Projects
Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle
It was 1921 and the only way to prolong the life of a child with Type 1 diabetes was to starve her – literally. Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Hughes, daughter of American politician and Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes weighed just 48 pounds when Canadian researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered the miracle drug that would save her and millions of others.
Shackleton: Leadership Lessons from Antarctica
The ship Endurance set sail from South Georgia bound for the Antarctic on December 5, 1914 under the leadership of intrepid British explorer Ernest Shackleton. On January 18, 1915, just one day short of reaching their planned landing site at Vahsel Bay, the Endurance became frozen solid in the ice of the Weddell Sea. The ship was miles from land and cut off from all human contact. It should have been a death sentence for all 28 men aboard.
The Chinese Exclusion Act
In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed a law that would tear families apart, separating children from parents, wives from husbands. Children might never know their fathers, wives were abandoned to rear those children alone in a country thousands of miles away, and husbands committed themselves to long hours of harrowing manual labor in the United States in order to send money back. Many would never go home again. The law, the first in American history to drastically restrict immigration, would remain in effect for more than half a century.