Lawrence, Kansas
Lawrence is the county seat of Douglas County and sixth-largest city in Kansas. It is located in the northeastern sector of the state, astride Interstate 70, between the Kansas and Wakarusa Rivers; as of the 2010 census, the city's population was 87,643. Lawrence is a college town and the home to both the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University. Lawrence was founded by the New England Emigrant Aid Company, was named for Amos Adams Lawrence, a Republican abolitionist from Massachusetts, who offered financial aid and support for the settlement. Lawrence was central to the "Bleeding Kansas" period and was the site of the Wakarusa War and the Sack of Lawrence. During the American Civil War, it was the site of the Lawrence massacre. Lawrence began as a center of free-state politics. From here, its economy diversified into many industries, including agriculture and education, beginning with the founding of the University of Kansas in 1865, Haskell Indian Nations University in 1884, as well as several private and public schools.
Prior to Kansas Territory being established in May 1854, most of Douglas County was part of the Shawnee Indian Reservation. During this period, the Oregon Trail ran parallel to the Kansas River through the area where Lawrence would be situated and a hill known as "Hogback Ridge"; this area was used as an outlook by those on the trail. While this territory was technically unopened to settlement prior to 1854, there did exist a few "squatter settlements" in the area just north of the Kansas River. Lawrence was founded "strictly for political reasons" having to do with the issue of slavery, debated in the United States during the early-to-mid 1800s. Northern Democrats, led by Senators Lewis Cass of Michigan and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois promoted the idea of "popular sovereignty" as a middle position on the slavery issue. Proponents of this doctrine argued that it was more democratic, as it allowed the citizens of newly-organized territories to have final say in regards to the permissibly of slavery in their own lands.
Douglas made popular sovereignty the backbone of his Kansas–Nebraska Act—legislation that repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska—which passed in Congress in 1854. Around this time, the Christian abolitionist and Protestant minister Richard Cordley noted that "there was a feeling of despondency all over the north" because the bill's passage "opened Kansas to slavery was thought to be equivalent to making Kansas a slave state." This was because nearby Missouri allowed slavery, many rightly assumed that the first settlers in Kansas Territory would come flooding in from this state, bringing their penchant for slavery with them. In time, anger at the Kansas-Nebraska Act united antislavery forces into a movement committed to stopping the expansion of slavery. Many of these individuals decided to "meet the question on the terms of the bill itself" by migrating to Kansas, electing antislavery legislators, banning the practice of slavery altogether.
These settlers soon became known as "Free-Staters". In his book A History of Lawrence, Cordley wrote: The most systematic and extensive movement, was made "The New England Emigrant Aid Company"... The men engaged in it, Eli Thayer, Amos A. Lawrence, others, began their work at once, arousing public interest and making arrangements to facilitate emigration to Kansas; as early as June, 1854, they sent Dr. Charles Robinson, of Fitchburg, Mr. Charles H. Branscomb, of Holyoke, to explore the territory and select a site for a colony... Robinson his party climbed the hill along this spur, looked off over what was afterwards the site of Lawrence, they marked the magnificence of the view. Whether they thought of what might afterwards occur is not known; when he was asked, therefore, to go and explore the country with a view to locating colonies, it was not altogether an unknown land to him. Branscomb was tasked with exploring the Kansas River up to about the location of Fort Riley, whereas Robinson scouted land near Fort Leavenworth and the nearby city of the same name.
The two chose this site because it was the "first desirable location where emigrant Indians had ceded their land rights." The area was attractive because it was close to not only on the Oregon Trail, but the Santa Fe and the 1846 Military Trails. Concurrent with Robinson and Branscomb's exploration, the New England Emigrant Aid Company was soliciting some of its members into settling in Kansas. At first, the New England Emigrant Aid Company had wanted to send a somewhat sizeable group of settlers to claim the land. A cholera outbreak in the Missouri Valley preve
President of the United States
The president of the United States is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. In contemporary times, the president is looked upon as one of the world's most powerful political figures as the leader of the only remaining global superpower; the role includes responsibility for the world's most expensive military, which has the second largest nuclear arsenal. The president leads the nation with the largest economy by nominal GDP; the president possesses international hard and soft power. Article II of the Constitution establishes the executive branch of the federal government, it vests the executive power of the United States in the president. The power includes the execution and enforcement of federal law, alongside the responsibility of appointing federal executive, diplomatic and judicial officers, concluding treaties with foreign powers with the advice and consent of the Senate.
