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Albert Sabin
he Sabin Vaccine Institute is founded on the legacy and global vision of one of the pre-eminent scientific figures in the history of medicine, Dr. Albert B. Sabin. Best known as the developer of the oral live virus polio vaccine, Dr. Sabin not only dedicated his entire professional career to the elimination of human suffering though his groundbreaking medical advances, he also waged a tireless campaign against poverty and ignorance throughout his lifetime. -
Warren Burger Supreme Court
Richard Nixon campaigned for president in 1968 on his opposition to the Warren Court, which was known for its many decisions expanding civil rights and civil liberties, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Miranda v. Arizona (1966), Mapp v. Ohio (1961), and Engel v. Vitale (1962). Then-candidate Nixon voiced opposition to judicial activism and called for a return to strict construction of the Constitution. -
Orval Faubus
Orval E. Faubus became the national symbol of racial segregation when he used Arkansas National Guardsmen to block the enrollment of nine black students who had been ordered by a federal judge to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School. His action created a national crisis with President Dwight D. Eisenhower finally ordering federal troops to Little Rock to ensure the judge's order was obeyed, to protect the black students, and maintain order for the remainder of the school year. -
Jack Ruby
In January 3, 1967, Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, dies of cancer in a Dallas hospital. The Texas Court of Appeals had recently overturned his death sentence for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald and was scheduled to grant him a new trial.
On November 24, 1963, two days after Kennedy’s assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was brought to the basement of the Dallas police headquarters on his way to a more secure county jail. -
Balkans Crisis
The war set the stage for the Balkan crisis of 1914 and thus served as a "prelude to the First World War". By the early 20th century, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia had achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire, but large elements of their ethnic populations remained under Ottoman rule. -
Dr. Jonas Salk
Vaccine, Salk: Vaccine against poliomyelitis named for Dr. Jonas Salk who developed and introduced it in 1955. It was the first type of polio vaccine to become available. It was made by cultivating three strains of the virus separately in monkey tissue. -
Earl Warren Supreme Court
Earl Warren was a prominent 20th-century leader of American politics and law. Elected California governor in 1942, Warren secured major reform legislation during his three terms in office. After failing to claim the Republican nomination for the presidency, he was appointed the 14th chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1953. The landmark case of his tenure was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in which the Court unanimously determined the segregation of schools to be unconstitutional. -
Panama Canal
Following the failure of a French construction team in the 1880s, the United States commenced building a canal across a 50-mile stretch of the Panama isthmus in 1904. The project was helped by the elimination of disease-carrying mosquitoes, while chief engineer John Stevens devised innovative techniques and spurred the crucial redesign from a sea-level to a lock canal. -
News
To many, the 1950s recall an idyllic era when everyone confirmed and everyone lived simply and happily. Beneath this conformity, people were stirring and new ideas were simmering; some would not explode until the 1960s.Television became a powerful medium. Commercials sold everything from chewing gum to presidents. The increased purchase of television sets was indicative of mid-century society's materialistic mood. -
Ross Perot
At age seven, Perot started working at various jobs throughout his childhood, including breaking horses, selling Christmas cards, magazines, and garden seeds, buying and selling bridles, saddles, horses and calves, delivering newspapers, and collecting for classified ads. After graduation from the Naval Academy, Perot served at sea for four years on a destroyer and an aircraft carrier.
In 1956, he married Margot, whom he met while at the Naval Academy. -
Ike Turner
An early pioneer of fifties rock and roll, he is most popularly known for his work in the 1960s and 1970s with his then-wife Tina Turner in the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. Turner began playing piano and guitar when he was eight, forming his group, the Kings of Rhythm, as a teenager. -
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley was rock & roll’s first real star, not to mention one of the most important cultural forces in history, a hip-shaking symbol of liberation for the staid America of the 1950s. A white Southerner singing blues laced with country, and country laced with gospel, he brought together American music from both sides of the color line and performed it with a natural sexuality that made him a teen idol and role model for generations of cool rebels. -
G.I Bill
The Readjustment Benefits Act of 1966 extended these benefits to all veterans of the armed forces, including those who had served during peacetime. The G.I. bill, officially the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, provided many benefits to veterans of World War II. -
Trinity test
Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 am on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project.
