-
Period: to
Wilson’s Presidency Term
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States during the First World War. He was known for his reforming progressivism and introducing federal income tax, and part of his campaign near the beginning of the war was neutrality to keep America out of war. Near 1917, though, he signed off on America finally joining the war efforts against Germany. He was president until the end of the First World War, and went on to create his fourteen points and influence creating the League of Nations -
Period: to
WW1’s timeframe
World War One (also known as the Great War) began on the 28th of June, 1914 when Archduke Frank Ferdinand (heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and his wife were assassinated on their honeymoon tour in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary then declares war on Serbia, and various other countries end up creating alliances against each other, declaring war against each other, namely The Allies and the Central Powers or Axis Powers -
Sinking of the Lusitania
The fastest carrier luxury steamship at the time, Lusitania, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland as they believed that it carried artillery. The vast majority of the almost 2,000 passengers it carried died including 114 Americans. This sparked outrage and officially brought the U.S. into the war. -
First Woman Elected to Congress
Jeannette Pickering Rankin was the first woman to be elected to Congress and sworn into the House of Representatives. She was a progressive from Montana who was also an advocate for women’s suffrage and voiced her opinions on the ongoing war. She aided in passing the nineteenth amendment for women to vote, and was known for her pacifism. -
Period: to
The Great Migration
The Great Migration was the movement of millions of African Americans migrating northward and throughout the country. Many people migrated northward to seek greater opportunities for themselves and their families and to escape the extreme racial tension and segregation of the south. -
Selective Service Act
President Woodrow Wilson put forth the Selective Services Act to require men between 21 and 30 years of age to register into the military during WW1. This drafting or conscription was needed to raise and build the U.S. army to help fight in the war. -
The Espionage Act
The Espionage Act was set in place to supposedly keep national defense safe. It punished those who were outwardly disloyal or rebelled against the government and decisions made by the national defense and those who refused to go to war if they were drafted. It posed consequences such as imprisonment to those who secretly or outwardly supported of enabled opposing forces against the U.S. -
Lenin leads Russian Revolution
Lenin, a radical communist, overthrew the Provisional Russian Government on, taking advantage of a power vacuum created by the earlier overthrow of the czar. His coup resulted in Russian withdrawal from World War 1, and the beginning of a communist Russia. -
Influenza Pandemic
Near the end of the First World War, a new pandemic began to rapidly spread throughout America and around the world. It was known as the Spanish Flu or H1N1, and was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history killing and infecting millions of people. Casualties from the war actually killed less people than the pandemic ultimately ended up killing. -
Wilson’s Fourteen Points
Wilson created a statement for post World War One principles of peace called his Fourteen Points. He accumulated and studied issues and areas where nations should interact differently and improve peace terms as a way to end ww1 and prevent any war from happening again in the future. Most of his points were disregarded in meetings concerning the treaty of Versailles other than his final point proposing a League of Nations to create a national alliance. -
Sedition Act
The Sedition Act was an act that allowed the government to arrest people for criticizing the government for its involvement in world war 1 or the sale of war bonds. It was an extension of the Espionage Act. Eventually, it was repealed alongside many other wartime laws. -
Schenck v. United States
Schenck versus U.S. was a court case that happened during the First World War where a man was caught handing out anti-war propaganda flyers to draft age citizens. The government saw this as a violation of the laws out in place by the Sedition Act, but Schenck saw his limitations on freedom of speech as a violation of his first amendment rights, so the case eventually appealed to the Supreme Court where they ruled that those who violated the Sedition Act at that time could face repercussions. -
US Senate rejects Treaty of Versailles
Upon voting whether or not to consent to signing the treaty of Versailles, the senate ultimately ended up not meeting a required amount of votes to sign and rejected the treaty. There were many concerns about the constraints of the treaty and how the League of Nations would operate. Many felt that it was unnecessary for America to have to be pulled in to affairs concerning issues that they were not directly involved with. -
Antwerp, Belgium Summer Olympics
The 1920 summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium took place as a way to reunite nations after the war and rebuild connections with traditional friendly competition. A summer Olympics was supposed to take place in Germany around 1916, but World War One completely abolished those plans. The Olympics began again in 1920, but did not include some countries including the countries previously allied in the Axis Powers due to post-War tensions. -
Band-aids first invented
Earle Dickson, a Johnson & Johnson employee at the time, wanted to create a wound dressing that could be applied by the wearer for his wife who often would get hurt. Though this concept did not boom in popularity until later, his adhesive bandages now sell by the billions worldwide and are a staple for standard first aid and wound care. -
The 19th Amendment
The nineteenth amendment finally allowed women the right to vote and prohibited the government from not allowing citizens to vote based on bias of gender. After years of people advocating for women’s rights and activists supporting the growing movement for women’s suffrage, the nineteenth amendment granted women a say in government. -
First insulin injection to treat diabetes
Insulin was first used to treat diabetes at the University of Toronto by Sir Frederick G Banting and Charles H Best. A fourteen year old boy named Leonard Thompson with diabetes was the first person to have an insulin injection derived from an ox’s pancreas and proved to show life changing results. Since then, insulin has promised a much longer lifespan to those with diabetes. -
Teapot Dome Scandal
Albert Bacon Fall, the secretary of the interior at the time, secretly leased rights for federal oil reserves in Wyoming and California to oil companies. This was illegal as they were unsupervised decisions involving fraudulent loan transactions and bribery which became a widely discussed scandal. -
The Halibut Treaty
Post World War One, Canada and America created a treaty which set limitations and fishing rights for northern Pacific Ocean halibut fishing since its population declining rapidly and was in need of set rules for management. The treaty also brought forth the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) with equal member numbers from America and Canada. -
The Great Gatsby written
The American literary classic “The Great Gatsby” was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald during a time when America (especially the “lost generation”) was going through a period of post-war self discovery and expression in literature and media. He wrote it as a reflection of his life, his desires and lost love, a periodic reflection of the 20s as a whole, and as a cautionary tale for those who aspired for “the American Dream.”