The president is further empowered to grant federal pardons and reprieves, to convene and adjourn either or both houses of Congress under extraordinary circumstances. The president directs the foreign and domestic policies of the United States, takes an active role in promoting his policy priorities to members of Congress. In addition, as part of the system of checks and balances, Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution gives the president the power to sign or veto federal legislation; the power of the presidency has grown since its formation, as has the power of the federal government as a whole. Through the Electoral College, registered voters indirectly elect the president and vice president to a four-year term; this is the only federal election in the United States, not decided by popular vote. Nine vice presidents became president by virtue of a president's intra-term resignation. Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 sets three qualifications for holding the presidency: natural-born U. S. citizenship.
The Twenty-second Amendment precludes any person from being elected president to a third term. In all, 44 individuals have served 45 presidencies spanning 57 full four-year terms. Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, so he is counted twice, as both the 22nd and 24th president. Donald Trump of New York is the current president of the United States, he assumed office on January 20, 2017. In July 1776, during the American Revolutionary War, the Thirteen Colonies, acting jointly through the Second Continental Congress, declared themselves to be 13 independent sovereign states, no longer under British rule. Recognizing the necessity of coordinating their efforts against the British, the Continental Congress began the process of drafting a constitution that would bind the states together. There were long debates on a number of issues, including representation and voting, the exact powers to be given the central government. Congress finished work on the Articles of Confederation to establish a perpetual union between the states in November 1777 and sent it to the states for ratification.
Under the Articles, which took effect on March 1, 1781, the Congress of the Confederation was a central political authority without any legislative power. It could make its own resolutions and regulations, but not any laws, could not impose any taxes or enforce local commercial regulations upon its citizens; this institutional design reflected how Americans believed the deposed British system of Crown and Parliament ought to have functioned with respect to the royal dominion: a superintending body for matters that concerned the entire empire. The states were out from under any monarchy and assigned some royal prerogatives to Congress; the members of Congress elected a President of the United States in Congress Assembled to preside over its deliberation as a neutral discussion moderator. Unrelated to and quite dissimilar from the office of President of the United States, it was a ceremonial position without much influence. In 1783, the Treaty of Paris secured independence for each of the former colonies.
With peace at hand, the states each turned toward their own internal affairs. By 1786, Americans found their continental borders besieged and weak and their respective economies in crises as neighboring states agitated trade rivalries with one another, they witnessed their hard currency pouring into foreign markets to pay for imports, their Mediterranean commerce preyed upon by North African pirates, their foreign-financed Revolutionary War debts unpaid and accruing interest. Civil and political unrest loomed. Following the successful resolution of commercial and fishing disputes between Virginia and Maryland at the Mount Vernon Conference in 1785, Virginia called for a trade conference between all the states, set for September 1786 in Annapolis, with an aim toward resolving further-reaching interstate commercial antagonisms; when the convention failed for lack of attendance due to suspicions among most of the other states, Alexander Hamilton led the Annapolis delegates in a call for a convention to offer revisions to the Articles, to be held the next spring in Philadelphia.
Prospects for the next convention appeared bleak until James Madison and Edmund Randolph succeeded in securing George Washington's attendance to Philadelphia as a delegate for Virginia. When the Constitutional Convention convened in May 1787, the 12 state delegations in attendance (Rh
University of Kansas
The University of Kansas referred to as KU, is a public research university with its main campus in Lawrence and several satellite campuses and educational centers, medical centers, classes across the state of Kansas. Two branch campuses are in the Kansas City metropolitan area on the Kansas side: the university's medical school and hospital in Kansas City, the Edwards Campus in Overland Park, a hospital and research center in the state's capital of Topeka. There are educational and research sites in Garden City, Leavenworth and Topeka, branches of the medical school in Salina and Wichita; the university is one of the 62 members of the Association of American Universities. Founded March 21, 1865, the university was opened in 1866, under a charter granted by the Kansas State Legislature in 1864 following enabling legislation passed in 1863 under the State Constitution, adopted two years after the 1861 admission of the former Kansas Territory as the 34th state into the Union following an internal civil war known as "Bleeding Kansas" during the 1850s.
