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Alaska purchased by US from Russia.
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Completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.
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Rockefeller starts Standard Oil.
The beginning of a company that would evolve into a monopoly over the oil industry, making its founder the richest man in America at the time. As a result of the harm it ended up causing, actions started to be taken to keep monopolies from happening again (though they didn't always work, even today). -
Graham Bell invents the telephone.
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Edison invents the light bulb.
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Chinese Exclusion Act approved.
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Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor.
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Sherman Antitrust Act.
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Ellis Island opens.
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Carnegie Steel's homestead strike.
In response to his employees trying to unionize, Carnegie hired Pinkerton agents to deal with them. The Pinkerton agents were basically an army for hire. They weren't apposed to using gun violence to get what their current employer wanted. When the workers wouldn't back down after being threatened by them, the Pinkerton agents opened fire, killing 7 and injuring over 300. -
Plessy v Ferguson.
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The U.S. declares war on Spain.
Under the guise of wanting to help Cuba gain freedom from Spain (and to stop the Cuban public from destroying things the US had set up there because they were using their land while ignoring their struggles), the US went to war with Spain. They promised to not take over Cuba after the war, but as soon as they gained independence the US wrote laws into Cuba's new constitution that basically game them control. -
Hawaii is annexed.
Before it became yet another victim of US imperialism, Hawaii was an independent monarchy. The US took interest in it because of its sugar production, which would be cheaper to obtain if they owned Hawaii. The US threatened violence if the the Hawaiian monarchs didn't give up their land, and in an attempt to avoid harm to her subjects, the queen was pressured into giving it to them. US imperialism negatively effects indigenous Hawaiians to this day. -
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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Tenement Act. (-everyone while still having plenty of money left over, don't care about the working class and would rather have them die then have to spend a bit of their horded wealth to build them bare minimum livable housing. I ran out of characters)
Created to improve housing conditions for the working class, the Tenement Act introduced requirements that every tenement (housing similar to apartments) had to be built with. Every home had to have a window that let outside, proper lighting and ventilation, indoor toilets, and fire safety measures. Before this law was passed, homes were allowed to be (and often were) built without any of these things because rich people, who were and still are perfectly capable of providing proper housing to- -
McKinley is assassinated and Roosevelt becomes President.
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The Philippine Insurrection comes to an end.
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The Roosevelt Corollary added to the Monroe doctrine.
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Upton Sinclair releases “The Jungle”.
A novel originally written to show the struggles of working class immigrants under capitalism and to push for socialism in the U.S., "The Jungle" is often only brought up in reference to health concerns in the meat packing industry. While it did bring those issues to light, the rest of Sinclair's message was ignored for the most part. When asked about the public's reaction to his work, Sinclair replied, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." -
Pure Food & Drug Act passed.
One of the laws passed in response to the public outcry caused by Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". This law required every food item/drug sold to have its ingredients publicly and accurately listed. It was later updated to include cosmetics and to ban the sale of goods that had been exposed to toxins, like pesticides . -
Peak year of immigration through Ellis Island.
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Meat Inspection Act passed.
One of the laws passed in response to the public outcry caused by Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". This law required that meat producers work in sanitary conditions. It also criminalized the sale of contaminated, expired, or mislabeled meat items. Before this law was passed, expired meat was often sold, as well as meat products with rodents and human body parts (from workplace injuries) mixed in with them. -
Henry Ford produced his first Model T.
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Creation of the NAACP.
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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. (-conditions in factories being enforced. I ran out of characters)
Located in New York, this blouse production factory had the same poor working conditions as every other factory at the time. Pay was low, hours were long, and safety precautions were basically nonexistent. When a fire suddenly broke out, the lack of fire exits, doors that wouldn't unlock, and the bulky equipment trapped the workers inside the burning building. 146 workers died. Some didn't even die from the fire, rather they jumped out of high windows to try to escape. It let to safer working- -
The Assassination of Austria’s archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The event that prompted WW1. Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Black Hand (a secret society/ terror organization based in Serbia) fatally shot the archduke while he and his wife were riding in an open carriage. Austria-Hungary blamed all of Serbia rather than just the Black Hand and declared war on them. Starting with Russia threatening Aus.-Hun. to protect Serbia, more and more countries stepped in to defend those they had alliances with until it eventually escalated into the first world war. -
Panama Canal is completed and opened.
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The United States enters WWI.
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Ratification of the 18th Amendment, Prohibition.
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Women got the right to vote in the U.S.
