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Sand Creek Massacre
During the American Indian Wars, a force of nearly 700 Colorado Volunteer Cavalry under the command of Col. John Chivington decimated from 70-500 Native Americans, mostly of Cheyenne and Arapaho heritage of whom most were women and children. Fierce Native retaliation would result for many years following the slaughter. -
President Lincoln's Assassination
Only days after the end of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln is shot while viewing a play at the Ford's Theater in Washington D.C. The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, did so to inspire southern Confederates to rise up in a second rebellion against the Union. -
Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment
With the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment came equal citizenship rights and liberties to all people naturalized in the United States. It marked a major stepping stone in the long and arduous process of fully integrating African Americans into American society. -
Election of 1868
Republican candidate and former Union general, Ulysses S. Grant, wins the election against Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour by 134 electoral votes. Grant's victory greatly influenced the lives of many Republican-supportive African Americans across the nation. -
Completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad
On May 10, 1869, the rails of the west-building Union Pacific and east-building Central Pacific Railroads met at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory and were joined by a gold, ceremonial spike, leaving a connected east and west coast and revolutionizing cross-country travel time. -
Battle of the Little Big Horn
Fought between June 25 and 26, the Battle of the little Big Horn was a military engagement between the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army led by Lt. Col. George Custer and the combined forces of Arapaho, Lakota, and Northern Cheyenne tribes. The battle was a humiliating defeat for the United States in the Great Sioux War of 1876. -
Jane Addams' Hull House
Founded by Jane Addams in 1889, the Hull House was intended as a place of refuge for newly arrived European immigrants in Chicago. The institution advanced the beliefs of Social Gospel, providing food, clothing, and housing to those in need. -
Jacob Riis and "How the Other Half Lives"
Journalist and photographer Jacob Riis publishes "How the Other Half Lives" a prime example of American photojournalism in which he visually conveyed the deplorable conditions of immigrant ghettos and slums in American cities around the turn of the century. Riis intended to shock the American public into action by showing them photographs depicting the everyday life of poor immigrants. -
Founding of General Electric
After George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla secure a contract to supply a power plant on Niagara Falls, financer J.P. Morgan buys the majority of Edison Electric stock and creates General Electric, which soon becomes the largest electricity provider in the world. -
Homestead Strike
After tensions mounted at the Homestead steal works of the Carnegie Steal Company, workers began a multi-day strike due to increasingly harsh conditions and increasingly smaller wages. The strike culminated in a violent interaction between strikers and private security agents, the Pinkertons. -
World's Columbian Exposition
On May 1, 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago commenced, displaying America's wealth and innovative progress to the world. The grounds were lit entirely by Tesla's alternating current. -
Nomination of William Jennings Bryan
The Democratic Party nominates Nebraska politician and Populist Party advocate William Jennings Bryan, who promises to destroy all American monopolies and trusts, as presidential candidate for the upcoming election, threatening wealthy industrialists nationwide. -
Annexation of Hawaiian Islands
After organizing a successful revolt in 1893 in response to the 1890 McKinley Tariff on imported commodities, Stanford Dole and numerous prominent Hawaiian planters overthrew the feeble Hawaiian monarchy headed by Queen Liliuokalani and demanded annexation, which was not carried out until 1898. -
Explosion of the U.S.S. Maine
After continued intervention from the United States following Cuban Civil War against the Spanish, the American battleship U.S.S. Maine exploded and sank from an unknown cause while docked in Havana Harbor. The incident was one of many to, once publicized through yellow journalism, prompt the United States to declare on Spain in 1898. -
Boxer Rebellion
Due to continuing socio-economic hardship during the 1890s, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists was formed to restore stability and rid China of western colonialism and Christian missionaries, resulting in the deaths of thousands. Ended with the signing of the Boxer Protocol on September 7, 1901. -
Carrie A. Nation
Carrie Nation remained a powerful and rather controversial voice for American women during the course of the Progressive Era. Famous for her use of violent protest, Nation most well known public display was destroying the interior of a bar/saloon in Wichita, Kansas with a hatchet in 1901. -
Platt Amendment
Passed in 1903, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the Platt Amendment effectively nullified past American-Cuban agreements by not allowing the independent Cuba to enter into any foreign treaties, requiring them to lease/sell land to the United States for naval purposes, and permitting the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs when necessary. -
Dissolution of Standard Oil
On May 15, 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of John Rockefeller's Standard Oil on the basis of its unlawful business practices of forming dominating trusts, forcing competitors out of business, the unfair regulation of oil prices. Standard Oil was dissolved into 34 separate oil companies. -
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Due mainly to physical restrictions placed upon them by their employers, 146 employees, most of them young immigrant women, were killed when the factory caught fire on March 11, 1911. Left with no means of escape, many were forced to jump from the 10-story building in hopes of being caught, but to no avail. The accident, and others like it, led to rapid business reform in America. -
Tampico Incident
After refusing to offer a 21-gun salute and publicly apologize to the United States for arresting a number of American sailors, Mexico swiftly becomes an outright enemy of the United States and diplomatic relations between the two countries rapidly deteriorate. -
Sinking of the RMS Lusitania
In response to Great Britain's naval blockade of Germany the First World War, Germany began sinking British passenger ships in retaliation. On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat sunk the RMS Lusitania, which had 100 American passengers aboard at the time. -
Reemrgence of the KKK
Largely influenced by the silent film "Birth of a Nation", William Simmons initiates the second movement of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, expanding its influence far beyond its original demographic and geographic area. At its peak, the Klan's membership exceeded 4 million members in the mid 1920s. -
Reelection of Woodrow Wilson
Running against Supreme Court Justice, Charles Evans, and with the slogan "He Kept us Out of War", Woodrow Wilson wins the 1916 presidential election with immense support from Midwesterners and Westerners. -
Conviction of Eugene Debs
After delivering a speech in Canton, Ohio aimed at discouraging young men to conscript in the U.S. army, Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison on account of violating the Sedition and Espionage Acts of 1917 and 1918 and threatening the security of the United States. -
Scopes Trial
in 1925, Tennessee school teacher John Scopes was indicted for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution to his students. Scopes was fined $100, but the topic was brought to the public eye and caused substantial controversy. -
First Transatlantic Flight
American aviator Charles Lindbergh completes the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean (from NYC to Paris) which took a total of 33 hours and 9 minutes. -
Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
After being convicted in 1920 of murdering a paymaster and his guard in Braintree, MA, Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed by electric chair in the Charlestown State Prison. -
Nazi Invasion of Poland
On 1 September, 1939, a week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi and Slovak forces invaded Poland from the North, South, and West, facilitating the beginning of the Second World War. -
Attack on Pearl Harbor
On the morning of December 7, 1942, Japanese bomber aircraft carried out an aerial attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, destroying several ships and airplanes. The attack was carried out with the intention of inflicting serious damage to the American Pacific fleet in order to delay an expected American offensive. -
Normandy Landings
On June 6, 1944, a joint American, British, and Canadian invasion commenced in Nazi-occupied France. The invasion opened up the Western Front in Europe, leaving Germany forced to fight a war on two fronts. -
Yalta Conference
Beginning on February 4 and ending on February 11, 1945, the Yalta Conference involved negotiations between the heads of the major Allied Powers concerning the organization of post-war Germany and Europe after the end of the war.
