The United States Social Security Administration is an independent agency of the U. S. federal government that administers Social Security, a social insurance program consisting of retirement and survivors benefits. To qualify for most of these benefits, most workers pay Social Security taxes on their earnings. Otherwise benefits such as Supplemental Security Income are given based on need; the Social Security Administration was established by a law codified at 42 U. S. C. § 901. It was created in 1935 as the Social Security Board assumed its present name in 1946, its current leader, Commissioner Andrew Saul, has served since June 2019, succeeding Acting Commissioner Nancy Berryhill. SSA is headquartered in Woodlawn, just to the west of Baltimore, at what is known as Central Office; the agency includes 10 regional offices, 8 processing centers 1300 field offices, 37 Teleservice Centers. As of 2018, about 60,000 people were employed by SSA. Headquarters non-supervisory employees of SSA are represented by American Federation of Government Employees Local 1923.

Social Security is the largest social welfare program in the United States. For 2014, the net cost of Social Security was $906.4 billion, an amount corresponding to 21% of US Federal Government expenditures. It has declined over the years in employee satisfaction surveys and has fallen to 14th best place to work in the U. S. federal government due to a lack of confidence in senior leadership and the elimination of work-life programs such as the employee vision program and telework. The Social Security Act created a Social Security Board, to oversee the administration of the new program, it was created as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal with the signing of the Social Security Act of 1935 on August 14, 1935; the Board consisted of three presidentially appointed executives, started with no budget, no staff, no furniture. It obtained a temporary budget from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration headed by Harry Hopkins; the first counsel for the new agency was Thomas Elliott, one of Felix Frankfurter's "happy hot dogs".

The first Social Security office opened in Austin, Texas, on October 14, 1936 Social Security taxes were first collected in January 1937, along with the first one-time, lump-sum payments. The first person to receive monthly retirement benefits was Ida May Fuller of Vermont, her first check, dated January 31, 1940 was in the amount of US$22.54. In 1939, the Social Security Board merged into a cabinet-level Federal Security Agency, which included the SSB, the U. S. Public Health Service, the Civilian Conservation Corps, other agencies. In January 1940, the first regular ongoing monthly benefits began. In 1946, the SSB was renamed the Social Security Administration under President Harry S. Truman's Reorganization Plan. In 1953, the Federal Security Agency was abolished and SSA was placed under the Department of Health and Welfare, which became the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed into law 42 U. S. C. § 901 returning SSA to the status of an independent agency in the executive branch of government.

In 1972, Cost of Living Adjustments were introduced into SSA programs to deal with the effects of inflation on fixed incomes. Social Security Commissioners Arthur J. Altmeyer William L. Mitchell John W. Tramburg Charles I. Schottland William L. Mitchell Robert M. Ball Arthur E. Hess James B. Cardwell Don I. Wortman Stanford G. Ross William J. Driver Herbert R. Doggette John A. Svahn Martha A. McSteen Dorcas R. Hardy Gwendolyn S. King Louis D. Enoff Lawrence H. Thompson Shirley S. Chater John J. Callahan Kenneth S. Apfel William Halter Kasumu Gafar Larry G. Massanari Jo Anne B. Barnhart Linda S. McMahon Michael J. Astrue Carolyn W. Colvin Nancy A. Berryhill Alexander Pompeo Former Andrew Saul SSA was one of the first federal agencies to have its national headquarters outside of Washington, D. C. or its adjacent suburbs. It was located in Baltimore due to the need for a building, capable of holding the unprecedented amount of paper records that would be needed. Nothing suitable was available in Washington in 1936, so the Social Security Board selected the Candler Building on Baltimore's harbor as a temporary location.

Soon after locating there, construction began on a permanent building for SSA in Washington that would meet their requirements for record storage capacity. However, by the time the new building was completed, World War II had started, the building was commandeered by the War Department. By the time the war ended, it was judged too disruptive to relocate the agency to Washington; the Agency remained in the Candler Building until 1960, when it relocated to its newly built headquarters in Woodlawn. The road on which the headquarters is located, built for SSA, is named Security Boulevard and has since become one of the major arteries connecting Baltimore with its western suburbs. Security Boulevard is the name of SSA's exit from the nearby Baltimore Beltway. A nearby shopping center has been named Security Square Mall, Woodlawn is referred to informally as "Security." Interstate 70, which runs f

The Roxbury Latin School, founded in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, by the Rev. John Eliot under a charter received from King Charles I of England, is the oldest school in continuous existence in North America. Since its founding in 1645, it has educated boys on a continuous basis. Located since 1927 at 101 St. Theresa Avenue in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, the school now serves 300 boys in grades seven through twelve. Eliot founded the school "to fit for public service both in church and in commonwealth in succeeding ages," and the school still considers instilling a desire to perform public service among its principal missions; the school's endowment is estimated at $189 million, the largest of any boys' day school in the United States. The school maintains a need-blind admissions policy, admitting boys without consideration of the ability of their families to pay the full tuition, its previous headmaster, F. Washington Jarvis, who retired in the summer of 2004 after a 30-year tenure, published two books about Roxbury Latin: a history of the school and a collection of his speeches to boys at Roxbury Latin.

