On February 19, 1861, Czar Alexander II promulgated the Emancipation Manifesto, which abolished the serfdom in Russia after over two hundred years of the practice.

Read the Emancipation Manifesto.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9066, authorizing the wartime internment of Japanese Americans.

Learn more about the internment of Japanese Americans from Vernillia Randall at the University of Dayton School of Law and read the first chapter of Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters of World War II, by Eric Muller of the University of North Carolina Law School.