New Jersey spans dense urban corridors, farmland, and 130 miles of Atlantic coastline — making it one of the most ecologically and socially complex states in the U.S. This archive collects progress stories from across the Garden State, covering environmental protection, public health, community investment, and civic innovation.
Governor Phil Murphy signed a measure that would require all public schools to teach LGBTQ history, making New Jersey only the second state in the U.S. to do so, after California in 2017.
The new plan would raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour on July 1, $11 an hour in 2020, $12 an hour in 2021, $13 in 2022, $14 in 2023 and $15 in 2024.
This policy is said to bring the wages of thousands of workers, approximately 40,000, to $19 per hour by 2023.
New Jersey becomes the 10th state to enact sick-leave legislation. Under the law, employers are required to provide one hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked.
Streptomycin was isolated on October 19, 1943, in a Rutgers University basement lab, where 23-year-old PhD student Albert Schatz pulled it from a soil microbe called Streptomyces griseus. It became the first antibiotic that could kill tuberculosis, a disease ancient enough to appear in Egyptian mummies and, until then, essentially untreatable.