The efforts of the Manhattan Project finally came to fruition in 1945. After three years of research and experimentation, the world’s first nuclear device, the “Gadget,” was successfully detonated in the New Mexico desert. This inaugural test ushered in the nuclear era. -
The Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain was the name for the boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. A term symbolizing the efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with the West and non-Soviet-controlled areas. -
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton is an American politician from Arkansas who served as the 42nd President of the United States (1993-2001). He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first baby-boomer generation President. During the administration of William Jefferson Clinton, the U.S. enjoyed more peace and economic well being than at any time in its history. He was the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second term. -
Al Gore
A native of Tennessee, Al Gore served as vice president of the United States under President Bill Clinton from 1992 to 2000, after a long tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. He lost a presidential bid to George W. Bush in 2000. In 2007, Gore won a Nobel Prize for his work to raise awareness of global warming. -
Berlin Airlift
The Berlin Airlift, which took place during 1948–1949. At the end of the Second World War, U.S., British, and Soviet military forces divided and occupied Germany. Also divided into occupation zones, Berlin was located far inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. -
Fair Deal
On this day, President Harry S. Truman announces, in his State of the Union address, that every American has a right to expect from our government a fair deal. In a reference to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, Truman announced his plans for domestic policy reforms including national health insurance, public housing, civil rights legislation and federal aid to education. He advocated an increase in the minimum wage, federal assistance to farmers and an extension of Social Security. -
Beat Generation
The Beat Generation is a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. -
North Korea invades South Korea
War began when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. -
rock 'n' roll
the word “roll” has been used since the Middle Ages to refer to, among other things, having sex: “Let’s go for a roll in the hay”; “Rolling under the sheets”; etc. The word “rock”, again among other things, has been used since at least the 17th century as a term meaning “shake or disturb”. -
Duck and Cover
American were aware of the destruction that individual atomic bombs did to the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the general public did not know a lot yet about the dangers of radiation and fallout.So, FCDA was set up in 1951 to educate americans one of their approaches was to conduct air raid drills where they would suddenly yell, "Drop!" and students were expected to kneel down under their desks with their hands clutched around their heads and necks. -
Polio Vaccination
Polio is an infectious disease caused by a virus that lives in the throat and intestinal tract. There are two types of vaccine that protect against polio: inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) and oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV). IPV is given as an injection in the leg or arm, depending on the patient's age -
Emmett Till Tragedy
While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. His assailants–the white woman’s husband and her brother–made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. -
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a long, costly armed conflict that pitted the communist regime of North Vietnam and its southern allies, known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The divisive war, increasingly unpopular at home, ended with the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973 and the unification of Vietnam under Communist control two years later. More than 3 million people, including 58,000 Americans, were killed in the conflict. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating, and is regarded as the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the U.S. Four days before the boycott began, Rosa Park, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested and fined. The boycott of public buses by blacks in Montgomery began on the day of Parks’ court hearing and lasted 381 days. -
Little Rock 9
In a key event of the American Civil Rights Movement, nine black students enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, testing a landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The court had mandated that all public schools in the country be integrated “with all deliberate speed” in its decision related to the groundbreaking case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. -
Civil Rights Act of 1957
On this date, the House of Representatives passed the initial version of what eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Propelled by advocacy groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, Congress took up the issue of civil rights during the summer of 1957. -
Sputnik
History was changed in October when the soviet union successfully launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite which was about the size of a beach ball. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age and space race.Sputnik caught the world's attention and the American public off-guard. In addition, the public feared that the Soviets' ability to launch satellites that could carry nuclear weapons from Europe to the U.S. -
Sit ins Nashville, Tennessee
African Americans could shop at these stores and spend their money – but they were refused service at the lunch counters.The protest soon attracted the support of other students (black and white) and the numbers soon went into the hundreds. The organizers of the sit-in were concerned that not all those involved in the protest had been schooled in non-violent techniques. Therefore, two students, -
LSD