Enrollment at the Lawrence and Edwards campuses was 28,401 students in 2016. The university overall employed 2,814 faculty members in fall 2015. On February 20, 1863, Kansas Governor Thomas Carney signed into law a bill creating the state university in Lawrence; the law was conditioned upon a gift from Lawrence of a $15,000 endowment fund and a site for the university, in or near the town, of not less than forty acres of land. If Lawrence failed to meet these conditions, Emporia instead of Lawrence would get the university; the site selected for the university was a hill known as Mount Oread, donated by Charles L. Robinson, Republican governor of the state of Kansas from 1861 to 1863, one of the original settlers of Lawrence, Kansas. Robinson and his wife Sara bestowed the 40-acre site to the State of Kansas in exchange for land elsewhere; the philanthropist Amos Adams Lawrence donated $10,000 of the necessary endowment fund, the citizens of Lawrence raised the remaining money themselves via private donations.
On November 2, 1863, Governor Carney announced Lawrence had met the conditions to get the state university, the following year the university was organized. The school's Board of Regents held its first meeting in March 1865, the event that KU dates its founding from. Work on the first college building began that year; the university opened for classes on September 12, 1866, the first class graduated in 1873. According to William L. Burdick, the first degree awarded by the university was a Doctor of Divinity, bestowed upon noted abolitionist preacher Richard Cordley. During World War II, Kansas was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission. KU is home to the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, the Beach Center on Disability, Lied Center of Kansas and radio stations KJHK, 90.7 FM, KANU, 91.5 FM. The university is host to several museums including the University of Kansas Natural History Museum and the Spencer Museum of Art.
The libraries of the University include Watson Library, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, the Murphy Art and Architecture Library, Thomas Gorton Music & Dance Library, Anschutz Library. Of athletic note, the university is home to Allen Fieldhouse, heralded as one of the greatest basketball arenas in the world, David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium; the University of Kansas is a state-sponsored university with five campuses. KU is a member of the Association of American Universities and it is classified among "R-1: Doctoral Universities – Highest Research Activity" by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. KU features the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, which includes the School of the Arts and the School of Public Affairs & Administration; the university offers more than 345 degree programs. In its 2018 list, U. S. News & World Report ranked KU as tied for 115th place among National Universities and 53rd place among public universities; the city management and urban policy program was ranked first in the nation, the special education program second, by U.
S. News & World Report's 2016 rankings. USN&WR ranked several programs in the top 25 among U. S. universities. The University of Kansas School of Architecture and Design, with its main building being Marvin Hall, traces its architectural roots to the creation of the architectural engineering degree program in KU's School of Engineering in 1912; the Bachelor of Architecture degree was added in 1920. In 1969 the School of Architecture and Urban Design was formed with three programs: architecture, architectural engineering, urban planning. In 2001 architectural engineering merged with environmental engineering; the design programs from the discontinued School of Fine Arts were merged into the school in 2009 forming the School of Architecture and Planning with three departments. In 2017, the Urban Planning department merged into KU's School of Public Affairs and Administration. Accordingly, the SADP was renamed to the School of Design. According to the journal DesignIntelligence, which annually publishes "America's Best Architecture and Design Schools," the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Kansas was named the best in the Midwest and ranked 11t
History of the United States Republican Party
The Republican Party referred to as the GOP, is one of the world's oldest extant political parties. The party values reflect classical conservatism and corporate liberty rights, it is the second oldest existing political party in the United States after its primary rival, the Democratic Party. The party emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas–Nebraska Act, an act that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories by popular sovereignty; the early Republican Party had no presence in the Southern United States, but by 1858 it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state. With its election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and its success in guiding the Union to victory in the American Civil War and abolishing slavery, the party came to dominate the national political scene until 1932; the Republican Party at its beginning consisted of African-American and White Northern Protestants, small business owners, factory workers, farmers.
