controversy. When Congress created diversity jurisdiction, allowing the federal courts to hear cases in which the opposing parties are from different states, it also required that the plaintiff claim a certain amount of monetary damages.^note since 1996, the minimum required amount is $75,000.01 When federal question jurisdiction was permanently established in 1875, the amount in controversy requirement^note then $500.01 was extended to those cases. The amount in controversy requirement wasn't repealed for federal question cases until 1976 for actions against the US government and 1980 for all other federal question cases.^note In both 1976 and 1980, the required amount in controversy was $10,000.01.
• The District of Columbia only started participating in presidential elections in 1964, and it took the passage of a constitutional amendment (the 23rd) to allow it to happen.
• Nowadays, the US president is probably the most highly-guarded person in the world, with every location he visits put on virtual lockdown. This was not always the case, though; until the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), who entered office following the assassination of William McKinley, anyone could visit the White House and even go right to the president's office and chat with him. The only staff in the White House were a few household servants; no guards were posted there. Presidents would usually walk around Washington without any kind of security detail up to then, too; the very first statutory funds granted to presidential security were the 1906 Secret Service appropriations. The accessibility of the president to the common folk was seen by Americans as a point of national pride, an indication that the president was not an elected emperor. Even after Secret Service protection became routine, protective measures were comparatively modest compared to today — a bodyguard or two — until they escalated following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and again following the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life in 1981.
  • Related to this; Secret Service protection would not be extended to (non-incumbent) candidates for the Presidency until 1968 immediately following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
• In the United States, there were virtually no laws against prostitution until approximately 1910, when a moral panic over "white slavery" led to a wave of anti-prostitution laws, which were further strengthened when the US entered World War I in 1917. Until 1910, almost every city in America had brothels, which operated openly in specially-designated red light districts.
• Although the first British Prime Minister is conventionally considered to be Robert Walpole (1721-1742), this terminology was not used at the time, as the term "Prime Minister" was used exclusively by Walpole's opponents to insinuate that he saw himself as above the rest of the King's cabinet. Walpole's official titles were First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Leader of the House of Commons; for the next century, his successors followed his lead in denying that there was any such office as Prime Minister, as all cabinet members were supposed to be equal under British political convention. The first Prime Minister to refer to himself as such, in an official capacity, was Benjamin Disraeli, signing the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. The first Act of Parliament to acknowledge the existence of the Prime Minister was the Chequers Estate Act of 1917, and the first to explicitly define the position was the Ministers of the Crown Act of 1937 (this being done to assign the Prime Minister a salary.)
• The first US president to attend a press conference in person was Woodrow Wilson, starting in 1913.
• The practice of Native American religion was not generally protected under American law, and was in many cases outright prohibited, until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978.
• The UK had no laws against abortion until the passing of Lord Ellenborough's Act in 1803, and Connecticut was the first US state to outlaw abortion, doing so in 1821.
• The name "Pakistan" was invented whole-cloth during the partition of India in 1947: it refers to Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan, which are the regions that make up Pakistan, with "Pak" also happening to be Persian for "pure". In fact, most countries that have the suffix "-stan" in its name only got it relatively recently (Afghanistan got it in the early 19th century). Somewhat ironically, despite the suffix's association with Islamic countries, the oldest existing country that has the suffix "-stan" is Armenia, which has been a Christian country since before the Romans ever became Christians. Armenians have been referring to their country as "Hayastan" since the 5th century.
• The term "rule of law" dates to 1883.
• The White House was officially called the Executive Mansion until the start of Theodore Roosevelt's administration in 1901, when he changed its name.
• Ubiquitous polling for United States presidential elections did not become prevalent until the 21st century, when websites such as RealClearPolitics (founded in 2000) and FiveThirtyEight (founded in 2008) began aggregating polls from all different firms and using them to prognosticate results. Prior to this, polls were much fewer and further between, and there would be a lot more uncertainty heading into election nights.
• The first US president to leave the US while in office was Theodore Roosevelt, who visited Panama in 1906. His predecessor William McKinley didn't want to be the first, so when he visited Niagara Falls on the morning of September 6, 1901 (before his assassination a few hours later), McKinley only went halfway across the Honeymoon Bridge so he wouldn't enter Canada.
  • On the flip side, the first US president to receive a foreign dignitary was Ulysses S. Grant, who met with King Kalākaua of the Kingdom of Hawaii when he visited Washington in 1874.