20 Apr
The court case most recently before the Supreme Court regarding discrimination on college campuses last year was Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.
Here is a nice short summary from the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/19/AR2010041900505.html
Here are the various arguments and briefs submitted in the case from the American Bar Association: http://www.abanet.org/publiced/preview/briefs/april2010.shtml#christian
18 Apr
Robert Bork’s entry into the public consciousness began for me here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/articles/102173-2.htm
And then in 1987, he entered into the public eye again here:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,965277,00.html
And here is a nice compendium of his activities:
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=robert_bork_1
9 Apr
39 Outline– due April 12
Stalemated Seventies
I. What were Nixon’s Foreign Relations Concerns?
A. How does he attempt to get us out of Vietnam?
1. Vietnamization
2. Nixon Doctrine
3. My Lai
4. Invasion of Cambodia– what did he hope to accomplish?
B. Détente (What does that mean?)
1. Kissinger
2. ABM treaty
3. SALT
4. How committed are we really to de-armament?
C. “Opening” of China
1. Why?
2. How does this impact relations with Moscow?
a. “China card”
D. “Peace with honor” in Vietnam?
1. Bombings
II. Nixon’s Domestic Concerns
A. Cooling economy—explain factors
1. Wage and price freeze
2. End of gold standard
3. End of Bretton Woods system
B. The Warren Court leans left
1. Judicial activism
2. Southern criticism
3. Appointment of Berger disappoints
C. Social spending
1. AFDC
2. SSI
3. “indexing”
D. Anti-discrimination
1. “Philadelphia Plan” of 1969
2. What are “set-asides?”
3. Change in meaning of affirmative action
4. What is “reverse discrimination?”
E. Environmental concerns
1. Silent Spring
2. EPA
3. Clean Air Act
4. Endangered Species Act
F. OSHA
III. BIG SCANDALS!!!!
A. The Watergate, CREEP and “dirty tricks”
B. indicted staffers
C. Nixon’s paranoia
1. enemies list
2. Ellsberg
3. “plumbers”
D. Sam Ervin’s investigation
1. John Dean
2. tapes
3. Archibald Cox and the “Saturday Night Massacre”
E. Agnew’s resignation
1. Gerald Ford and the 25th Amendment
Make a chart for each Supreme Court decision including the following information:
Name of case, date, issue addressed, Constitutional amendment or article addressed; summary of decision, impact
1. Griswold v. Connecticut
2. Gideon v. Wainwright
3. Escobedo v. Illinois
4. Miranda v. Arizona
5. Engel v. Vitale
6. School District of Abingdon Township v. Schempp
7. Reynolds v. Sims
8. Roe v. Wade
9. Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
7 Apr
President Hatcher, Governor Romney, Senators McNamara and Hart, Congressmen Meader and Staebler, and other members of the fine Michigan delegation, members of the graduating class, my fellow Americans:
It is a great pleasure to be here today. This university has been coeducational since 1870, but I do not believe it was on the basis of your accomplishments that a Detroit high school girl said, “In choosing a college, you first have to decide whether you want a coeducational school or an educational school.”
Well, we can find both here at Michigan, although perhaps at different hours.
I came out here today very anxious to meet the Michigan student whose father told a friend of mine that his son’s education had been a real value. It stopped his mother from bragging about him.
I have come today from the turmoil of your Capital to the tranquillity of your campus to speak about the future of your country.
The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.
For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.
The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.
Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in out time. But that is just the beginning.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society — in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.
Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans — four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must re-build the entire urban United States.
Aristotle said: “Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life.” It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today.
The catalog of ills is long: there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated.
Worst of all expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.
Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders.
New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city a place where future generations will come, not only to live but to live the good life.
I understand that if I stayed here tonight I would see that Michigan students are really doing their best to live the good life.
This is the place where the Peace Corps was started. It is inspiring to see how all of you, while you are in this country, are trying so hard to live at the level of the people.
A second place where we begin to build the \cf2 Great Society\cf0 is in our countryside. We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong and America the free, but America the beautiful. Today that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.
A few years ago we were greatly concerned about the “Ugly American.” Today we must act to prevent an ugly America.
For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.
A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children’s lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.
Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population of Michigan, have not finished 5 years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished 8 years of school. Nearly 54 million — more than one-quarter of all America — have not even finished high school.
Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today’s youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary school enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by 5 million. College enrollment will increase by more than 3 million.
In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid, and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.
But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.
These are three of the central issues of the Great Society. While our Government has many programs directed at those issues, I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems.
But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings — on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society .
The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.
Woodrow Wilson once wrote: “Every man sent out from his university should be a man of his Nation as well as a man of his time.”
Within your lifetime powerful forces, already loosed, will take us toward a way of life beyond the realm of our experience, almost beyond the bounds of our imagination.
For better or for worse, your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.
So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?
Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?
Will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live in enduring peace — as neighbors and not as mortal enemies?
Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?
There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.
Those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world. So I have come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision our reality. So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.
Thank you. Good-bye.
3 Apr
America survives the Great Depression and faces the pressures of the Cold War.
1 Apr
Here is a great website that also includes links to documents, including what the National Security Council suggested the US do about this event:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB76/
And here is a site that provides pictures and more information:
http://www.hungary1956.com/photos.htm
Here is an account from the London Times reprinted from November 4, 1956:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/4/newsid_2739000/2739039.stm
What eventually happened to Imre Nagy, the upstart prime minister of Hungary?
