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This Week in Princeton History for July 11-17
In this week’s installment of our recurring series, a baseball player turns pro, a former instructor laments the loss of the gymnasium, and more. July 11, 1818—London’s Literary Gazette overviews the state of American college education, singling out Princeton as the only institution with “any systematic lectures on moral philosophy.” The writer goes on, The…
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A Princeton-Area Nazi Boys Camp and Civil Liberties in New Jersey in the 1930s
The people of Princeton were on edge one summer in 1934. Six miles away on the banks of the Delaware & Raritan Canal in Griggstown, 200 boys ranging in age between 8 and 16 from New York, Buffalo, and Philadelphia were camping in tents that bore swastika emblems, wearing uniforms apparently modeled on the “Brown…
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This Week in Princeton History for October 28-November 3
In this week’s installment of our recurring series bringing you the history of Princeton University and its faculty, students, and alumni, sophomores organize a battle against freshmen for canes for the first time, the ACLU urges Princetonians to support the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and more. October 28, 1983—Princeton’s Director of the Center for Visitor…
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Comic Books, Censorship, and Moral Panic
By Zachary Bampton ’20 Previously on this blog we covered the educational and political aspirations of comic books in American popular culture. Keen interest in comics as teaching tools–or as propaganda–reflected a public awareness of the power of the medium. However, Americans did not always receive comics well. In the 1950s, creative expression came into…
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This Week in Princeton History for September 4-10
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series bringing you the history of Princeton University and its faculty, students, and alumni, a tropical storm batters the campus, a mountain is named after a professor, and more. September 4, 2001—Anthony Romero ’87 becomes the American Civil Liberties Union’s first Latino and first openly gay executive director.
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The American Civil Liberties Union and the Fight Against Japanese American Internment
This Sunday marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the mass expulsion of Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States. Specifically, the order allowed the Secretary of War to designate certain regions as “military areas” from which anyone could be expelled at the discretion of the Secretary or his…
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This Week in Princeton History for January 16-22
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series bringing you the history of Princeton University and its faculty, students, and alumni, a riot paralyzes the campus, a senior performs for the U.S. president, and more. January 18, 1893—The faculty approve a resolution ending supervision of exams, provided that students sign a pledge stating that they…
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The Right to Love: Loving v. Virginia and the American Civil Liberties Union
The film Loving, based on the Loving v. Virginia case, is now in expanded release in U.S. theaters. When Mildred and Richard Loving were married in June 1958, twenty-four states still had anti-miscegenation laws. For this reason, Mildred, a black woman who was also of Rappahannock and Cherokee Indian descent, and Richard, a white man, were…
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ACLU Court Document Summons King’s Last Days
A recent reference inquiry brought to light a document within the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Records that provides a record of one of the events that took place in the days surrounding the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. W.J. Michael Cody, an attorney in Memphis,…
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Rodger Baldwin: From The Civil Liberties Bureau to the American Civil Liberties Union
by: Professor Samuel Walker School of Criminal Justice University of Nebraska at Omaha This is the first part in a series that was introduced earlier. Roger Baldwin was director of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB) from its founding as an organization independent of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) in October 1917 until his…
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