Albert Hofmann, a chemist working for Sandoz Pharmaceutical, synthesized1 LSD for the first time in 1938, in Basel, Switzerland, while looking for a blood stimulant. However, its hallucinogenic effects were unknown until 1943 when Hofmann accidentally consumed some LSD. It was later found that an oral dose of as little as 25 micrograms (equal in weight to a few grains of salt) is capable of producing vivid hallucinations. -
Feminism
The feminist movement of the 1960s and '70s originally focused on dismantling workplace inequality, such as denial of access to better jobs and salary inequity, via anti-discrimination laws. ... As such, the different wings of the feminist movement sought women's equality on both a political and personal level. -
Ho Chi Minh Trail
The trail was a system of roads from the north and south Vietnam through the next door countries like Laos and Cambodia to provide logistical support to the Vietcong and north Vietnamese army in the war. It was a mixture of truck routes and paths for walking a bike riding. the trail was a total of 16000 kilometers. the main idea for this trail was a secret road to supplies to the south. this trail was initially coded 559, but later become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. -
OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries)
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is a group consisting of 12 of the world's major oil-exporting nations. OPEC was founded in 1960 to coordinate the petroleum policies of its members, and to provide member states with technical and economic aid. OPEC is a cartel that aims to manage the supply of oil in an effort to set the price of oil on the world market, in order to avoid fluctuations that might affect the economies of both producing and purchasing countries. -
Freedom Riders
A group of 13 African-American and white civil rights activists launched the Freedom Rides, a series of bus trips through the American South to protest segregation in interstate bus terminals. The Freedom Riders, who were recruited by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a U.S. civil rights group, departed from Washington, D.C., and attempted to integrate facilities at bus terminals along the way into the Deep South. -
MLK letters from Birmingham jail
The Letter from Birmingham Jail, also known as the Letter from Birmingham City Jail and The Negro Is Your Brother, by Martin Luther King Jr. The letter defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism. In his famous open letter from the Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. defended both his right and his moral grounds for organizing nonviolent protest activities in support of the civil rights of African Americans. He defended breaking laws when those laws are unjust. -
Assassination of JFK
Sitting in a Lincoln convertible, the Kennedys and Connallys waved at the large and enthusiastic crowds gathered along the parade route. As their vehicle passed the Texas School Book Depository Building at 12:30 p.m., Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly fired three shots from the sixth floor, fatally wounding President Kennedy and seriously injuring Governor Connally. Kennedy was pronounced dead 30 minutes later at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital. He was 46. -
Daisy Girl Ad
a 3-year old girl in a simple dress counted as she plucked daisy petals in a sun-dappled field. Her words were supplanted by a mission control countdown followed by a massive nuclear blast in a classic mushroom shape. the message was clear if only implicit: president candidate Barry Goldwater was a genocidal maniac who threaten the world's future. Two months later, President LydonJOhnson won easily, and the emotional political attack ad—visceral, terrifying, and risky—was made. -
Great Society
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65. The main goal was the elimination of poverty and racial injustice.nti-war Democrats complained that spending on the Vietnam War choked off the Great Society. While some of the programs have been eliminated or had their funding reduced, many of them, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Older Americans Act and federal education funding, continue to the present. -
Selma March
In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register black voters in the South. That March, protesters attempting to march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery were met with violent resistance by state and local authorities. As the world watched, the protesters finally achieved their goal, walking around the clock for three days to reach Montgomery. -
Voting Rights of 1965
The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on August 6, 1965, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States. -
Home Video Game Systems
The first generation of video game consoles began in 1972 with the Magnavox Odyssey (which began development in 1968 by Ralph Baer under the code name "The Brown Box"), until 1977, when "pong"-style console manufacturers left the market en masse due to the video game crash of 1977 and when microprocessor-based consoles -
Counter Culture
A counterculture is a subculture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society =, often in opposition to mainstream cultural mores. A counterculture movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well defined era. -
Nixon's Election
Most political observers believed that Nixon’s political career was over, but by February 1968, he had sufficiently recovered his political standing in the Republican Party to announce his candidacy for president. Taking a stance between the more conservative elements of his party led by Ronald Reagan and the liberal Northeastern wing led by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon won the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. -
Apollo 11
Apollo 11 launched from Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969, carrying Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin into an initial Earth-orbit of 114 by 116 miles. An estimated 530 million people watched Armstrong's televised image and heard his voice describe the event as he took "...one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" on July 20, 1969. -
hippies