1 Apr
(Remember, there were about 3 million federal employees in 1947…)
PRESCRIBING PROCEDURES FOR THE ADMINISTRATION OF AN EMPLOYEES LOYALTY PROGRAM IN THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH OF THE GOVERNMENT
Whereas each employee of the Government of the United States is endowed with a measure of trusteeship over the democratic processes which are the heart and sinew of the United States; and
Whereas it is of vital importance that persons employed in the Federal service be of complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States; and
Whereas, although the loyalty of by far the overwhelming majority of all Government employees is beyond question, the presence within the Government service of any disloyal or subversive person constitutes a threat to our democratic processes; and
Whereas maximum protection must be afforded the United States against infiltration of disloyal persons into the ranks of its employees, and equal protection from unfounded accusations of disloyalty must be afforded the loyal employees of the Government:
Now, Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and statutes of the United States, including the Civil Service Act of 1883 (22 Stat. 403), as amended, and section 9A of the act approved August 2, 1939 (18 U.S.C. 61i), and as President and Chief Executive of the United States, it is hereby, in the interest of the internal management of the Government, ordered as follows:
PART I, — INVESTIGATION OF APPLICANTS
1. There shall be a loyalty investigation of every person entering the civilian employment of any department or agency of the executive branch of the Federal Government….
6. An investigation shall be made of all applicants at all available pertinent sources of information and shall include reference to:
7. Federal Bureau of Investigation files.
8. Civil Service Commission files.
9. Military and naval intelligence files.
10. The files of any other appropriate government investigative or intelligence agency.
11. House Committee on un-American Activities files.
12. Local law-enforcement files at the place of residence and employment of the applicant, including municipal, county, and State law-enforcement files.
13. Schools and colleges attended by applicant.
14. Former employers of applicant.
15. References given by applicant.
16. Any other appropriate source.
17. Whenever derogatory information with respect to loyalty of an applicant is revealed a full investigation shall be conducted. A full field investigation shall also be conducted of those applicants, or of applicants for particular positions, as may be designated by the head of the employing department or agency, such designations to be based on the determination by any such head of the best interests of national security.
PART II — INVESTIGATION OF EMPLOYEES
1. The head of each department and agency in the executive branch of the Government shall be personally responsible for an effective program to assure that disloyal civilian officers or employees are not retained in employment in his department or agency….
4. The head of each department and agency shall appoint one or more loyalty boards, each composed of not less than three representatives of the department or agency concerned, for the purpose of hearing loyalty cases arising within such department or agency and making recommendations with respect to the removal of any officer or employee of such department or agency on grounds relating to loyalty, and he shall prescribe regulations for the conduct of the proceedings before such boards.
5. An officer or employee who is charged with being disloyal shall have a right to an administrative hearing before a loyalty board in the employing department or agency. He may appear before such board personally, accompanied by counsel or representative of his own choosing, and present evidence on his own behalf, through witnesses or by affidavit….
PART III — RESPONSIBILITIES OF CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION
1. There shall be established in the Civil Service Commission a Loyalty Review Board of not less than three impartial persons, the members of which shall be officers or employees of the Commission.
2. The Board shall have authority to review cases involving persons recommended for dismissal on grounds relating to loyalty by the loyalty board of any department or agency and to make advisory recommendations thereon to the head of the employing department or agency. Such cases may be referred to the Board either by the employing department or agency, or by the officer or employee concerned….
2. There shall also be established and maintained in the Civil Service Commission a central master index covering all persons on whom loyalty investigations have been made by any department or agency since September 1, 1939. Such master index shall contain the name of each person investigated, adequate identifying information concerning each such person, and a reference to each department and agency which has conducted a loyalty investigation concerning the person involved….
3. The loyalty Review Board shall currently be furnished by the Department of Justice the name of each foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group or combination of persons which the Attorney General, after appropriate investigation and determination, designates as totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive, or as having adopted a policy of advocating or approving the commission of acts of force or violence to deny others their rights under the Constitution of the United States, or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means.
4. The Loyalty Review Board shall disseminate such information to all departments and agencies….
PART V — STANDARDS
1. The standard for the refusal of employment or the removal from employment in an executive department or agency on grounds relating to loyalty shall be that, on all the evidence, reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal to the Government of the United States.
2. Activities and associations of an applicant or employee which may be considered in connection with the determination of disloyalty may include one or more of the following:
3. Sabotage, espionage, or attempts or preparations therefor, or knowingly associating with spies or saboteurs;
4. Treason or sedition or advocacy thereof;
5. Advocacy of revolution or force or violence to alter the constitutional form of government of the United States;
6. Intentional, unauthorized disclosure to any person, under circumstances which may indicate disloyalty to the United States, of documents or information of a confidential or non-public character obtained by the person making the disclosure as a result of his employment by the Government of the United States;
7. Performing or attempting to perform his duties, or otherwise acting, so as to serve the interests of another government in preference to the interests of the United States.
8. Membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group or combination of persons, designated by the Attorney General as totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive, or as having adopted a policy of advocating or approving the commission of acts of force or violence to deny other persons their rights under the Constitution of the United States, or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means….
Harry S. Truman
The White House,
March 21, 1947.
1 Apr
This is just a very basic review point and moves pretty fast, but it’ll help you see where your gaps are…..
This video can be accessed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65Y1jsD3QHE
The Scoop on History-APUSH and more 