June 29 · This Day in America
From a bed at Walter Reed, recovering from surgery, President Dwight Eisenhower signs the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. It authorizes forty-one thousand miles of limited-access highway and twenty-five billion dollars to build it, the largest public works project the country has ever attempted. Eisenhower had two pictures in his mind: a miserable Army convoy that took sixty-two days to cross the country in 1919, and the smooth German autobahns he watched armies move on in 1945. He wanted America to be able to move, for commerce and, in the language of the law, for defense. What gets built reshapes everything: where people live, how cities breathe, what a weekend can reach, which neighborhoods get severed by a ramp. It is the road that made the road trip a birthright and, in the same stroke, remade the map of American life.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1972
In Furman v. Georgia, a divided Court rules five to four that the death penalty as it is being applied is so arbitrary and so shadowed by race that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The decision voids the sentences of nearly seven hundred people on death rows across the country and forces dozens of states to rewrite their laws. It is not a permanent end. But for four years, by order of the Court, America stopped.
Source: supreme.justia.com