A hippie (or hippy) is a member of a liberal counterculture, originally a youth movement that started in the United States and the United Kingdom during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. This countercultural movement that rejected the mores of mainstream American life. The movement originated on college campuses in the United States, although it spread to other countries, including Canada and Britain -
Nixon's Tapes
Richard Nixon taped roughly 3,700 hours of his conversations as president. About 3,000 hours of those tapes have been released, while the rest remain closed to protect family privacy or national security. The public has a general impression of what’s on the Nixon White House tapes—the expletives deleted, the so-called “smoking gun” when Nixon appeared to try to use the CIA to derail the FBI investigation of Watergate, the slurs against blacks and Jews. -
Anti-War Movement
An anti-war movement (also antiwar) is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. -
Rap music
One of the first rappers at the beginning of the hip hop period, at the end of the 1970s, was also hip hop's first DJ, DJ Kool Herc. Herc, a Jamaican immigrant, started delivering simple raps at his parties, which some claim were inspired by the Jamaican tradition of toasting. -
Jimmy Carter Presidency
Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency is remembered for the events that overwhelmed it—inflation, energy crisis, war in Afghanistan, and hostages in Iran. After one term in office, voters strongly rejected Jimmy Carter's honest but gloomy outlook in favor of Ronald Reagan's telegenic optimism. -
Equal Rights Admendments
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal rights for all citizens regardless of gender; it seeks to end the legal distinctions between men and women in terms of divorce, property, employment, and other matters. -
Satellite Entertainment
he great scare of 1986 has faded and satellite dishes, if not enjoying a booming business, are in good health. That may surprise some people who predicted three years ago that backyard dishes were doomed after Home Box Office and other premium services began to scramble their signals.Dishes took off in the very early 1980s. Consumers seemed to be purchasing those 10- to 16-foot monsters as fast as they could be manufactured. The allure was easy to understand if the price tag wasn't. -
The New Right
In Australia, the "New Right" refers to a late 1970s and 1980s onward movement both within and outside of the Liberal and National Coalition which advocates economically liberal and increased socially conservative policies as opposed to the "old right" which advocated economically conservative policies and small-l liberals. -
Election of 1980
The United States presidential election of 1980 featured a contest between incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter and his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, as well as Republican Congressman John B. Anderson, who ran as an independent. Reagan, aided by the Iran hostage crisis and a worsening economy at home, won the election in a landslide. Carter, after defeating Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination, attacked Reagan as a dangerous right-wing radical. -
Reaganomics
During the campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan announced a recipe to fix the nation's economic mess. He claimed an undue tax burden, excessive government regulation, and massive social spending programs hampered growth. Reagan proposed a phased 30% tax cut for the first three years of his Presidency. The bulk of the cut would be concentrated at the upper income levels. The economic theory behind the wisdom of such a plan was called SUPPLY-SIDE -
Space Shuttle Program
NASA's space shuttle fleet began setting records with its first launch on April 12, 1981 and continued to set high marks of achievement and endurance through 30 years of missions. Starting with Columbia and continuing with Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, the spacecraft has carried people into orbit repeatedly, launched, recovered and repaired satellites, conducted cutting-edge research and built the largest structure in space, the International Space Station. -
MTV
MTV (originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable and satellite television channel owned by Viacom Media Networks (a division of Viacom) and headquartered in New York City. Launched on August 1, 1981, the channel originally aired music videos as guided by television personalities known as "video jockeys." In its early years, MTV's main target demographic was young adults, but today it is primarily towards teenagers, particularly high school and college students. -
Strategic Defense Initiative
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a proposed missile defense system intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons (intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles). -
Iran Contra affair
A scandal in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, which came to light when it was revealed that in the mid-1980s the United States secretly arranged arms sales to Iran in return for promises of Iranian assistance in securing the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon. -
Challenger Explosion
NASA’s second space shuttle to enter service, embarked on its maiden voyage on April 4, 1983, and made a total of nine voyages prior to 1986. That year, it was scheduled to launch on January 22 carrying a seven-member crew that included Christa McAuliffe, a 37-year-old high school social studies instructor from New Hampshire who had earned a spot on the mission through NASA’s Teacher in Space Program. -
Lionel Sosa
Sosa helped U.S. Senator John Tower win his 1978 re-election bid with 37% of the Hispanic vote; no Republican in Texas had ever won more than 8%. Soon clients like Bacardi rum, Dr. Pepper, and Coors beer came seeking his advice on how to woo the Latino market, eventually turning Sosa & Associates into the largest Hispanic advertising agency in the U.S. At one point it was billing more than $100 million annually. -
Moral Majority
The Moral Majority was a prominent American political organization associated with the Christian right and Republican Party. It was founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell and associates, and dissolved in the late 1980s. The Christian Right that emerged with the formation of Falwell's Moral Majority in 1979 was a response to transformations in American society and culture that took place in the 1960s and '70s. -
