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Interstate Commerce Act of 1887
The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 is a United States federal law that was designed to regulate the railroad industry, particularly its monopolistic practices. The Act required that railroad rates be "reasonable and just," but did not empower the government to fix specific rates. -
National American Woman Suffrage Association
The National American Woman Suffrage Association was formed to work for women's suffrage in the United States -
Publication of How the Other Half Lives
Studies among the Tenements of New York was an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. -
Sherman Antitrust Act
A landmark federal statute in the history of United States antitrust law passed by Congress in 1890. -
Eugene V. Debs
Debs organized the American Railway Union, which waged a strike against the Pullman Company of Chicago in 1894. -
Woman's Christian Temperence Union
The first mass organization among women devoted to social reform with a program that "linked the religious and the secular through concerted and far-reaching reform strategies based on applied Christianity. -
Tarbell Takes on the Oil Industry
Tarbell exposed unfair practices of the Standard Oil Company, leading to a U.S. Supreme Court decision to break its monopoly. -
Anthracite Coal Strike
A strike by the United Mine Workers of America in the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. Miners were on strike asking for higher wages, shorter workdays and the recognition of their union. -
Lincoln Steffens Publishes "The Shame of the Cities"
"The Shame of the Cities" unmasked the corrupt alliance between big business and municipal government -
Department of Commerce and Labor
he United States Department of Commerce and Labor was a short-lived Cabinet department of the United States government, which was concerned with controlling the excesses of big business. The United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor was the head of the department. -
Northern Securites Antitrust
Northern Securities Co. v. United States, was a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court ruled 5 to 4 against the stockholders of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroad companies, who had essentially formed a monopoly, and to dissolve the Northern Securities Company. -
Elkins Act
The Act authorized the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to impose heavy fines on railroads that offered rebates, and upon the shippers that accepted these rebates. -
Pure Food and Drug Act
For preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein, and for other purposes. -
Roosevelt establishes the Square Deal
It aimed at helping middle class citizens and involved attacking plutocracy and bad trusts while at the same time protecting business from the most extreme demands of organized labor -
Publication of The Jungle
Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities. -
Meat Inspection Act
Act that works to prevent adulterated or misbranded meat and meat products from being sold as food and to ensure that meat and meat products are slaughtered and processed under sanitary conditions. -
Robert La Follette turns Wisconsin into a democracy
La Follette worked closely with professors from the University of Wisconsin to help the state become "a laboratory of democracy." By the time he joined the U.S. Senate in 1906, La Follette had become a national figure. -
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan, New York City was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in US history -
17th Amendment ratified
Senators Elected by Popular Vote. The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. -
Progressive (Bull Moose) Party
Bull Moose Party, formally Progressive Party, U.S. dissident political faction that nominated former president Theodore Roosevelt for the presidency in 1912; the formal name and general objectives of the party were revived 12 years later. -
March for Suffrage
Wells takes part in the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA)'s protest march, demanding that Woodrow Wilson acknowledge the goals of the suffrage movement. Famously, Wells refuses to march separately from the white sufragettes. -
Anti-saloon League
The Anti-Saloon League was the leading organization lobbying for prohibition in the United States in the early 20th century.In 1913, the League sponsored a parade in Washington, DC. At the gathering's conclusion, the League's superintendent, Purley Baker, presented an amendment to the United States Congress and to the House of Representatives. -
Underwood Tariff Act
Its purpose was to reduce levies on manufactured and semi-manufactured goods and to eliminate duties on most raw materials. To compensate for the loss of revenue, the act also levied a graduated income tax (on U.S. residents. -
Federal Reserve Act
Act of Congress that created and established the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States, and granted it the legal authority to issue Federal Reserve Notes -
Federal Trade Commision
Its principal mission is the promotion of consumer protection and the elimination and prevention of anticompetitive business practices, such as coercive monopoly. -
Clayton Antitrust Act
The Clayton Antitrust Act is an amendment passed by the U.S. Congress in 1914 that provides further clarification and substance to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. -
Keating-Owen Child Labor Act
Child labor laws in the United States include numerous statutes and rules regulating the employment of minors. According to the United States Department of Labor, child labor laws affect those under the age of 12 in a variety of occupations. -
19th Amendment Ratified
The Nineteenth (19th) Amendment to the United States Constitution granted women the right to vote, prohibiting any United States citizen to be denied the right to vote based on sex. I -
The 18th Amendment
The Eighteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution effectively established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States by declaring illegal the production, transport and sale of alcohol -
Margaret Sanger
In 1921, Sanger established the American Birth Control League, a precursor to today's Planned Parenthood Federation of America. -
John Dewey and the Philosophy of pragmatism
Dewey believed that human beings learn through a 'hands on' approach. This places Dewey in the educational philosophy of pragmatism.