About the Interactive Timeline

The foundations for government's greatest endeavors are packages of laws organized around consistent strategies for addressing focused problems, like healthcare access, water quality, or food safety. Throughout the Government's Greatest Achievements book and the materials on this website, the emphasis is on endeavors, like reducing hunger and improving nutrition, rather than the important laws that, cumulatively, make this goal the source of such great Congressional effort, like the National School Lunch Act and the Food Stamp Act.

The Interactive Timeline takes a step back from the endeavors to the major laws, placing them in the historical context of the Congress in which they were enacted.

Use the Interactive Timeline to:

• Consider the legacy of each Congress and president in passing the most significant laws of the past half century;
• Consider which Congresses were more and less active in passing major laws and why;
• Consider the impact of unified and divided party control in Congress on the passage of major laws;
• Put a law into the context of the greater problem it was enacted to solve. By clicking on a law, a link to its related endeavors will appear.