It was pro-business, supporting banks, the gold standard and high tariffs to protect factory workers and grow industry faster. Under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, it emphasized an expansive foreign policy; the GOP lost its majorities during the Great Depression. Instead, the Democrats under Franklin D. Roosevelt formed a winning New Deal coalition, dominant from 1932 through 1964; that coalition collapsed in the mid-1960s because of white Southern Democrats' disaffection with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Republicans won five of the six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, with Ronald Reagan as the party's iconic conservative hero. From 1992 to 2016, the Republican candidate has been elected to the White House in three of the seven presidential elections. Two of these saw George W. Bush and Donald Trump losing the popular vote, but winning the Electoral College. A similar situation in which Republicans won the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote were the 1876 and 1888 elections.
The Republican Party expanded its base throughout the South after 1968 due to its strength among conservative white evangelical Protestants and traditionalist Roman Catholics. As white Democrats in the South lost dominance of the Democratic Party once American courts declared the Democratic white primary elections unconstitutional, the region began taking on the two-party apparatus which characterized most of the nation; the Republican Party's transforming leader by 1980 was Reagan, whose conservative policies called for reduced government spending and regulation, lower taxes and a strong anti-Soviet Union foreign policy. Reagan's influence upon the party persists as nearly every Republican Party speaker still reveres him; as such, social scientists Theodore Caplow et al. argue: "The Republican party, moved from right-center toward the center in the 1940s and 1950s moved right again in the 1970s and 1980s". The Republican Party grew out of opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, signed into law by President Franklin Pierce in 1854.
The Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission as slave states, thus implicitly repealing the prohibition on slavery in territory north of 36° 30′ latitude, part of the Missouri Compromise. This change was viewed by anti-slavery Northerners as an aggressive, expansionist maneuver by the slave-owning South. Opponents of the Act began forming a new party; the Party began as a coalition of anti-slavery Conscience Whigs such as Zachariah Chandler and Free Soil Democrats such as Salmon P. Chase; the first anti-Nebraska local meeting where "Republican" was suggested as a name for a new anti-slavery party was held in a Ripon, Wisconsin schoolhouse on March 20, 1854. The first statewide convention that formed a platform and nominated candidates under the Republican name was held near Jackson, Michigan on July 6, 1854. At that convention, the party opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories and selected a statewide slate of candidates; the Midwest took the lead in forming state Republican Party tickets.
New England Yankees, who dominated that region and much of upstate New York and the upper Midwest, were the strongest supporters of the new party. This was true for the pietistic Congregationalists and Presbyterians among them and, during the war, many Methodists and Scandinavian Lutherans; the Quakers were a small, tight-knit group, Republican. By contrast, the liturgical churches rejected the moralism of the Republican Party; the new Republican Party envisioned modernizing the United States, emphasizing expanded banking, more railroads and factories, giving free western land to farmers as opposed to letting slave owners buy up the best properties. It vigorously argued that free market labor was superior to slavery and was the foundation of civic virtue and true republicanism. Without using the term "containment", the Republican Party in the mid-1850s proposed a system of containing slavery. Historian James Oakes explains the strategy: The federal government would surround the south with free states, free territories, free waters, building what they called a'cordon of freedom' around slavery, hemming it in until the system's own internal
Topeka, Kansas
Topeka is the capital city of the U. S. state of Kansas and the seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States; as of the 2010 census, the city population was 127,473. The Topeka Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Shawnee, Jefferson and Wabaunsee counties, had a population of 233,870 in the 2010 census; the name Topeka is a Kansa-Osage sentence that means "place where we dug potatoes", or "a good place to dig potatoes". As a placename, Topeka was first recorded in 1826 as the Kansa name for what is now called the Kansas River. Topeka's founders chose the name in 1855 because it "was novel, of Indian origin and euphonious of sound." The mixed-blood Kansa Native American, Joseph James, called Jojim, is credited with suggesting the name of Topeka. The city, laid out in 1854, was one of the Free-State towns founded by Eastern antislavery men after the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Bill.
