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First Flight
at 10:35 am on December 17, 1903, Orville Wright flew the Flyer for 12 seconds over 120 feet of ground. This flight took place on Kill Devil Hill. Orville was the first man to fly. -
Theory of Relativity
In 1905, Albert Einstein wrote a paper that revolutionized science.In his Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein explained that the speed of light was constant but that both space and time were relative to the position of the observer. -
Sinking of the RMS Titanic
The world was shocked when the Titanic hit an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912, and sunk just a few hours later at 2:20 am on April 15, 1912. The "unsinkable" ship RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage, losing at least 1,517 lives. -
World War One
World War I was an extremely bloody war between the allies and axis. Fought mostly by soldiers in trenches, World War I saw an estimated 10 million military deaths and another 20 million wounded. -
TV
The world’s first electronic television was created by a 21 year old inventor named Philo Taylor Farnsworth. That inventor lived in a house without electricity until he was age 14. Starting in high school, he began to think of a system that could capture moving images, transform those images into code, then move those images along radio waves to different devices. -
The Great Depression
The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1941, was a severe economic downturn caused by an overly-confident, over-extended stock market and a drought that struck the South. -
Nazi Party
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party took control of Germany in the early 1930s, established a dictatorship and started the Second World War in Europe. -
Holocaust
The Holocaust began in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and ended in 1945 when the Nazis were defeated by the Allied powers.In addition to Jews, the Nazis targeted Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the disabled for persecution. Those who resisted the Nazis were sent to forced labor camps or murdered. It is estimated that 11 million people were killed during the Holocaust. -
War II
World War II, which lasted from 1939 to 1945, was a war fought primarily between the Axis Powers (Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan) and the Allies (France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States). The bloodiest war in world history, responsible for the deaths of an estimated 40 to 70 million people, many of whom were civilians. -
King's Landmark "I Have a Dream" Speech
In 1957, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which organized civil rights activities throughout the United States. In August 1963, he led the great March on Washington, where he delivered this memorable speech in front of 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and millions more who watched on television. -
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was the prolonged struggle between nationalist forces attempting to unify the country of Vietnam under a communist government and the United States (with the aid of the South Vietnamese) attempting to prevent the spread of communism. -
President John F. Kennedy's Assassination
On November 22, 1963, the youth and idealism of America in the 1960s faltered as its young President, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald while riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Two days later, Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby during a prisoner transfer. -
First Internet
On a cold war kind of day in 1969, work began on ARPAnet, the grandfather to the Internet. Designed as a computer version of the nuclear bomb shelter, ARPAnet protected the flow of information between military installations by creating a network of geographically separated computers that could exchange information via a newly developed technology called NCP or Network Control Protocol. this change the world because now the world was able to share information to each other. -
The Jonestown Massacre
On November 18, 1978, Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones instructed all members living in the Jonestown, Guyana compound to commit an act of "revolutionary suicide," by drinking poisoned punch. In all, 918 people died that day, nearly a third of whom were children. -
Pac-Man
On May 22, 1980, the Pac-Man video game was released in Japan and by October of the same year it was released in the United States. The yellow, pie-shaped Pac-Man character, who travels around a maze trying to eat dots and avoid four mean ghosts, quickly became an icon of the 1980s. To this day, Pac-Man remains one of the most popular video games in history. -