Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

George W. Norris's Persuasion In The Campaign For The Unicameral Legislature, Phillip K. Tompkins

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The people of forty-seven states in this country are governed by bicameral or two-house legislatures. The people of the forty-eighth, Nebraskans, are governed by a unicameral or one-house legislature.

On November 6, 1934, the people of Nebraska provided by amendment to their state constitution, a one-house legislature to be composed of between thirty and fifty members to be elected on a non-partisan ballot. The number of solons was later set at forty-three, and 1957 marked the twentieth anniversary of the first unicameral session in Nebraska.

Senator George W. Norris is generally regarded by all as the father of the unicameral …

Ambassador Livingston Merchant On Anglo-American Relations, 1957, Matt Loayza

U.S. Foreign Relations

In October 1957, U.S. Ambassador to Canada Livingston Merchant wrote to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles with an assessment of Anglo-American relations in the context of recent world events. Although relations between the two countries had been quite positive for several decades, the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain had been strained by the recent “Suez Crisis.” This event was prompted by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s July 1956 decision to nationalize the Franco-British Suez Canal Company, a French-British company responsible for operating the Suez Canal. The Eisenhower administration did not relish the prospect of a rupture …

Ambassador Ellis Briggs On Sputnik, 1957, Matt Loayza

U.S. Foreign Relations

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. Sputnik weighed in at just under 184 pounds, with a diameter (22.8 inches) slightly smaller than a basketball. Sputnik orbited the Earth until January 4, 1958, when it burned up upon reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. In the following telegram, Ellis Briggs, the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil provides an analysis of recent developments.

Bibliography:

Walter McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)

Dulles And Brownell On Little Rock, 1957, Matt Loayza

U.S. Foreign Relations

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The Brown decision followed over two decades of efforts to overturn the “separate but equal” legal doctrine that had prevailed since the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. In 1955, the court called for the process of desegregating schools to begin “with all deliberate speed.” However, since the Brown II decision left the implementation of the desegregation process to local school boards, it soon became clear that white Southerners were less interested in complying with the Brown decision than …

U.S. House Journal Of William H. Natcher, Vol. 8, Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

U.S. House Journals of William H. Natcher

Journal, 31 May 1957 to 11 February 1958, of U.S. Congressman William Huston Natcher while he was representing Kentucky’s 2^nd District. The journal includes an almost daily account of Natcher’s reflections on current events and transactions with the U.S. House of Representatives. Many of the entries contain typescripted newspaper articles with some editorial comment provided by Natcher, others are more personal in nature.

My Native Grounds, Royal W. France, Jack C. Lane

Faculty Publications

In 1957, near the end of his life, Royal France, a Rollins College economics professor for over twenty years, published My Native Grounds, a memoir that chronicles his life of service and commitment in the first half of the twentieth century. His story, which provides insights and perspectives on American life during the first half of the twentieth century that only an active participant could furnish, will appeal to scholars of both Florida and national histories, particularly those interested in American civil liberties history. This exceptionally well written, readable memoir will appeal as well to the general reader who has …