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Discovery of Gold in Pikes Peak
In the first week of July 1858, Green Russell and Sam Bates found a small placer deposit near the mouth of Little Dry Creek that yielded about 20 troy ounces (622 grams) of gold, the first significant gold discovery in the Rocky Mountain region. -
Bessemer Process
A process of making steel from pig iron by burning out carbon and other impurities by means of a blast of air forced through the molten metal. -
Homestead Act
To help develop the American West and spur economic growth, Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1862, which provided 160 acres of federal land to anyone who agreed to farm the land. The act distributed millions of acres of western land to individual settlers. -
Morrill Land grant act
First proposed when Morrill was serving in the House of Representatives, the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862 set aside federal lands to create colleges to “benefit the agricultural and mechanical arts.” The president signed the bill into law on July 2, 1862. -
Transcontinental r/r completed
The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad May 10, 1869, is recognized as one of our country's biggest achievements and one of mankind's biggest accomplishments. -
Battle of little bighorn
The battle was a momentary victory for the Lakota and Cheyenne. The death of Custer and his troops became a rallying point for the United States to increase their efforts to force native peoples onto reservation lands. -
Farmers alliance created
Farmers' Alliance, an American agrarian movement during the 1870s and '80s that sought to improve the economic conditions for farmers through the creation of cooperatives and political advocacy. The movement was made up of numerous local organizations that coalesced into three large groupings. -
Thomas Edison invents light bulb
By January 1879, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting. -
Carlisle school established
Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, opened in 1879 as the first government-run boarding school for Native American children. The goal? Forced assimilation of Native children into white American society under the belief of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man -
Chinese exclusion act
This act was the first significant restriction on free immigration in U.S. history, and it excluded Chinese laborers from the country under penalty of imprisonment and deportation. It also made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship. -
Edison lights up NYC
He lit up Manhattan, his company flipped the switch on his Pearl Street power station on September 4, 1882, providing hundreds of homes with electricity -
Statue of Liberty built
The Statue of Liberty was built in France between 1875 and 1884. This monument would honor the United States' centennial of independence and the friendship with France. -
American federation of labor founded
It was founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions eager to provide mutual support and disappointed in the Knights of Labor. -
Interstate commerce act passed
The Interstate Commerce Act addressed the problem of railroad monopolies by setting guidelines for how the railroads could do business. The act became law with the support of both major political parties and pressure groups from all regions of the country. -
Dawes act
Also known as the General Allotment Act, the law authorized the President to break up reservation land, which was held in common by the members of a tribe, into small allotments to be parceled out to individuals. Thus, Native Americans registering on a tribal "roll" were granted allotments of reservation land. -
Jacob Riis published his book of photos
While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the poor living conditions of poor people by exposing these conditions to the middle and upper classes. -
Sherman ant-trust act passed
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was the first Federal act that outlawed monopolistic business practices. The Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 was the first measure passed by the U.S. Congress to prohibit trusts. -
Wounded knee massacre
The massacre at Wounded Knee, during which soldiers of the US Army 7th Cavalry Regiment indiscriminately slaughtered hundreds of Sioux men, women, and children, marked the definitive end of Indian resistance to the encroachments of white settlers. -
Fredrick Jackson Turner writes essay of settling the west
Turner's frontier thesis describes "the farmer's advance," waves of settlement in the westward migration. Turner says the pioneer is involved in the first wave. Pioneers farm, support their families and improve the land. -
Alfred T Mahan writes his book on sea power
In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a lecturer in naval history and the president of the United States Naval War College, published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, a revolutionary analysis of the importance of naval power as a factor in the rise of the British Empire. -
Pullman strike
Pullman Strike, (May 11, 1894–c. July 20, 1894), in U.S. history, widespread railroad strike and boycott that severely disrupted rail traffic in the Midwest of the United States in June–July 1894. The federal government's response to the unrest marked the first time that an injunction was used to break a strike -
Plessy v Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for Black people. -
Holden v hardy
Hardy, 169 U.S. 366 (1898), is a US labor law case in which the US Supreme Court held a limitation on working time for miners and smelters as constitutional. -
Spanish American War begins