In 1857, Topeka was chartered as a city. The city is well known for the landmark U. S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson and declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. Three ships of the U. S. Navy have been named USS Topeka after the city. For many millennia, the Great Plains of North America were inhabited by Native Americans. From the 16th century to 18th century, the Kingdom of France claimed ownership of large parts of North America. In 1762, after the French and Indian War, France secretly ceded New France to Spain, per the Treaty of Fontainebleau. In 1802, Spain returned most of the land to France. In 1803, most of the land for modern day Kansas was acquired by the United States from France as part of the 828,000 square mile Louisiana Purchase for 2.83 cents per acre. In the 1840s, wagon trains made their way west from Independence, Missouri, on a journey of 2,000 miles, following what would come to be known as the Oregon Trail.
About 60 miles west of Kansas City, three half Kansas Indian sisters married to the French-Canadian Pappan brothers established a ferry service allowing travelers to cross the Kansas River at what is now Topeka. During the 1840s and into the 1850s, travelers could reliably find a way across the river, but little else was in the area. In the early 1850s, traffic along the Oregon Trail was supplemented by trade on a new military road stretching from Fort Leavenworth through Topeka to the newly established Fort Riley. In 1854, after completion of the first cabin, nine men established the Topeka Town Association. Included among them was Cyrus K. Holliday, an "idea man" who would become mayor of Topeka and founder of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. Soon, steamboats were docking at the Topeka landing, depositing meat and flour and returning eastward with potatoes and wheat. By the late 1860s, Topeka had become a commercial hub providing many Victorian era comforts. Topeka was a bastion for the free-state movement during the problems in Kansas Territory between anti- and proslavery settlers.
After southern forces barricaded Topeka in 1856, Topeka's leaders took actions to defend the free-state town from invasion. A militia was organized and fortifications were built on Quincy Street; the fortifications seemed to consist of low-lying earthwork levies strengthened by the presence of at least one cannon. There was stone in the fortifications; the militia manned the fortifications until at least September 1856, when the siege around the town was lifted. After a decade of abolitionist and pro-slavery conflict that gave the territory the nickname Bleeding Kansas, Kansas was admitted to the Union in 1861 as the 34th state. Topeka was chosen as the capital, with Dr. Charles Robinson as the first governor. In 1862, Cyrus K. Holliday donated a tract of land to the state for the construction of a state capitol. Construction of the Kansas State Capitol began in 1866, it would take 37 years to build the capitol, first the east wing, the west wing, the central building, using Kansas limestone. In fall 1864 a stockade fort named Fort Simple, was built in the intersection of 6th and Kansas Avenues to protect Topeka, should Confederate forces in Missouri decide to attack the city.
It was abandoned by April 1865 and demolished in April 1867. State officers first used the state capitol in 1869, moving from Constitution Hall, what is now 427-429 S. Kansas Avenue. Besides being used as the Kansas statehouse from 1863 to 1869, Constitution Hall is the site where anti-slavery settlers convened in 1855 to write the first of four state constitutions, making it the "Free State Capitol." The National Park Service recognizes Constitution Hall - Topeka as headquarters in the operation of the Lane Trail to Freedom on the Underground Railroad, the chief slave escape passage and free trade road. Although the drought of 1860 and the ensuing period of the Civil War slowed the growth of Topeka and the state, Topeka kept pace with the revival and period of growth Kansas enjoyed from the close of the war in 1865 until 1870. In the 1870s, many former slaves known as Exodusters, settled on the east side of Lincoln Street between Munson and Twelfth Streets; the area was known as Tennessee Town.
