History
The Aerican Empire was founded on 8 May 1987 by Montreal resident Eric Lis and a core group of friends. Lis, who founded the Aerican Empire as a child, obtained his M.D., C.M. from McGill University and has been published in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and Weird Tales magazine.
For the first ten years the Empire was almost wholly fictional, claiming sovereignty over a vast galaxy of planets and engaging in "wars" against other micronations. After the advent of the Internet, through which the founders discovered other micronations similar to their own, the Empire slowly abandoned most fictional elements and worked towards becoming a political entity rather than a hobby. In 1997, the Empire created a Web site.
In 2000, the first growth spurt in the Empire's population was triggered by an article in The New York Times. In the months following this, the Empire's membership rose to over five hundred people. This number slowly fell over the following years as members left, eventually stabilizing and rising again with time.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)