The Spanish–American War (April 21 – August 13, 1898) began in the aftermath of the internal explosion of USS Maine in Havana Harbor in Cuba, leading to United States intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. -
Hawaii is annexed
On July 7, 1898, the Hawaiian Islands were annexed by this joint resolution. When the Hawaiian islands were formally annexed by the United States in 1898, the event marked the end of a lengthy internal struggle between native Hawaiians and non-native American businessmen for control of the Hawaiian government. -
Phillipines islands are annexed
In Paris on December 10, 1898, the United States paid Spain $20 million to annex the entire Philippine archipelago -
Newlands Reclamation act
the legislation authorized the Secretary of the Interior to designate irrigation sites and to establish a reclamation fund from the sale of public lands to finance the projects. -
U-boats created
The first fully functional U-boat was created -
Lochner v New York
In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Supreme Court ruled that a New York law setting maximum working hours for bakers was unconstitutional. -
Sinclair’s the Jungle written
Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the appalling working conditions in the meat-packing industry. His description of diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat shocked the public and led to new federal food safety laws. Before the turn of the 20th century, a major reform movement had emerged in the United States. -
Pure Food and drug act passed
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 prohibited the sale of misbranded or adulterated food and drugs in interstate commerce and laid a foundation for the nation's first consumer protection agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). -
Muller V Oregon
A case in which the Court found that limiting the number of work hours for women did not violate the right to contract in the Fourteenth Amendment. -
Founding of the NAACP
The NAACP was created in 1909 by an interracial group consisting of W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, Mary White Ovington, and others concerned with the challenges facing African Americans, especially in the wake of the 1908 Springfield (Illinois) Race Riot. -
Hepner act
A penalty may be recovered by a civil action, although such an action may be so far criminal in its nature that the defendant cannot be compelled to testify against himself therein in respect to any matter involving his being guilty of a criminal offense. -
Ford Motor company's first full assembly line starts
The Ford Motor Company team decided to try to implement the moving assembly line in the automobile manufacturing process. After much trial and error, in 1913 Henry Ford and his employees successfully began using this innovation at the Highland Park assembly plant. -
17th adm
Passed by Congress on May 13, 1912, and ratified on April 8, 1913, the 17th Amendment modified Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution by allowing voters to cast direct votes for U.S. senators. Prior to its passage, senators were chosen by state legislatures. -
Federal Reserve act
The 1913 Federal Reserve Act created the Federal Reserve System, known simply as "The Fed." It was implemented to establish economic stability in the U.S. by introducing a central bank to oversee monetary policy. -
Panama Canal is built
Completed in 1914, the Panama Canal symbolized U.S. technological prowess and economic power. Although U.S. control of the canal eventually became an irritant to U.S.-Panamanian relations, at the time it was heralded as a major foreign policy achievement -
Beginning of the first world war
World War 1 begins -
Clayton Antitrust act
The Clayton Act prohibits price discrimination. This is the act of selling the same product to different buyers and charging different prices based on who is purchasing the goods. -
Lusitania Sunk
RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat on 7 May 1915. The luxury passenger liner was crossing the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool when the German submarine U-20 fired without warning. After a second explosion – the cause of which is still debated – the ship quickly sank. -
Selective Service act
The Selective Service Act of 1917 or Selective Draft Act authorized the United States federal government to raise a national army for service in World War I through conscription. -
US enters WWI
On April 4, 1917, the U.S. Senate voted in support of the measure to declare war on Germany. The House concurred two days later. The United States later declared war on German ally Austria-Hungary on December 7, 1917. -
WWI ends
On Nov. 11, 1918, after more than four years of horrific fighting and the loss of millions of lives, the guns on the Western Front fell silent. Although fighting continued elsewhere, the armistice between Germany and the Allies was the first step to ending World War I. -
18th adm
prohibited the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors..." and was ratified by the states on January 16, 1919 -
19 adm
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. -
Immigration quota act
The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. -
National origins act
A law that severely restricted immigration by establishing a system of national quotas that blatantly discriminated against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and virtually excluded Asians. -
Scopes trial
The trial was viewed as an opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of the bill, to publicly advocate for the legitimacy of Darwin's theory of evolution, and to enhance the profile of the American Civil Liberties Union