The first African American Kindergarten west of the Mississippi was organized in Tennessee Town by Dr. Charles Sheldon, pastor of the Central Congregational Church in 1893. Lincoln College, now Washburn University, was established in 1865 in Topeka by a charter issued by the State of Kansas and the General A
Great Society
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65; the main goal was the total elimination of poverty and racial injustice. President Johnson first used the term "Great Society" during a speech at Ohio University unveiled the program in greater detail at an appearance at University of Michigan. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation were launched during this period; the program and its initiatives were subsequently promoted by him and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s and years following. The Great Society in scope and sweep resembled the New Deal domestic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt; some Great Society proposals were stalled initiatives from John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. Johnson's success depended on his skills of persuasion, coupled with the Democratic landslide in the 1964 election that brought in many new liberals to Congress, making the House of Representatives in 1965 the most liberal House since 1938.
Anti-war Democrats complained. While some of the programs have been eliminated or had their funding reduced, many of them, including Medicare, the Older Americans Act and federal education funding, continue to the present; the Great Society's programs expanded under the administrations of Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Unlike the old New Deal, a response to a severe financial and economic calamity, the Great Society initiatives came during a period of rapid economic growth. Kennedy proposed an across-the-board tax cut lowering the top marginal income tax rate in the United States by 20%, from 91% to 71%, enacted in February 1964, three months after Kennedy's assassination, under Johnson; the tax cut significantly reduced marginal rates in the lower brackets as well as for corporations. The gross national product rose 10% in the first year of the tax cut, economic growth averaged a rate of 4.5% from 1961 to 1968. Johnson's tax cut measure triggered what one historian described as "the greatest prosperity of the postwar years."
GNP increased by 7% in 1964, 8% in 1965, 9% in 1966. The unemployment rate fell below 5%, by 1966 the number of families with incomes of $7,000 a year or more had reached 55%, compared with 22% in 1950. In 1968, when John Kenneth Galbraith published a new edition of The Affluent Society, the average income of the American family stood at $8,000, double what it had been a decade earlier. Johnson's first public reference to the "Great Society" took place during a speech to students on May 7, 1964, at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio: And with your courage and with your compassion and your desire, we will build a Great Society, it is a society where no child will go unfed, no youngster will go unschooled. He formally presented his specific goals for the Great Society in another speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on May 22, 1964. We are going to assemble the best thought and broadest knowledge from all over the world to find these answers. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, on other emerging challenges.
From these studies, we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society. After the Ann Arbor speech, 14 separate task forces began studying nearly all major aspects of United States society under the guidance of presidential assistants Bill Moyers and Richard N. Goodwin. In his use of task forces to provide expert advice on policy, Johnson was following Kennedy's example, but unlike Kennedy, Johnson directed his task forces to work in secret, his intent was to prevent his program from being derailed by public criticism of proposals that had not yet been reviewed. The average task force had five to seven members and was composed of governmental experts and academics. After the task force reports were submitted to the White House, Moyers began a second round of review; the recommendations were circulated among the agencies concerned, strategies were developed for getting the proposed legislation through Congress. On January 4, 1965, Johnson announced much of his proposed program in his State of the Union Address.
With the exception of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Great Society agenda was not a discussed issue during the 1964 presidential election campaign. Johnson won the election with 61% of the vote, he carried all but six states. Democrats gained enough seats to control more than two-thirds of each chamber in the Eighty-ninth Congress, with a 68–32 margin in the Senate and a 295–140 margin in the House of Representatives; the political realignment allowed House leaders to alter rules that had allowed Southern Democrats to kill New Frontier and civil rights legislation in committee, which aided efforts to pass Great Society legislation. In 1965, the first session of the Eighty-Ninth Congress created the core of the Great Society, it began by enacting long-stalled legislation such as Medicare and federal aid to education and moved into other areas, including high-speed mass transit, rental supplements, truth in packaging, environmental safety legislation, new provisions for mental health facilities, the Teacher Corps, manpower training, the Head Start program, aid to urban mass transit, a demonstration cities program, a housing act that included rental subsidies, an act for higher education.
