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By 1894, 23 more states had adopted the holiday, and on June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed a law making the first Monday in September of each year a national holiday. Link:
https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history#:~:text=The%20first%20Labor%20Day%20holiday,%2C%20on%20September%205%2C%201883. -
Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for Black people. Link:
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/plessy-v-ferguson -
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, the namesake and second cousin three times removed of the author of the National Anthem. Fitzgerald’s given names indicate his parents’ pride in his father’s ancestry. Link:
https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/university_libraries/browse/irvin_dept_special_collections/collections/matthew_arlyn_bruccoli_collection_of_f_scott_fitzgerald/life_of_fitzgerald/index.php -
Zelda Fitzgerald, née Zelda Sayre, was born July 24, 1900, and was an American writer and artist, best known for personifying the carefree ideals of the 1920s flapper and for her tumultuous marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Link:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Zelda-Fitzgerald -
Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) is widely acknowledged to be the first narrative film to have achieved such continuity of action. The film depicts the robbery, the formation of a posse, and its pursuit and elimination of the gunmen. Link:
britannica.com/biography/Edwin-S-Porter -
The Wright brothers achieved flight in 1903. The first flight was a failure, but the second was a success, with Orville achieving a total airspeed of 34 mph. Link:
https://www.nps.gov/wrbr/learn/historyculture/thefirstflight.htm -
General relativity is physicist Albert Einstein's understanding of how gravity affects the fabric of space-time. The theory, which Einstein published in 1915, expanded the theory of special relativity that he had published 10 years earlier. Link:
https://www.space.com/36273-theory-special-relativity.html -
On July 26, 1908, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is born when U.S. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte orders a group of newly hired federal investigators to report to Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch of the Department of Justice. Link:
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fbi-founded#:~:text=On%20July%2026%2C%201908%2C%20the,of%20the%20Department%20of%20Justice. -
At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the British ocean liner Titanic sinks into the North Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada. The massive ship, which carried 2,200 passengers and crew, had struck an iceberg two and half hours before. Link:
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/titanic-sinks -
After entering Princeton in 1913, Fitzgerald became a close friend of Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop and spent most of his time writing lyrics for Triangle Club theatrical productions and analyzing how to triumph over the school’s intricate social rituals. Link:
https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/f-scott-fitzgerald -
Charlie Chaplin was a comedic British actor who became one of the biggest stars of the 20th century's silent-film era. To differentiate himself from other actors in Sennett films, Chaplin decided to play a single identifiable character, and "The Little Tramp" was born, with audiences getting their first taste of him in Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914). Link:
https://www.biography.com/actor/charlie-chaplin -
World War I was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history. It led to the fall of four great imperial dynasties (in Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey), resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and, in its destabilization of European society, laid the groundwork for World War II. Link:
https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-I -
On academic probation and unlikely to graduate, Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. Link:
https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/university_libraries/browse/irvin_dept_special_collections/collections/matthew_arlyn_bruccoli_collection_of_f_scott_fitzgerald/life_of_fitzgerald/index.php#:~:text=His%20college%20friends%20included%20Edmund,second%20lieutenant%20in%20the%20infantry. -
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 on December 7, 1917. Link:
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1914-1920/wwi#:~:text=On%20April%204%2C%201917%2C%20the,Hungary%20on%20December%207%2C%201917. -
In 1918, a new influenza virus emerged. During this same time period World War I was taking place. The conditions of World War I (overcrowding and global troop movement) helped the 1918 flu spread. Link:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/pandemic-timeline-1918.htm -
In July 1918, while he was stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. They fell deeply in love, and, as soon as he could, Fitzgerald headed for New York determined to achieve instant success and to marry Zelda. Link:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/F-Scott-Fitzgerald -
The Eighteenth Amendment emerged from the organized efforts of the temperance movement and Anti-Saloon League, which attributed to alcohol virtually all of society’s ills and led campaigns at the local, state, and national levels to combat its manufacture, sale, distribution, and consumption. Link:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Eighteenth-Amendment -
In 1920, ten football teams gathered in Canton, Ohio to create the American Professional Football Association (APFA), now known as the National Football League (NFL). Four more teams joined the League later that year, rounding out the 14 Original NFL Towns. Link:
https://www.nfl.com/100/original-towns/#:~:text=In%201920%2C%20ten%20football%20teams,the%2014%20Original%20NFL%20Towns. -
Immature though it seems today, the work when it was published was considered a revelation of the new morality of the young in the early Jazz Age, and it made Fitzgerald famous. A portrait of the Lost Generation, the novel addresses Fitzgerald’s later theme of love distorted by social climbing and greed. Link:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/This-Side-of-Paradise -
It was not until Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, was accepted by publishers, and he was "the man with the jingle of money in his pocket" as he wrote, that she consented to marriage, and in 1920, a week after the book was published to huge acclaim, they wed. Link:
https://www.independent.ie/style/beautiful-and-damned-the-tumultuous-marriage-of-f-scott-fitzgerald-and-zelda-35055101.html -
Fitzgerald’s second novel, it concerns a handsome young married couple who choose to wait for an expected inheritance rather than involve themselves in productive, meaningful lives. Link:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Beautiful-and-Damned -
Coolidge acceded to the presidency after the death in office of Warren G. Harding, just as the Harding scandals were coming to light. He restored integrity to the executive branch of the federal government while continuing the conservative pro-business policies of his predecessor. Link:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Calvin-Coolidge -
The Great Gatsby, third novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Set in Jazz Age New York, the novel tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth. Link:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Great-Gatsby -
On November 18, 1928, Walt Disney’s animated movie ‘Steamboat Willie‘ was released that presented his most famous character ‘Mickey Mouse‘ for the very first time in New York City. The film is also notable for being the first cartoon with synchronized sound. Link:
http://scihi.org/walt-disney-steamboat-willie/ -
Zelda Fitzgerald suffered a mental breakdown in 1930, and from there, she was never the same. A couple of years later, she suffers the same fate, from which she never recovered. Link:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/F-Scott-Fitzgerald
