20 Times A Piece Of Paper Changed History

The Titanic departed from England in April 1912. It was built to meet British maritime law requiring enough lifeboats for around 1,000 passengers on vessels that large. This law was established many years before and had not been revised when ships began growing much larger. Titanic had lifeboats in excess of what the law required, not because of negligence, but because it was following the law. Even with those lifeboats, more than 1,500 people died when the Titanic struck an iceberg.

In January of 1917, the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a secret telegram to the Mexican government suggesting a German-Mexican alliance against the United States. If Mexico entered the conflict, it would be given Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The British intercepted and deciphered the message, and President Wilson made it public on March 1. Mexico rejected the offer, but its publication destroyed American neutrality. Combined with German U-boat warfare, it led Congress to declare war a few weeks later.

In December 1917, a French freighter named Mont-Blanc pulled into Halifax harbor in Canada loaded with more than 2,900 tons of explosives destined for the war effort in Europe. Port officials had checked off the ship’s cargo list and knew exactly what was inside, but wartime regulations prevented the vessel from flying a flag indicating its hazardous cargo or advising ships in the area to keep their distance. When Mont-Blanc collided with another ship, it burst into flames, burned for 18 minutes, and then exploded, killing approximately 2,000 people and leveling much of Halifax.

When British forces under Lord Raglan saw Russian troops rolling away captured cannon from a hilltop at Balaclava in October 1854, Lord Raglan sent a written order to Lord Lucan, commander of the cavalry in the valley, telling him to advance and prevent the enemy from carrying away the guns. Lucan had no way to see the position of the guns. Louis Nolan, the officer who delivered Raglan’s message, pointed toward a heavily fortified battery instead. Lucan led the Light Brigade into a charge toward that battery, resulting in hundreds of casualties among some 670 men.

A scrap of paper, a torn memo without a signature, was found in a wastebasket at the German embassy in Paris in 1894. It contained secret details about French artillery that were supposed to be shared with Germany. Antisemitic army officers identified the handwriting as belonging to Jewish artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus, sentenced him to life on Devil’s Island, and moved on. Eventually, an officer named Georges Picquart discovered that the secret plans had actually been written by another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. The officers hid the truth, but Dreyfus was finally cleared in 1906.

In May 1939, the MS St. Louis departed Hamburg with 937 people aboard, most of them Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution. Almost everyone had valid landing certificates for Cuba, which they had purchased legally. However, several days before the ship sailed, Cuba’s president rescinded those certificates. As the St. Louis approached Cuba, just 28 of its passengers were allowed to disembark, while the U.S., which the ship then approached seeking refuge, rejected the rest. The ship headed back toward Europe, where more than 250 of its passengers would be killed in the Holocaust.

Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a black man or woman in a Northern state could be captured if a slave owner’s agent claimed that they were his property. There was no jury trial, and they were not allowed to speak in their own defense. The federal officials who sat as judges in these matters received $10 for returning someone to slavery, but only $5 for freeing them. Even those who had certificates of freedom might be told that the document was a forgery. No appeal was permitted. Many free blacks fled to Canada.

In December 1085, William I, the first Norman ruler of England, had his officials make a complete inventory of every village’s acreage, peasants, and cattle. The survey resulted in a collection of manuscript books completed in 1086 that described the holdings of 13,000 manors. Whatever his agents put on paper was immutable truth and forever sealed the Norman takeover of land that had belonged to England’s Anglo-Saxon nobility. The book was nicknamed Domesday by the English landholders who dreaded it, because its rulings were as final as those on Judgment Day.

In 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a mail carrier from Harlem, published a paper travel guide with listings of Black-owned and non-segregated hotels, restaurants, and gas stations throughout the country. Under Jim Crow, Black motorists faced the risks of being denied service, harassed by police, or left stranded in towns where they couldn’t stay overnight. If you had a missing or out-of-date copy, your family might end up without a place to rest. Green continued to publish it every year through 1966, after the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964, rendered it less needed.

In the San Francisco earthquake and fire of April 1906, the city’s Hall of Records was destroyed, including the birth and marriage certificates stored there. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese immigrants were prevented from acquiring citizenship through naturalization. However, all persons born in the United States were still citizens. With records of such births now missing, Chinese immigrants began claiming they were born in San Francisco, creating “paper sons” back in China and selling those false identities. The Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943.