The Johnson Administration submitted 87 bills to Congress, Johnson signed 84, or 96%, arguably the most successful legislative agenda in US congressional history. The Naked Society is a 1964 book on privacy by Vance Packard; the book argues that changes in tec
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state located in the northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The Appalachian Mountains run through its middle; the Commonwealth is bordered by Delaware to the southeast, Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, Lake Erie and the Canadian province of Ontario to the northwest, New York to the north, New Jersey to the east. Pennsylvania is the 33rd-largest state by area, the 6th-most populous state according to the most recent official U. S. Census count in 2010, it is the 9th-most densely populated of the 50 states. Pennsylvania's two most populous cities are Philadelphia, Pittsburgh; the state capital and its 10th largest city is Harrisburg. Pennsylvania has 140 miles of waterfront along the Delaware Estuary; the state is one of the 13 original founding states of the United States. Part of Pennsylvania, together with the present State of Delaware, had earlier been organized as the Colony of New Sweden.
It was the second state to ratify the United States Constitution, on December 12, 1787. Independence Hall, where the United States Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution were drafted, is located in the state's largest city of Philadelphia. During the American Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg was fought in the south central region of the state. Valley Forge near Philadelphia was General Washington's headquarters during the bitter winter of 1777–78. Pennsylvania is 170 miles north to south and 283 miles east to west. Of a total 46,055 square miles, 44,817 square miles are land, 490 square miles are inland waters, 749 square miles are waters in Lake Erie, it is the 33rd-largest state in the United States. Pennsylvania has 51 miles of coastline along Lake Erie and 57 miles of shoreline along the Delaware Estuary. Of the original Thirteen Colonies, Pennsylvania is the only state that does not border the Atlantic Ocean; the boundaries of the state are the Mason–Dixon line to the south, the Twelve-Mile Circle on the Pennsylvania-Delaware border, the Delaware River to the east, 80° 31' W to the west and the 42° N to the north, with the exception of a short segment on the western end, where a triangle extends north to Lake Erie.
Cities include Philadelphia, Reading and Lancaster in the southeast, Pittsburgh in the southwest, the tri-cities of Allentown and Easton in the central east. The northeast includes the former anthracite coal mining cities of Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton. Erie is located in the northwest. State College serves the central region while Williamsport serves the commonwealth's north-central region as does Chambersburg the south-central region, with York and the state capital Harrisburg on the Susquehanna River in the east-central region of the Commonwealth and Altoona and Johnstown in the west-central region; the state has five geographical regions, namely the Allegheny Plateau and Valley, Atlantic Coastal Plain and the Erie Plain. New York Ontario Maryland Delaware West Virginia New Jersey Ohio Pennsylvania's diverse topography produces a variety of climates, though the entire state experiences cold winters and humid summers. Straddling two major zones, the majority of the state, with the exception of the southeastern corner, has a humid continental climate.
The southern portion of the state has a humid subtropical climate. The largest city, has some characteristics of the humid subtropical climate that covers much of Delaware and Maryland to the south. Summers are hot and humid. Moving toward the mountainous interior of the state, the winter climate becomes colder, the number of cloudy days increases, snowfall amounts are greater. Western areas of the state locations near Lake Erie, can receive over 100 inches of snowfall annually, the entire state receives plentiful precipitation throughout the year; the state may be subject to severe weather from spring through summer into fall. Tornadoes occur annually in the state, sometimes in large numbers, such as 30 recorded tornadoes in 2011; as of 1600, the tribes living in Pennsylvania were the Algonquian Lenape, the Iroquoian Susquehannock & Petun and the Siouan Monongahela Culture, who may have been the same as a little known tribe called the Calicua, or Cali. Other tribes who entered the region during the colonial era were the Trockwae, Saponi, Nanticoke, Conoy Piscataway, Iroquois Confederacy—possibly among others.
Other tribes, like the Erie, may have once held some land in Pennsylvania, but no longer did so by the year 1600. Both the Dutch and the English claimed both sides of the Delaware River as part of their colonial lands in America; the Dutch were the first to take possession. By June 3, 1631, the Dutch had begun settling the Delmarva Peninsula by establishing the Zwaanendael Colony on the site of present-day Lewes, Delaware. In 1638, Sweden established the New Sweden Colony, in the region of Fort Christina, on the site of present-day Wilmington, Delaware. New Sweden claimed and, for the most part, controlled the lower Delaware River region (parts of present-day Delaware, New Jersey, Pe
United States
United States Army
First Lieutenant
