This page is a list of the amendments to the United States Constitution. Since the Constitution went into effect on March 4, 1789, twenty-seven amendments have been added to the Constitution. This page gives just a short summary of each of these amendments. For more information about each amendment, click on the links in the box at the right of this page. The amendments are numbered in Roman numerals from I (One) to XXVII (Twenty-seven).
Usually, for an amendment to be approved and added to the Constitution, there are two steps:
Once this happens, the amendment becomes part of the Constitution.
The first ten amendments to the Constitution were all approved together. As a group, they are called the Bill of Rights.
Between 1789 and December 2014, about 11,623 amendments were proposed in Congress. However, most of these suggested amendments "die" in the committees that suggest them. In total, in the past 227 years, Congress has sent only 33 amendments to the states for ratification just about one out of every 500 suggested amendments. Of these 33, the states have ratified 27.
Out of the six unratified amendments, two failed when they were not ratified by a set deadline. The other four are still officially "pending"; they do not have enough votes to pass or fail, but they also do not have deadlines written into them.
Congress sent twelve amendments to the states for ratification on September 25, 1789. Ten of these were officially ratified on December 15, 1791: two years, two months, and 20 days after Congress proposed them. Here is a summary of what those amendments say.
Kirtankhola
Kirtankhola () is a river that starts from Sayeshtabad in Barisal district and ends into the Gajalia near Gabkhan khal (canal). The total length of the river is about .
Separate but equal
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine that existed in the United States for 58 years. It was based on the United States Supreme Court decision "Plessy v. Ferguson". Here the Court ruled that racial segregation was not in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as long as the racially separate facilities were equal. The Court also said segregation was not discrimination. Segregation in public accommodations, transportation and schools was legally justified by "Plessy" until it was overturned in 1954 by "Brown v. Board of Education".
After the American Civil War, the Republican controlled Congress passed three amendments to the Constitution called the Reconstruction Amendments. The first was the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which abolished slavery in the United States. The second was the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which provided equal protection of the laws to all citizens. The third was the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution that gave voting rights to African American men.
After the passage of the reconstruction amendments, things began to get worse for black people in the South. Many whites would not accept the new changes. The economy in the south was stagnant and taxes were high. There was a good deal of corruption which was made worse by carpetbaggers from the north and southern supporters of reconstruction called scalawags. Out of fear and hatred, white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were born. Through the use of violence including lynching, rape, murder and terrorism, they sought to control African Americans and keep them from using their new rights.
Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation, and to prevent being excluded from jury duty. The bill was passed by the 43rd United States Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1875. Several years later, the Supreme Court ruled in "Civil Rights Cases" (1883) that sections of the act were unconstitutional. The Court's reasoning was the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited discrimination by states not by individuals. As a result Congress could not protect against individual cases of discrimination.
Florida was the first to pass a law requiring railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races”. Soon, Texas, Mississippi and other states had the same or similar laws. In 1890, when Louisiana passed a similar law, blacks began resisting. In 1892 it was agreed Homer Plessy would challenge the laws in order to form a test case. Plessy "passed" for white and while riding on an East Louisiana train in the "white section" announced he was black and refused to move to the "colored" section. Plessy was arrested and 1896 his case reached the Supreme Court. The case was "Plessy v. Ferguson", Fergusson being the name of the Judge who first ruled against him in the New Orleans Criminal District Court.
In 1896, the Supreme Court heard the case. Plessy's lawyers argued Louisiana's Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court, in a 7-1 decision decided against Plessy and that the law was constitutional. Writing the majority opinion, Justice Henry Brown wrote:
The lone dissenter, Justice John Harlan, saw terrible consequences in the judicial opinion rendered by the court. He wrote:
Beginning in 1890, Southern Democrats began to pass state laws that took away the rights African Americans had gained. These racist laws became known as Jim Crow laws. "Plessy" caused Jim Crow laws to go unchallenged by the federal government for 58 years. They included laws that made it impossible for blacks to vote. Since they could not vote, blacks also could not be on juries. Other laws required racial segregation so blacks could not go to the same schools, restaurants or hospitals as whites. They could not use the same bathrooms or drink from the same drinking fountains. They could also not sit in front of whites on busses or trains. Many southern Christian ministers taught that whites were the chosen people and blacks were cursed by God. Lynchings were designed to instill fear in blacks and keep them in their place. Between 1882 and 1968, 3,440 black men and women were lynched. Others were burned at the stake, castrated, beaten or murdered. The Jim Crow era began to end after the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision overruled Plessy.
Berber calendar
The Berber calendar is a calendar used most often in the region of North Africa, to control seasonal agricultural works.
Address bus
An address bus is a computer bus architecture. It is used to transfer data between devices. The devices are identified by the hardware address of the physical memory (the physical address). The address is stored in the form of binary numbers to enable the data bus to access memory storage.
Address buses are made up of a collection of wires connecting the CPU with main memory that is used to identify particular locations (addresses) in main memory. The width of the address bus (that is, the number of wires) determines how many unique memory locations can be addressed. Modern personal computers and Macintoshes have as many as 36 address lines. This theoretically allows them to access 64 gigabytes of main memory. However, the actual amount of memory that can be accessed is usually much less than this theoretical limit due to chipset and motherboard limitations.
An address bus is part of the system bus architecture, which was developed to decrease costs and enhance modular integration. However, most modern computers use a variety of individual buses for specific tasks.
An individual computer contains a system bus, which connects the major components of a computer system and has three main elements, of which the address bus is one, along with the data bus and control bus.