1865-1920 important events timeline

  • Bessemer Process

    Bessemer Process

    A steel making process.
  • Discovery of Gold in Pikes Peak

    Discovery of Gold in Pikes Peak

    Gold was discovered in pikes peak.
  • Homestead Act

    Homestead Act

    Allowed people to aquire a piece of land and make a homestead on it.
  • Morrill Land grant act

    Morrill Land grant act

    The Morrill Land-Grant Acts are United States statutes that allowed for the creation of land-grant colleges in U.S. states using the proceeds from sales of federally-owned land, often obtained from indigenous tribes through treaty, cession, or seizure.
  • Transcontinental r/r completed

    Transcontinental r/r completed

    Just as it opened the markets of the west coast and Asia to the east, it brought products of eastern industry to the growing populace beyond the Mississippi. The railroad ensured a production boom, as industry mined the vast resources of the middle and western continent for use in production.
  • Battle of little bighorn

    Battle of little bighorn

    The battle was a momentary victory for the Lakota and Cheyenne. The death of Custer and his troops became a rallying point for the United States to increase their efforts to force native peoples onto reservation lands.
  • Farmers alliance created

    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 invents light bulb

    Thomas Edison invented the light bulb
  • Carlisle school established

    Carlisle school established

    Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, opened in 1879 as the first government-run boarding school for Native American children. The goal? Forced assimilation of Native children into white American society under the belief of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
  • Chinese exclusion act

    Chinese exclusion act

    It was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. In the spring of 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur. This act provided an absolute 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States.
  • Edison lights up NYC

    Edison lights up NYC

    1882 was an important year for Edison in New York City, the year when he lit up Manhattan. His company flipped the switch on his Pearl Street power station on September 4, 1882, providing hundreds of homes with electricity.
  • Statue of Liberty built

    Statue of Liberty built

    The Statue of Liberty was built.
  • American federation of labor founded

    American federation of labor founded

    after the KOL rejected a proposal reaffirming the historic separation of trade-union and labour-reform functions, the craft unions revolted. Led by Samuel Gompers, an English immigrant who had organized cigar makers, the craft unions established the American Federation of Labor.
  • Interstate commerce act passed

    Interstate commerce act passed

    On February 4, 1887, both the Senate and House passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which applied the Constitution's “Commerce Clause”—granting Congress the power “to Regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States”—to regulating railroad rates.
  • Dawes act

    Dawes 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. Thus, Native Americans registering on a tribal "roll" were granted allotments of reservation land.
  • Jacob Riis published his book of photos

    Jacob Riis published his book of photos

    In 1888, Riis left the Tribune to work for the Evening Sun, where he began making the photographs that would be reproduced as engravings and halftones in How the Other Half Lives, his celebrated work documenting the living conditions of the poor, which was published to widespread acclaim in 1890.
  • Alfred T Mahan writes his book on sea power

    Alfred T Mahan writes his book on sea power

    In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a lecturer in naval history and the president of the United States Naval War College, published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, a revolutionary analysis of the importance of naval power as a factor in the rise of the British Empire.
  • Sherman ant-trust act passed

    Sherman ant-trust act passed

    The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was the first Federal act that outlawed monopolistic business practices. The Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 was the first measure passed by the U.S. Congress to prohibit trusts.
  • Wounded knee massacre

    Wounded knee massacre

    The massacre at Wounded Knee, during which soldiers of the US Army 7th Cavalry Regiment indiscriminately slaughtered hundreds of Sioux men, women, and children, marked the definitive end of Indian resistance to the encroachments of white settlers.
  • Fredrick Jackson Turner writes essay of settling the west

    Fredrick Jackson Turner writes essay of settling the west

    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

    The Pullman Strike (May–July 1894) was a widespread railroad strike and boycott that disrupted rail traffic in the U.S. Midwest in June–July 1894.
  • Plessy v Ferguson

    Plessy v Ferguson

    The ruling in this Supreme Court case upheld a Louisiana state law that allowed for "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races." During the era of Reconstruction, Black Americans' political rights were affirmed by three constitutional amendments and numerous laws passed by Congress.
  • Holden v hardy

    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

    Spanish American War begins

    When the Spanish American War begins.
  • Hawaii is annexed

    Hawaii is annexed

    On July 7, 1898, the Hawaiian Islands were annexed by this joint resolution. 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.
  • Newlands Reclamation act

    Newlands Reclamation act

    The Reclamation Act of 1902 is a United States federal law that funded irrigation projects for the arid lands of 20 states in the American West. The act at first covered only 13 of the western states as Texas had no federal lands. Texas was added later by a special act passed in 1906.
  • Panama Canal is built

    Panama Canal is built

    The Panama Canal was built.
  • Lochner v New York

    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.
  • Pure Food and drug act passed

    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).
  • Muller V Oregon

    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

    Founding of the NAACP

    Oldest and Boldest. Founded Feb. 12. 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest, largest and most widely recognized grassroots-based civil rights organization.
  • Hepner act

    This action of debt was brought by the United States to recover a penalty under the statute of Congress of March 3d, 1903, regulating the immigration of aliens into this country. 32 Stat. at L. 1213, 1214, chap. 1012. The case is now before this court upon a question certified by the judges of the circuit court of appeals under the authority of § 6 of the judiciary act of March 3d. 1891. 26 Stat. at L. 828, chap. 517, U. S. Comp. Stat. 1901, p. 549.