Persian Gulf War
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion and occupation of neighboring Kuwait in early August 1990. Alarmed by these actions, fellow Arab powers such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt called on the United States and other Western nations to intervene. Hussein defied United Nations Security Council demands to withdraw from Kuwait by mid-January 1991, and the Persian Gulf War began with a massive U.S.-led air offensive known as Operation Desert Storm. -
Rodney King Incident
On March 3, 1991, four police officers were filmed beating taxi driver Rodney King after a pursuit through the streets of Los Angeles. The video shocked the city, and the events that followed shocked the nation. It was one of the first police brutality videos of its kind, and forever changed the conversation about police and race in America. -
Election of 1992
United States presidential election of 1992, American presidential election held on Nov. 3, 1992, in which Democrat Bill Clinton defeated incumbent Republican Pres. George Bush. Independent candidate Ross Perot secured nearly 19 percent of the vote—the highest percentage of any third-party candidate in a U.S. presidential election in 80 years. -
World Trade Center Attack
On February 26, 1993, terrorists parked a rental van in a garage underneath the World Trade Center’s twin towers and lit the fuses on a massive homemade bomb stuffed inside. Six people died and more than 1,000 were injured in the subsequent explosion, which carved out a crater several stories deep and propelled smoke into the upper reaches of the quarter-mile-high skyscrapers. At the time, it was one of the worst terrorist attacks ever to occur on U.S. soil. -
The North American Free Trade Agreement
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA; Spanish: Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte, TLCAN; French: Accord de libre-échange nord-américain, ALÉNA) is an agreement signed by Canada, Mexico, and the United States, creating a trilateral trade bloc in North America. -
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) enacted September 21, 1996, was a United States federal law that, prior to being ruled unconstitutional, defined marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman, and allowed states to refuse -
third-mile island
In 1979 at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in USA a cooling malfunction caused part of the core to melt in the #2 reactor. The TMI-2 reactor was destroyed. Some radioactive gas was released a couple of days after the accident, but not enough to cause any dose above background levels to local residents. -
Bush v. Gore
Election night 2000 was a cliffhanger that went on for weeks. Many people went to bed that night thinking that Al Gore had won, only to discover in the morning that George W. Bush had been declared the winner. In fact, the election was simply too close to call. Several states were up for grabs, but in the end it came down to one: Florida, where Bush’s younger brother, Jeb, was governor. Florida electors were unable to commit themselves to either Bush or Gore owing to the closeness of the vote. -
George W. Bush Presidency
America’s 43rd president served in office from 2001 to 2009. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School, Bush worked in the Texas oil industry and was an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team before becoming governor. In 2000, he won the presidency after narrowly defeating Democratic challenger Al Gore. Bush’s time in office was shaped by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against America. -
9/11
On September 11, 2001, 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airliners and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States. Two of the planes were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., and the fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Often referred to as 9/11, the attacks resulted in extensive death and destruction. -
Patriot Act
The USA PATRIOT Act is an Act of Congress that was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. With its ten-letter abbreviation (USA PATRIOT) expanded, the full title is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 -
2nd Iraq War
United States, along with coalition forces primarily from the United Kingdom, initiates war on Iraq. Just after explosions began to rock Baghdad, Iraq’s capital, U.S. President George W. Bush announced in a televised address, “At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” President Bush and his advisors built much of their case for war on the idea that Iraq. -
Hurricane Katina
Early in the morning on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States. When the storm made landfall, it had a Category 3 rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale–it brought sustained winds of 100–140 miles per hour–and stretched some 400 miles across. The storm itself did a great deal of damage, but its aftermath was catastrophic. -
Great Recession
The Great Recession is a term that represents the sharp decline in economic activity during the late 2000s, which is generally considered the largest downturn since the Great Depression. The term applies to both the U.S. recession, officially lasting from December 2007 to June 2009, and the ensuing global recession in 2009. The economic slump began when the U.S. housing market went from boom to bust and large amounts of mortgage-backed securities and derivatives lost significant value. -
Barack Obama
Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, two years after the territory was admitted to the Union as the 50th state. He grew up mostly in Hawaii, but also spent one year of his childhood in Washington State and four years in Indonesia. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988 Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. -
Affordable Care Act
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often shortened to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and nicknamed Obamacare, is a United States federal statute enacted by the 111th United States Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010.
