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U-boats created
The destruction of enemy shipping by German U-boats was a spectacular feature of both World Wars I and II. -
Bessemer Process
The Bessemer process (1855) made it possible to produce steel as ingots. -
Discovery of Gold in Pikes Peak
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. -
Homestead Act
Gave citizens or future citizens up to 160 acres of public land provided they live on it, improve it, and pay a small registration fee. -
Morrill Land grant act
The Morrill Act committed the federal government to grant each state 30,000 acres of public land issued in the form of "land scrip" certificates for each of its representatives and senators in Congress. -
Transcontinental r/r completed
By connecting the existing eastern U.S. rail networks to the west coast, the Transcontinental Railroad (known originally as the "Pacific Railroad") became the first continuous railroad line across the United States. It was constructed between 1863 and 1869. -
Battle of little bighorn
Marked the most decisive Native American victory and the worst U.S. Army defeat in the long Plains Indian War. The demise of Custer and his men outraged many white Americans and confirmed their image of the Indians as wild and bloodthirsty. -
Farmers Alliance created
The Farmers' Alliance was first organized in Texas in the mid-1870s and soon spread to other states and territories in the South and Midwest. One of the group's main goals was to form cooperatives. Farmers set up cooperatively owned retail stores and marketing organizations. -
Thomas edison invents light bulb
Thomas Edison used this carbon-filament bulb in the first public demonstration of his most famous invention—the light bulb, the first practical electric incandescent lamp. The light bulb creates light when an electrical current passes through the metal filament wire, heating it to a high temperature until it glows. -
Carlisle school established
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in 1879 and operated for nearly 30 years with a mission to “kill the Indian” to “save the Man.” This philosophy meant administrators forced students to speak English, wear Anglo-American clothing, and act according to U.S. values and culture. -
Chinese exclusion act
This act provided an absolute 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States. For the first time, federal law proscribed entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities. -
Edison lights up NYC
On this day in 1882, with the flip of a switch, electric lights brightened our city for the first time. It happened at Pearl Street Station, the first central power station in the world. Operated by Thomas A. Edison and his Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York, the entity is now Consolidated Edison. -
Statue of Liberty built
The statue was constructed of copper sheets, hammered into shape by hand and assembled over a framework of four gigantic steel supports, designed by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. -
American federation of labor founded
American Federation of Labor (AFL), federation of North American labour unions that was founded in 1886 under the leadership of Samuel Gompers as the successor to the Federation of Organized Trades (1881), which had replaced the Knights of Labor (KOL) as the most powerful industrial union of the era. -
Interstate commerce act passed
Approved on February 4, 1887, the Interstate Commerce Act created an Interstate Commerce Commission to oversee the conduct of the railroad industry. With this act, the railroads became the first industry subject to Federal regulation. -
Dawes act
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
Documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. -
Alfred T Mahan writes his book on sea power
A revolutionary analysis of the importance of naval power as a factor in the rise of the British Empire. -
Sherman ant-trust act passed
Authorized the federal government to institute proceedings against trusts in order to dissolve them. Any combination "in the form of trust or otherwise that was in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states, or with foreign nations" was declared illegal. -
Wounded knee massacre
The slaughter of approximately 150–300 Lakota Indians by United States Army troops in the area of Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota. The massacre was the climax of the U.S. Army's late 19th-century efforts to repress the Plains Indians. -
Fredrick Jackson Turner writes essay of settling the west
Whereas in his 1893 essay he celebrated the pioneers for the spirit of individualism that spurred migration westward, 25 years later Turner castigated “these slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and livestock for their own need, living scattered and apart.” -
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 (1896) is the Supreme Court case that had originally upheld the constitutionality of “separate, but equal facilities” based on race. It was subsequently since overturned by Brown v. Board of Education (1954). -
Holden v hardy
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 of 1898 ended Spain's colonial empire in the Western Hemisphere and secured the position of the United States as a Pacific power. -
Hawaii is Annexed
America's annexation of Hawaii in 1898 extended U.S. territory into the Pacific and highlighted resulted from economic integration and the rise of the United States as a Pacific power. -
Phillipines islands are annexed
In Paris on December 10, 1898, the United States paid Spain $20 million to annex the entire Philippine archipelago. The outraged Filipinos, led by Aguinaldo, prepared for war. Once again, MacArthur was thrust to the fore and distinguished himself in the field as he led American forces in quashing the rebellion. -
Newlands Reclamation act
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. -
Lochner v New York
The case involved a New York law limiting the number of hours bakers could work in a day and in a week. -
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. -
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. -
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). -
Hepner act
Regulating the immigration of aliens into this country. -
Founding of the NAACP
On February 12, 1909, the nation's largest and most widely recognized civil rights organization was born. -
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 our Highland Park assembly plant. -
17th adm
The arguments for the Seventeenth Amendment sounded in the case for direct democracy, the problem of hung state legislatures, and in freeing the Senate from the influence of corrupt state legislatures. -
Federal Reserve act
The 1913 Federal Reserve Act is legislation in the United States that created the Federal Reserve System. 1 Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act to establish economic stability in the U.S. by introducing a central bank to oversee monetary policy. -
Panama Canal is built
President Theodore Roosevelt oversaw the realization of a long-term United States goal—a trans-isthmian canal. Throughout the 1800s, American and British leaders and businessmen wanted to ship goods quickly and cheaply between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. -
Beginning of the first world war
World War I, also known as the Great War, started in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. His murder catapulted into a war across Europe that lasted until 1918. -
Lusitania Sunk
German submarine (U-boat) U-20 torpedoed and sank the Lusitania, a swift-moving British cruise liner traveling from New York to Liverpool, England. -
Clayton Antitrust act
defines unethical business practices, such as price fixing and monopolies, and upholds various rights of labor. -
US enters WWI
In early April 1917, with the toll in sunken U.S. merchant ships and civilian casualties rising, Wilson asked Congress for “a war to end all wars” that would “make the world safe for democracy.” A hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, Congress thus voted to declare war on Germany, joining the bloody battle—then optimistically called the “Great War.” -
Selective Service act
authorized the Federal Government to temporarily expand the military through conscription. -
18th adm
prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in the United States. -
19th adm
makes it illegal to deny the right to vote to any citizen based on their sex. -
WWI ends
We imagine universal relief at the carnage of war finally ending, at least in the victorious countries. The armistice was agreed at 5.10am on 11 November to come into effect at 11 am. -
National origins 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. -
Immigration quota act
The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. -
Scopes trial
The Scopes “monkey trial” was the moniker journalist H. L. Mencken applied to the 1925 prosecution of a criminal action brought by the state of Tennessee against high school teacher John T. Scopes for violating the state's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools.