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Alaska is purchased from Russia
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Completion of Transcontinental Railroad
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John D. Rockefeller starts Standard Oil
With such an aggressive push into the industry, the public and the U.S. Congress took notice of Standard and its seemingly unstoppable march. Monopolistic behavior was not kindly regarded, and Standard soon became the epitome of a company grown too big and too dominant, for the public good. It provided light, pipelines and terminals, setting up a system of transport for its own products -
Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone
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Thomas Edison brings light to the world with the light bulb
Edison focused on inventing a safe, inexpensive electric light to replace the gaslight–a challenge that scientists had been grappling with for the last 50 years. With the help of J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family, Edison set up the Edison Electric Light Company and began research and development. He made a breakthrough with a bulb that used a platinum filament. -
Chinese Exclusion Act
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Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL)
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Sherman Anti-trust Act
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Ellis Island opens
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Carnegie Steel Homestead Strike
The Homestead strike pitted one of the most powerful new corporations, Carnegie Steel Company, against the nation’s strongest trade union. The 1889 strike had won the steelworkers a favorable three-year contract; but by 1892 Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the union. His plant manager, Henry Clay Frick, stepped up production demands, and when the union refused to accept the new conditions, Frick began locking the workers out of the plant. -
Plessy v Ferguson
Segregation had picked up pace in the South, and was more than tolerated by the North. Congress defeated a bill that would have given federal protection to elections and nullified a number of Reconstruction laws on the books. Then the Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson. In declaring separate-but-equal facilities constitutional on intrastate railroads, the Court ruled that the protections of 14th Amendment applied only to political and civil rights, not social rights. -
The U.S. declares war on Spain
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Hawaii is annexed
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Rudyard Kipling published “The White Man’s Burden” in The New York Sun
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The start of the Boxer Rebellion
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Pres. McKinley is assassinated and Progressive Theodore Roosevelt becomes President
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Tenement Act
These narrow, low-rise apartment buildings were all too often cramped, poorly lit and lacked indoor plumbing and proper ventilation. By 1900, 2.3 million people were living in tenement housing. Many of the more residents began to move further north, leaving their low-rise masonry row houses behind. At the same time, more and more immigrants began to flow into the city, fleeing famine in Ireland or revolution in Germany. -
The Philippine Insurrection comes to an end
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The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe doctrine declares the U.S. right to intervene in the Western Hem
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Upton Sinclair releases “The Jungle”
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Pure Food & Drug Act and The Meat Inspection Act are passed
The original Food and Drugs Act was passed by Congress on June 30, and was signed by President Theodore Roosevelt. The food and drug act prohibits interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks and drugs. It helped with the disease and infections to slow down. -
Peak year of immigration through Ellis Island
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Henry Ford produced his first Model T (car)
The Model T changed the way Americans live, work and travel. Henry Ford’s revolutionary advancements in assembly-line manufacturing made the Model T the first car to be affordable for a majority of Americans. For the first time car ownership became a reality for average American workers, not just the wealthy. More than 15 million Model Ts were built in Detroit and Highland Park, Michigan, and also assembled at a Ford plant in Manchester, England, and at plants in continental Europe. -
Creation of the NAACP
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The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable–most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The tragedy brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop conditions of factories, and led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers. -
The Assassination on Austria’s archduke Franz Ferdinand starts WWI
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The Panama Canal is completed and opened for traffic
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The United States enters WWI
Two days after the U.S. Senate voted 82 to 6 to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally enters World War I.When the war finally ended, on November 11, 1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives. -
Ratification of the 18th Amendment - Prohibition
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Women got the right to vote
The women’s suffrage movement was a decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. The campaign was not easy, but with hard work the women went through, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified. Enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
