Justice O'Connor Named Among 250 Americans Who Shaped the Nation

 

HISTORY.com has named Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to its list of 250 People Who Shaped America. She appears in a section titled "What Glass Ceiling?" as the woman who, in 1981, became the first to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

(The Historical League named her as 1992 Arizona Historymaker and she has done so much more since that time.)

 The recognition is fitting. But for the O'Connor Institute, the fuller story is the legacy she left behind.

Justice O'Connor was an Arizonan, a rancher's daughter, a state legislator, a judge, and ultimately a justice of the nation's highest court. After retiring, she devoted the next chapter of her public life to civic education, warning that self-government cannot endure if citizens do not understand it.

She called the decline of civics education a crisis. She built programs to address it. That work continues through the O’Connor Institute today.

https://www.history.com/articles/250-people-who-shaped-america