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25th president
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McKinley's is shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo, N.Y. He dies from his wounds September 14th
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26th president
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Wright brothers make the first controlled, sustained flight in heavier-than-air aircraft at Kitty
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27th president
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The Supreme Court breaks the Standard Oil monopoly into 34 different companies
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The Famous ship Titanic sinks after impacting an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean. The ship was believed by many to be indestructible. 1,496 people died.
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Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, providing for the direct election of U.S. senators by popular vote rather than by the state legislatures.
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28th president
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Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie are shot to death by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I by early August.
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Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers)
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America joins the war After German U-boats sink ships carrying American citizens like the Lusitania.
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Worldwide influenza epidemic (known as the Spanish Flu) strikes; by 1920, nearly 20 million are dead.
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Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor. It is later repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933.
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Treaty of Versailles, outlining terms for peace at the end of World War I, is rejected by the Senate. however, the treaty effectively ends the War
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The nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, granting women the right to vote.