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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Catches Fire
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company’s fire resulted in the tragic loss of nearly 150 young women and girls on March 25, 1911, in New York City. The garment workers at the company had been attempting to unionize to gain better wages and improved working conditions. The factory’s management responded by locking the workers into the building. -
The Great Migration Begins
This leaderless revolution, a response to oppression in the South, was set in motion by the labor shortage in the North during World War I. And once the door opened, a flood of people came. Those who migrated became the advance guard of the Civil Rights movement; they shaped our culture, from music to sports. -
The Prophet Is Published
the aftermath of World War I, the Lebanese-born, Boston-based poet-philosopher Kahlil Gibran wrote what would become one of the world’s most translated works of philosophy: The Prophet. This collection of inspirational sermons delivered by a fictional prophet—on love, marriage, work, reason, self-knowledge and ethics—challenged tired orthodoxies and oppressive ideologies. -
The KKK Marches in Washington
When the KKK paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., the headline in the New York Times declared “Sight Astonishes Capital: Robed, but Unmasked Hosts in White Move Along Avenue.” The marchers, the article noted, received “a warm reception.” The parade took place in broad daylight, in the nation’s capital, and most of the participants were from the north. -
Thomas Dorsey Invents the Gospel Blues
In Chicago in 1932, an African American composer named Thomas A. Dorsey, who had been a nightclub jazz pianist, wrote a song inspired by his wife’s death in childbirth. The song, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” unexpectedly became the foundation for the modern African American gospel music tradition. -
Hugo Black Is Appointed to the Supreme Court
Hugo L. Black of Alabama, FDR’s first appointment to the Supreme Court, defined the American judicial scene for three and a half decades. Black first defined and then implemented a reformist agenda that would revolutionize modern American constitutional law. For his first 15 years, Black set the table with new ideas—often presented in dissent, at first. -
FDR Accepts the 1936 Democratic Presidential Nomination
The “political equality we once had won,” FDR boomed as he accepted the Democratic nomination for a second presidential term in 1936, had been rendered “meaningless in the face of economic inequality.” The government no longer belonged to the people but had been taken hostage by “privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsty for power.” -
Truman Replaces Wallace
After World War II, President Roosevelt had a secret plan for how he would work things out with Stalin, but he died before sharing it. Truman entered the White House with almost no experience in foreign policy. The State Department told him that action must be taken on the Russian threat. The result was the Truman Doctrine: good against evil, communism against democracy, the Cold War. -
The North Atlantic Treaty Is Signed
The signing of the North Atlantic Treaty meant that, after intervening twice in the previous 32 years to restore peace in Europe, the U.S. was finally committed to an international alliance in peacetime, focused on preventing war in the first place. That act shaped our foreign policy, politics, military spending, military structure, doctrine, equipment and military ethos for the years to come. -
Barbara Johns Walks Out
On April 23, 1951, sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns led a walkout by four hundred black students to protest inadequate facilities at segregated Robert R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. Vowing to boycott classes until the local all-white School Board addressed their complaints, Johns and another student wrote to an NAACP attorney, who agreed to file a lawsuit seeking desegregation instead of just improved facilities. -
Emmett Till Is Murdered
In September of 1955, Mose Wright took the witness stand in a Mississippi courtroom. Rising from his chair, he pointed a finger at one of the two men who had murdered his niece’s son, Emmett Till. “There he is,” said Wright, in an extraordinary act of personal courage. Till’s killers were not convicted in 1955, but Till—a teenager who his killers thought had flirted with a white woman—still changed the country. -
The Birth Control Pill Is Approved
The birth control pill was one of the most significant achievements of the 20th century. Contraception wasn’t new: From ancient times, women have used methods of varying degrees of reliability to prevent getting pregnant. But the Pill, which was much more effective, transformed society. Americans began to think differently about sex, contraception and about women’s capacity to control their own bodies and participate as truly equal members of society. -
The Children March in Birmingham
The civil rights breakthrough in the 1960s required galvanizing the whole country, not just through rational arguments but by really breaking down people’s emotional resistance and making citizens across the country see they needed to do something. The children’s march really was the single event most responsible for inducing faraway people in Montana and Maine to say, “I need to do something about this.” Demonstrations spread like wildfire all across the country. -
Thich Quang Duc's Self-Immolation Is Broadcast
The international newspaper and TV coverage of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burning himself to death during a demonstration in Saigon changed the course of the Vietnam War and of American life. In the immediate aftermath, it caused horror and a reassessment of policy, which eventually led to more American troops on the ground and in the air but also to more media coverage in which Americans could actually see the war. It encouraged draft dodging and antiwar protests, some of which led violence -
Howard Smith Amends the Civil Rights Act
By 1964, little headway had been made in the women’s movement since winning the vote in 1920. So women’s rights supporters were delighted that year when Representative Howard Smith of Virginia offered a one-word amendment to Civil Rights Act, adding sex to the list of forms of discrimination prohibited by the act. Smith, a segregationist, opposed the bill—but he argued that if it passed, white women should get the same protections being extended to black men and women.