In July of 1798, Adams signed into law the Sedition Act, making defaming his Administration a federal crime.
Sultan Abdulaziz read impertinence and sedition into editorials of this kind, and in January 1865 the government introduced censorship following the example of Napoleon III.
Signed into law the Sedition Act in 1798; depending on your point of view, this was either so that he could have anyone who disagreed with him thrown in jail or so that he could protect the country from dangerous anarchists.
I still love the corny jokes, the angst, the anachronistic insertion of Patrick Swayze singing She's Like the Wind into an oldies soundtrack, the subtle sedition woven into the deceptively cheesy backdrop.
But will the opposition engage after the new Morsi-appointed prosecutor general referred a case against one of their leaders, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohammed El Baradei, to authorities for investigation into alleged espionage and sedition?
No matter what progressive issue you pick, conservatives are working to turn it into nothing less than sedition, carried out by an illegal president who is actually a traitor.
When Daniel Defoe was accused of sedition, it was into this rotten honeycomb of dilapidated hovels that he fled for safety.
Later in his career, of course, Adams would sign into law the Alien and Sedition Acts.
In case you're not familiar with the plot, Ben-Hur is basically The Fox and the Hound – if the hound framed the fox for sedition, sold the fox into slavery, and then everyone got leprosy.
The American Revolution eventually produced a stable system, but the Constitution did not take effect until 13 years after the Declaration of Independence, and the effects of upheavals like the Whiskey Rebellion and repressive measures like the Alien and Sedition Acts played out into the 19th century.
