Black Codes and Bondage, Settling the North, Legislative Follies

Chapter 3 covers the years in which the Illinois state capital moved from Kaskaskia to Vandalia to Springfield, focusing on legislative and judicial debates surrounding the Black Code, which limited the rights of free blacks, and the euphemistic practices of indentured/involuntary servitude and apprenticeship contracts. As antislavery populations surged in northern Illinois, political and legal opinions about blacks shifted. The 1832 Black Hawk War, a land dispute involving the Sauk and Fox, led to the 1833 treaty that removed Native Americans from the state. The Illinois General Assembly, including in 1836–37 representatives Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, chartered state banks that failed; set up internal improvement schemes that indebted the state; and ultimately supported completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal (1848).

Universal Admission Screening for Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus in a Level HID Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: The First 9 Months

In response to epidemic methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in the community, the Illinois General Assembly mandated that all patients admitted to intensive care units statewide be screened for MRSA. Screening was instituted at our neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in September 2007 by a polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based strategy. The law created an opportunity to determine the rate of MRSA colonization among neonates, to gather information about subsequent MRSA infections, and to evaluate risk factors for MRSA colonization on admission to the NICU.

Resurgent Governors in the Federal System

The time is July 1988, and baseball fever is rising. With barely a glimmer of hope remaining, “Big Jim” Thompson steps into the batter's box to swat a ninth inning “home run” that prevents the White Sox from going down to defeat—or more accurately—from going down to Florida. Such is the stuff of legends, although the real story is hardly less dramatic. Seated at a desk at home plate of Comiskey Park, Illinois Governor James Thompson signed a $ 150 million financing package for the construction of a new stadium that will keep the White Sox in Chicago and fore-close the team's removal to St. Petersburg. With vigorous lobbying from the Governor, the Illinois General Assembly, in the closing minutes of its 1988 session, had narrowly approved the stadium legislation.The news from Chicago, however, is more than a baseball story. The news tells us a great deal about modern governors in domestic policy making. They are more activist than their counterparts a generation or so ago, particularly in the realm of homestate economic development. Though most governors do not serve as long as Thompson–by late 1988, he had been governor for nearly 12 years–modern governors, as compared to their 1950s counterparts, are staying in office longer and, perhaps as a consequence, acquiring greater national influence.