In 1921, the Soviet government revoked the citizenship of all Russians who left during the Russian Civil War. Roughly 800,000 people became stateless in an instant, unable to cross borders or work legally anywhere. In response, Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees, created an entirely new form of legal document: the Nansen Passport. Dozens of countries would eventually honor the passport, allowing its holders to legally work and travel, but the documents never provided any path to citizenship.

In 1716, John Law, a Scottish economist, persuaded France’s regent to allow him to establish a bank that could issue the nation’s first paper money, redeemable for gold and silver. He also sold stock in his Mississippi Company based on fantasies about the riches to be found in Louisiana, and he printed paper money well beyond the amount of gold in the bank. In 1720, investors tried to redeem their paper money. When the bank failed to pay, the currency became worthless nearly overnight, leading to riots in Paris.

From November 1, 1765, all legal documents, land deeds, wills, newspapers, even playing cards in the colonies were to be printed on paper that had been officially taxed by Britain’s new Stamp Act. Contracts drawn up on unstamped paper couldn’t be used in court, and those who purchased stamped paper were acknowledging Parliament’s right to levy a tax for which they had no representation. With no reasonable alternative, mobs rioted against stamp agents and halted court proceedings until Parliament eventually rescinded the law in March of the next year.

The British Parliament shut Boston harbor to incoming ships in June 1774, until restitution was made for the tea that was dumped in the harbor. No ship could load or unload without the right paperwork, but Parliament had moved the customs office that issued it 20 miles away to Salem, leaving ships stuck while agents traveled back and forth for forms. Neighboring colonies sent food to Boston overland to keep people from starving, which helped push the colonies toward their first joint Congress.

By the terms of an 1848 treaty that ended the Mexican-American War, the Californio families, who were Spanish- and Mexican-era landowners, retained legal title to their land. Yet an 1851 statute required them to prove their title in court with hand-drawn maps showing where trees and creeks were located, while pitting them against English-speaking surveyors producing official plat maps. The statute created a land commission to review these claims. The commission confirmed more than 70 percent of claims, but on average the proceedings lasted 17 years, and the cost of fees to both lawyers and surveyors compelled most families to sell their property.

Back in the early 1920s, a fire started in the basement of a federal building in Washington, D.C., where the 1890 census documents, covering 62 million Americans at the time, were stored outside a fireproof vault. The firefighters’ hoses drenched the unbound rolls of paper, and fire, water, and eventually years of neglect took out nearly all of them. A small number of individual records remained, but for decades there was no census record to speak of. Outraged citizens petitioned Congress, and the U.S. National Archives was established.

Trujillo was dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. In 1932, he enacted a law saying every adult male citizen had to purchase a paper ID card, the cédula de identidad. Each one needed to be replaced annually, with the renewal fee serving as a source of state income. Any man found without a current, stamped cédula could be arrested, beaten, or sent to work on sugar cane plantations. The secret police also employed the cards as a tool of surveillance, noting those who were suspected opponents of the regime.

American seamen carried Protection Certificates, issued under an Act of Congress in the 1790s, to prove they sailed under the protection of the United States. In the Napoleonic Wars, however, the Royal Navy of Great Britain, severely short of manpower, visited American merchant vessels in search of deserters from the fleet. The British officers frequently tore up such papers on deck, declaring them spurious, and maintaining that every British subject was bound by his allegiance until death. As many as 6,000 American seamen were impressed during this period. The disregard of these documents was a leading cause of the War of 1812.

Under French Revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, in 1793 during the Reign of Terror, there was a law passed requiring every citizen to carry a “certificat de civisme,” a document issued by their local surveillance committee attesting to their revolutionary zeal, when traveling or working around the country. That paper could be withheld, denied, or revoked if one had an enemy, a past history, or even noble blood. A person without it was labeled a “suspect” and tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal. The penalty was death at the guillotine.

Dutch civil servant Jacobus Lentz created a virtually unhackable ID system in the 1930s. It was not because he was pro-Nazi, but because he was a meticulous bureaucrat, always seeking the ideal administrative practice. The Germans then used Lentz’s system to find and isolate Jewish people in their occupied country. Even though Dutch resistance members firebombed the Amsterdam registry and Royal Air Force planes bombed its backup archive in The Hague, 73% of Dutch Jews, the largest proportion in Western Europe, were deported and murdered.

This content was created with the help of AI.