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The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States between the Union and the Confederacy. The central cause of the war was the status of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery into territories acquired as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican American War. -
The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the Civil War -
Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright, together known as the Wright brothers, were American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful motor-operated airplane -
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. -
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, which began following World War II -
The civil rights movement was a political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the United States. -
Signed by President Dwight Eisenhower on July 29, 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 "provided for research into the problems of flight within and outside the earth's atmosphere" and established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
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Ham, also known as Ham the Chimp and Ham the Astrochimp, was a chimpanzee and the first great ape launched into space. On January 31, 1961, Ham flew a suborbital flight on the Mercury-Redstone 2 mission, part of the U.S. space program's Project Mercury. -
On April 12, 1961, Gagarin was launched into orbit by a Vostok rocket and became the first man in space. After completing one orbit, the spacecraft's automatic controls brought him safely back to Earth. -
John Herschel Glenn Jr. was an American aviator in the United States Marine Corps, engineer, astronaut, businessman, and politician. He was the third American in space, and the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962.
