Kelli’s Reviews > A Young People's History of the United States > Status Update

Women garment workers in New York City, at the start of the twentieth century, gained inspiration for their own movement of resistance from the words of the poet Shelley:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many, they are few!

In the fall of 2006, the U.S. Congress passed a bill that allowed the CIA harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists in secret prisons around the world. The bill also did away with the right of habeas corpus for an “unlawful enemy combatant,” even a U.S. citizen. The loss of this right, which is guaranteed in the Constitution, meant that prisoners would not be brought before a court to challenge their arrest.

By the spring of 1846, the army was ready to start the war that Polk wanted. All it needed was an excuse.