US History 1865-1920

  • U-boats created

    The boats Nordenfelt I and Nordenfelt II, built to a Nordenfelt design, followed in 1890. In 1903, the Friedrich Krupp Germaniawerft dockyard in Kiel completed the first fully functional German-built submarine, Forelle, which Krupp sold to Russia during the Russo-Japanese War in April 1904.
  • Bessemer process

    The Bessemer process was the cause of a steel mass productivity at an affordable price.
  • Discovery of Gold in Pikes Peak

    Gold was discovered in 1858 which caused an expansion of the population of Colorado in the search of profit.
  • Homestead Act

    The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead.
  • Morrill Land grant act

    Made it possible for states to establish public colleges funded by the development or sale of associated federal land grants.
  • Transcontinental r/r completed

    The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad
  • Statue of Liberty built

    1865 - 1886. In 1865, a French political intellectual and anti-slavery activist named Edouard de Laboulaye proposed that a statue representing liberty be built for the United States. This monument would honor the United States' centennial of independence and the friendship with France.
  • Battle of little bighorn

    The Battle of the Little Bighorn, known to the Lakota and other Plains Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass
  • Farmers alliance created

    Farmers' Alliance, an American agrarian movement during the 1870s and '80s that sought to improve the economic conditions for farmers.
  • Thomas Edison invents light bulb

    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.
  • Carlisle school established

    The United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, generally known as Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States from 1879 through 1918.
  • Chinese exclusion act

    It was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States.
  • Edison lights up NYC

    Thomas Edisons company flipped the switch on his Pearl Street power station on September 4, 1882, providing hundreds of homes with electricity.
  • 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

    Regulating railroad rates.
  • Dawes act

    Dawes Act (1887) | National Archives
    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.
  • Jacob Riis published his book of photos

    Scribner's published Riis's work in book form, How the Other Half Lives, Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890).
  • Alfred T Mahan writes his book on sea power

    Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a lecturer in naval history and the president of the United States Naval War College
  • Sherman ant-trust act passed

    The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was the first Federal act that outlawed monopolistic business practices.
  • Wounded knee massacre

    Wounded Knee, was a massacre of nearly three hundred Lakota people by soldiers of the United States Army.
  • Fredrick Jackson Turner writes essay of settling the west

    His thesis "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" mournfully proclaimed that the once vast American western frontier was closed.
  • Pullman strike

    Widespread railroad strike and boycott that severely disrupted rail traffic in the Midwest of the United States.
  • Plessy v Ferguson

    U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal".
  • Holden v hardy

    Holden v. Hardy, 169 U.S. 366, 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 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

    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

    the United States paid Spain $20 million to annex the entire Philippine archipelago. The outraged Filipinos, led by Aguinaldo, prepared for war.
  • Newlands Reclamation act

    The Act required that water users repay construction costs from which they received benefits. In the jargon of that day, irrigation projects were known as "reclamation"projects.
  • Panama Canal is built

    The Panama Canal is an artificial 82 km waterway in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean and divides North and South America.
  • Lochner v New York

    The Court decided that New York did not have the right to make a law interfering with the right of an employer to make a contract with workers.
  • Sinclair’s the Jungle written

    The Jungle is a fictional novel by American muckraker author Upton Sinclair, known for his efforts to expose corruption in government and business in the early 20th century.
  • Pure Food and drug act passed

    Prohibited the sale of misbranded or adulterated food and drugs in interstate commerce.
  • Muller V Oregon

    Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412, was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court. Women were provided by state mandate lesser work-hours than allotted to men. The posed question was whether women's liberty to negotiate a contract with an employer should be equal to a man's.
  • Founding of the NAACP

    The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey, and Ida B. Wells.
  • Hepner act

    Imposes the forfeiture and liability to pay double the value of the goods received, concealed, or purchased
  • 17th adm

    Allowing voters to cast direct votes for U.S. senators.
  • 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.
  • Federal Reserve act

    The law created the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States.
  • Clayton Antitrust act

    The Clayton Act prohibits price discrimination.
  • Beginning of the first world war

    Great War, was a major global conflict that lasted from 1914 to 1918. It was fought between two coalitions, the Allies and the Central Powers.
  • Lusitania Sunk

    The RMS Lusitania was a British-registered ocean liner that was torpedoed by an Imperial German Navy U-boat during the First World War on 7 May 1915, about 11 nautical miles off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland
  • Selective service act

    AN ACT to provide for the common defense by increasing the strength of the Armed Forces of the United States, including the reserve components thereof, and for other purposes.
  • 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
  • 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

    States imposing the federal prohibition of alcohol.
  • 19 adm

    Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote.
  • Immigration quota act

    The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota.
  • National origins act

    The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act, was a federal law that prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.
  • Scopes trial

    The Scopes trial, formally The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case from July 10 to July 21, 1925, in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school