Greg Johnson

Photo credit: Peter Tobia Amy Smith, left, and Hannah Weiss chat with Clarence Briscoe during a recent dinner at the Penn Hillel soup kitchen.

Many departments and offices spread the holiday cheer this time of year by exchanging Pollyanna or Secret Santa gifts among co-workers. But why not give a gift of charity instead?

Penn was by no means as radical as the University of California at Berkeley, or Columbia University, in the turbulent and tumultuous 1960s, but the University did see its share of campus uprisings and sit-ins to protest civil rights violations, the lack of cultural studies, assassinations and the Vietnam War.

HOPE SPRINGS: Florida-native and Penn sophmore Brittany Young, 19, established A Spring of Hope, a non-profit organization that builds wells in rural African communities, in 2005 after visiting Limpopo, South Africa, on vacation with her mother.

The United States, although widely recognized as a bastion of freedom and democracy, does not get an automatic “A” on its human rights report card.

 Photo credit: Peter Tobia

Photo credit: Mike Swiszcz With spectacular views of the Law School Courtyard, Golkin Hall is the fourth and final piece of Penn Law’s four-building site, and the last phase in a decade-long transformation of the Law School campus.

Depictions of people facing death have been used in news coverage since before the advent of photography. The earliest were illustrations, engravings and woodcuts, such as drawings of President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.

 Photo credit: Candace diCarlo Having grown up in Philadelphia and being a product of the black church, Chad D

In his 2008 book, “Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North,” released on the same day Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president of the United States, Thomas Sugrue says Obama appeared in only one sentence because he was not yet a central figure in civil rights.