So we now have President Trump’s first budget, weighing in at $4.1 trillion. Medicaid, food stamps, health care are up for big cuts. Defense spending would rise. One thing all sides agree on: it won’t pass as proposed. It’s the beginning, not end, of the process. Which is as it should be. The budget is, […]

There was a time, believe it or not, when America’s leaders and the rest of the free world cared about the hungry and homeless. It was called World War II. While engaged in a life and death struggle against intractable enemies on two fronts on opposite sides of the globe, the U.S. still mobilized a […]

One of the most amazing things about our historic collections in the Baruch College Library Archives is how they surprisingly intersect. Our distinguished namesake, financier Bernard Baruch, https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/alumni/online_exhibits/digital/2008/bernard/exhibit1.html turned out to have worked with reformer extraordinaire Luther Gulick in FDR’s wartime councils. Bernard Baruch rubbed shoulders with Edward L. Bernays, the wily father of public […]

If 2015 was, sadly, the Year of the Migrant and Refugee, it’s worth pausing to remember the epic era of immigration some 100 years ago, and a shameful if long-forgotten history captured in the Baruch Library Archives. We’re talking about the Ellis Island Investigating Commission and a scandal within a scandal, as revealed by a […]

Traffic congestion has been driving New Yorkers crazy since forever. Like all the city’s biggest problems, it was quickly handed off to New York’s Finest. In the late 1800’s, well before the automobile, the enfabled Broadway Squad of police officers– six-footers chosen for their brawn and good looks, to appeal to the ladies — was […]