Problem: Luzzatti was born of Jewish parents in Venice on 11 March 1841. After completing his studies in law at the University of Padua, he attracted the attention of the Austrian police by his lectures on political economy, and was obliged to emigrate after starting a mutual aid society among gondoliers. In 1863 he obtained a professorship at the Milan Technical Institute; in 1867 he was appointed professor of constitutional law at Padua, whence he was transferred to the University of Rome. Gifted with eloquence and energy, he popularized the economic ideas of Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch in Italy, worked for the establishment of a commercial college at Venice, and contributed to the spread of people's banks on a basis of limited liability throughout the country.

He was minister of agriculture in the second Sonnino Cabinet (December 2, 1909 - March 21, 1910), and on the resignation of the latter was called upon to form a cabinet himself. His administration, which lasted until March 18, 1911, was not very successful and fell over a proposed electoral reform. Although a man of first-class financial ability, great honesty and wide culture, he had not the strength of character necessary to lead a government: he showed lack of energy in dealing with opposition and tried to avoid all measures likely to make him unpopular. Furthermore, he never realized that with the chamber, as it was then constituted, he only held office at Giolitti's good pleasure.  During the First World War, he was consistently pro-Ally and strongly supported Italian intervention, but his tone was on the whole pessimistic. Although he did not take office while the war lasted, he was always consulted on all financial matters, and his sound advice was generally followed.  He became treasury minister in the second incarnation of the Nitti cabinet (March 12 - May 10, 1920), but did not resume office in the third. At the general elections of May 1921, he decided not to stand for parliament again, and was made a senator. In spite of his advanced age, he continued to write on economic and financial problems with his accustomed lucidity and soundness of judgment, insisting on the necessity for Italy to return to free trade and to reduce government interference in business matters to a minimum.

Did he have high approval ratings?

Answer with quotes: His administration, which lasted until March 18, 1911, was not very successful


Problem: Ford was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. on July 14, 1913, at 3202 Woolworth Avenue in Omaha, Nebraska, where his parents lived with his paternal grandparents. His mother was Dorothy Ayer Gardner and his father was Leslie Lynch King Sr., a wool trader and a son of prominent banker Charles Henry King and Martha Alicia King (nee Porter). Gardner separated from King just sixteen days after her son's birth. She took her son with her to the Oak Park, Illinois, home of her sister Tannisse and brother-in-law, Clarence Haskins James.

After returning to Grand Rapids in 1946, Ford became active in local Republican politics, and supporters urged him to take on Bartel J. Jonkman, the incumbent Republican congressman. Military service had changed his view of the world. "I came back a converted internationalist", Ford wrote, "and of course our congressman at that time was an avowed, dedicated isolationist. And I thought he ought to be replaced. Nobody thought I could win. I ended up winning two to one."  During his first campaign in 1948, Ford visited voters at their doorsteps and as they left the factories where they worked. Ford also visited local farms where, in one instance, a wager resulted in Ford spending two weeks milking cows following his election victory.  Ford was a member of the House of Representatives for 25 years, holding the Grand Rapids congressional district seat from 1949 to 1973. It was a tenure largely notable for its modesty. As an editorial in The New York Times described him, Ford "saw himself as a negotiator and a reconciler, and the record shows it: he did not write a single piece of major legislation in his entire career." Appointed to the House Appropriations Committee two years after being elected, he was a prominent member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Ford described his philosophy as "a moderate in domestic affairs, an internationalist in foreign affairs, and a conservative in fiscal policy." Ford was known to his colleagues in the House as a "Congressman's Congressman".  In the early 1950s, Ford declined offers to run for either the Senate or the Michigan governorship. Rather, his ambition was to become Speaker of the House, which he called "the ultimate achievement. To sit up there and be the head honcho of 434 other people and have the responsibility, aside from the achievement, of trying to run the greatest legislative body in the history of mankind ... I think I got that ambition within a year or two after I was in the House of Representatives".

What did he fight for

Answer with quotes: of course our congressman at that time was an avowed, dedicated isolationist. And I thought he ought to be replaced.


Problem: Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 - December 17, 1881) was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist who worked as a railroad lawyer. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois. Interested in what holds societies together, he proposed the concept that the earliest human domestic institution was the matrilineal clan, not the patriarchal family. Also interested in what leads to social change, he was a contemporary of the European social theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were influenced by reading his work on social structure and material culture, the influence of technology on progress.

After graduating in 1840, Morgan returned to Aurora to read the law with an established firm. In 1842 he was admitted to the bar in Rochester, where he went into partnership with a Union classmate, George F. Danforth, a future judge. They could find no clients, as the nation was in an economic depression, which had started with the Panic of 1837. Morgan wrote essays, which he had begun to do while studying law, and published some in The Knickerbocker under the pen name Aquarius.  On January 1, 1841, Morgan and some friends from Cayuga Academy formed a secret fraternal society which they called the Gordian Knot. As Morgan's earliest essays from that time had classical themes, the club may have been a kind of literary society, as was common then. In 1841 or 1842 the young men redefined the society, renaming it the Order of the Iroquois. Morgan referred to this event as cutting the knot. In 1843 they named it the Grand Order of the Iroquois, followed by the New Confederacy of the Iroquois. They made the group a research organization to collect information on the Iroquois, whose historical territory for centuries had included central and upstate New York west of the Hudson and the Finger Lakes region.  The men intended to resurrect the spirit of the Iroquois. They tried to learn the languages, assumed Iroquois names, and organized the group by the historic pattern of Iroquois tribes. In 1844 they received permission from the former Freemasons of Aurora to use the upper floor of the Masonic temple as a meeting hall. New members underwent a secret rite called inindianation in which they were transformed spiritually into Iroquois. They met in the summer around campfires and paraded yearly through the town in costume. Morgan seemed infused with the spirit of the Iroquois. He said, "We are now upon the very soil over which they exercised dominion ... Poetry still lingers around the scenery...." These new Iroquois retained a literary frame of mind, but they intended to focus on "the writing of a native American epic that would define national identity".

Who else was involved in this project?

Answer with quotes:
Morgan and some friends from Cayuga Academy