June 2018

THROWBACK THURSDAYS: Civil Rights Act

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on national television. The legislation prohibited racial discrimination and outlawed segregation, and was widely hailed as a tremendous achievement in human rights. However lofty the aims, in reality, the Civil Rights Act has not created the kind of fundamental change its supporters, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, hoped.

THROWBACK THURSDAYS: Gary Kroll

In 1956, Congress approved the Federal Highway Act, which allocated more than $25 billion dollars to build 41,000 miles of public highway, crisscrossing and uniting the Continental United States in an entirely new way. The first transcontinental road, from Washington D.C. to San Francisco, was built by the US Army in 1919, though the nation had very limited potential for expanding or even maintaining its existing infrastructure until the 1950s.

THROWBACK THURSDAYS: Sanctuary and the Rights of Immigrants on Campus

This week in 1798, John Adams passed the Naturalization Act, the first of four laws collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws were highly controversial in their time and remain so today; all but one was struck down within four years, but echoes of their intended policies ring through to our current, rapidly-escalating national immigration and sanctuary crisis.