The title of the former, Schola Illustris, was the phrase Cotton Mather used to describe the school in 1690, following John Eliot's death. In addition to those books, Richard Walden Hale published Tercentenary History of the Roxbury Latin School in 1946. Roxbury Latin is a member of the Independent School League and NEPSAC, it has an unofficial sister school relationship with the Winsor School in Boston as well as an African brother school, the Maru a Pula School. According to the school's website, the median Roxbury Latin student of the class of 2015 scored 2210 on the SAT. Roxbury Latin has the highest median SAT average of any private school. A 2004 piece in The Wall Street Journal noted Roxbury Latin for its acceptance rates at the most competitive universities, despite maintaining a low tuition relative to its peers. In 2003, Worth magazine ranked Roxbury Latin as the #1 "feeder school" for elite universities, with a larger portion of its graduating class attending Princeton University, Harvard University, or Yale University than any other school.

In 2008, the website PrepReview.com updated the earlier survey by Worth magazine. Despite using more inclusive criteria in place of Worth's narrow focus on Princeton and Yale, Roxbury Latin once again topped the rankings. PrepReview.com looked at the number of matriculants to all eight Ivy League undergraduate colleges as well as to MIT and Stanford University. Roxbury Latin placed nearly half of its recent graduates among these institutions, the highest rate of any secondary school in the world; the 2008 rankings by PrepReview.com placed Roxbury Latin first in all of the following categories: America's Top 50 High Schools, America's Best High Schools Ranked by SAT, America's Best Private Day Schools. Additionally, PrepReview.com ranked Roxbury Latin first in the world among secondary schools for its students' success at gaining admission to Harvard University: in 2009, 20% of the graduating class at Roxbury Latin matriculated at Harvard. In 2010, Forbes magazine ranked Roxbury Latin fifth in a list of the top 10 prep schools in America.

In 2015, TheStreet ranked Roxbury Latin among Top US Private Schools with the Most Graduates Getting Into Ivy League Universities. The school provides school bus service for some students who live in the Dorchester, South Boston, Hyde Park and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston; the school charges a nominal fee for the bus usage. The school has varsity, junior varsity and lower-level teams in football, cross country, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, tennis and track and field; the school has a notable wrestling program, with the former varsity coach Steven E. Ward being inducted into the wrestling hall of fame in 2009; the varsity soccer team was co-champions with Rivers in the NEPSAC tournament in 2012. The Track & Field team has won the NEPSTA Championship in nine of the last eleven years, including five in a row from 2011–2015; the Track Team won the ISTA Championship in 2012 and 2013. The Tennis team has won the ISL Championship in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, has been invited to the NEPSAC Class B Tennis Championship nine years in a row, winning the tournament in 2013 and finishing as runners-up in 2015.

The school has a wide variety of extracurricular activities for its students to partake in. The Model United Nations program and the Debate and Public Speaking program are popular, with a hundred students in each; the school participates in many Model United Nations conferences and debate tournaments every year. Another moderately popular activity is an annual interscholastic robotics competition; the school team has done exceptionally well in recent years, placing 5th in the New England Division in 2009. In 2010, it placed 2nd out of a school record; the school boasts several language clubs and a chess team that has won or shared the South Shore Interscholastic Chess League title in 2 of the last 5 years, as well as community service clubs, such as Habitat for Humanity. The school has an extensive music program, available to students of all grades. There is junior chorus for seventh and eighth graders, a glee club for high schoolers. There is a small a cappella group consisting of about fourteen singers called the Latonics that requires an audition.

Additionally, there is a jazz band and several halls a year devoted to instrumental performances by students and faculty. James Pierpont, principal founder of Yale University Paul D

W. P. Snyder Jr. known as W. H. Clingerman, W. P. Snyder Jr. State Memorial, or J. L. Perry, is a historic towboat moored on the Muskingum River in Marietta, Ohio, at the Ohio River Museum. A National Historic Landmark, she is the only intact, steam-driven sternwheel towboat still on the nation's river system. W. P. Snyder Jr. is a sternwheel, steam driven, towboat, built as the Carnegie Steel Company towboat W. H. Clingerman in 1918 by Rees & Sons Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1938, she was renamed J. L. Perry, in 1945 A-1. In August 1945, she was sold to Crucible Steel Company of Pittsburgh, renamed the W. P. Snyder Jr. in September 1945. She was a sister vessel of W. H. Colvin Jr. and she towed coal on the Monongahela River until being laid up on 23 September 1953, at Crucible, Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1955, the boat was given to the Ohio Historical Society for exhibit at the Ohio River Museum in Marietta, Ohio. W. P. Snyder Jr. was the last steamboat locking through Lock 1, on the Muskingum River, before that lock was removed.

She arrived in Marietta, with Captain Fred Way Jr. as master on 16 September 1955. As one of the first steel hull towboats constructed, she was fitted with the prominent anti-hogging struts and cables necessary on wooden hulled stern wheelers. At the time it wasn't known. W. P. Snyder Jr. has been permanently moored on the Muskingum River in Marietta, Ohio, at the Ohio River Museum. Visitors to the museum receive a guided tour of W. P. Snyder Jr.. She is "the only intact, steam-driven sternwheel towboat still on the nation's river system", but was "is in danger of sinking" in 2009. On 21 November 2009, W. P. Snyder Jr. was towed from Marietta to Ohio to have her hull replaced. W. P. Snyder Jr. made her way home starting 15 September 2010 and arrived back in the Muskingum River at Marietta on 17 September 2010. Foster, Kevin J.. "National Register of Historic Places registration form / W. P. Snyder Jr.". National Park Service. Retrieved 2012-09-24."Accompanying Photos". National Park Service. Retrieved 2012-09-24.

Photo of W. P. Snyder Jr. at the Ohio River Museum website