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Alaska is purchased from Russia
On March 30, 1867, the United States reached an agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia for a price of 7.2 million dollars. The Treaty with Russia was negotiated and signed by Secretary of State William Seward and Russian Minister to the United States Edouard de Stoeckl. -
Completion of the Transcontinental Railroad
One hundred fifty years ago, The first transcontinental railroad in the United State was completed and our Nation was changed forever. On May 10, 1869, the final golden spike was driven into the ground at Promontory Summit, Utah, joining the tracks of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. -
John D. Rockefeller started Standard Oil
Born into modest circumstances in upstate New York, he entered the then-fledgling oil business in 1863 by investing in a Cleveland, Ohio refinery. In 1870, he established Standard Oil, which by the early 1880's controlled some 90 percent of U.S. refineries and pipelines -
Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone
Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born scientist and inventor best known for inventing the first working telephone in 1876 and founding the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Bell's success came through his experiments in sound and the furthering of his family's interest in assisting the deaf with communication. -
Thomas Edison brings light to the world with the light bulb
By January 1879, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting. Still, the lamp only burned for a few short hours. -
Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers. -
Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor
Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor and served as the organization's president from 1886 to 1894, and from 1895 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize jurisdictional battles. -
Sherman Antitrust Act
Approved July 2, 1890, The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was the first Federal act that outlawed monopolistic business practices. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was the first measure passed by the U.S. Congress to prohibit trusts. -
Ellis Island opens
Ellis Island officially opened as an immigration station on January 1, 1892. Seventeen-year-old Annie Moore, from County Cork, Ireland was the first immigrant to be processed at the new federal immigration depot. -
Carnegie Steel’s Homestead Strike
The Homestead strike, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, pitted one of the most powerful new corporations, Carnegie Steel Company, against the nation’s strongest trade union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. An 1889 strike had won the steelworkers a favorable three-year contract; but by 1892 Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the union. -
Plessy v Ferguson
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 blacks. Rejecting Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Supreme Court ruled that a law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between whites and blacks was not unconstitutional. -
The U.S. declares war on Spain
On April 25, 1898 the United States declared war on Spain following the sinking of the Battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. -
Hawaii is annexed
Dole declared Hawaii an independent republic. Spurred by the nationalism aroused by the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898 at the urging of President William McKinley. Hawaii was made a territory in 1900, and Dole became its first governor. -
Rudyard Kipling published “The White Man’s Burden” in The New York Sun
As Victorian imperial poetry, "The White Man's Burden" thematically corresponds to Kipling's belief that the British Empire was the Englishman's "Divine Burden to reign God's Empire on Earth"; and celebrates British colonialism as a mission of civilization that eventually would benefit the colonized natives. -
The start of the Boxer Rebellion
The beginning of the Boxer Rebellion can be traced to the 1899 killing of two priests by two Boxer members visiting a German missionary in Juye County, China. In response, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German leader at the time, dispatched German troops to the scene of the crime, which further angered the rebels. -
Pres. McKinley is assassinated and Progressive, Theodore Roosevelt becomes President
Theodore Roosevelt unexpectedly became the 26th president of the United States in September 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley. Young and physically robust, he brought a new energy to the White House, and won a second term on his own merits in 1904. Roosevelt, a Republican, confronted the bitter struggle between management and labor head-on and became known as the great “trust buster” for his strenuous efforts to break up industrial combinations under the Sherman Antitrust Act. -
The Philippine Insurrection comes to an end
The organized insurrection effectively ended with the capture of Aguinaldo on March 23, 1901, by U.S. Brig. Gen. Frederick Funston. After learning of the location of Aguinaldo's secret headquarters from a captured courier, Funston personally led an audacious mission into the mountains of northern Luzon. -
Tenement Act
A New York State Progressive Era law which outlawed the construction of the dumbbell-shaped style tenement housing and set minimum size requirements for tenement housing. It also mandated the installation of lighting, better ventilation, and indoor bathrooms. -
The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe doctrine declares the U.S. right to intervene in the Western Hem
The Roosevelt Corollary of December 1904 stated that the United States would intervene as a last resort to ensure that other nations in the Western Hemisphere fulfilled their obligations to international creditors, and did not violate the rights of the United States or invite foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. As the corollary worked out in practice, the United States increasingly used military force to restore internal stability to nations in the region. -
Upton Sinclair releases “The Jungle”
It was published as a book on February 26, 1906 by Doubleday and in a subscribers' edition. The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair -
Pure Food & Drug Act and The Meat Inspection Act are passed
These were the first federal laws regulating the food and drug industries. The Pure Food and Drug Act required that all food and drugs meant for human consumption pass strict testing to assure safety and cleanliness. -
Henry Ford produced his first Model T
The first production Model T was built on August 12, 1908 and left the factory on September 27, 1908, at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, Michigan. On May 26, 1927, Henry Ford watched the 15 millionth Model T Ford roll off the assembly line at his factory in Highland Park, Michigan. -
Creation of the NAACP
The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is America's oldest and largest civil rights organization. It was formed in New York City by white and black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against African Americans around the country. -
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
With public outrage growing, New York state legislators enacted a law creating the Factory Investigating Commission, a watchdog agency with sweeping powers to probe labor conditions throughout the state. There were over 20 laws passed which changed fire safety, building safety, charged the state with worker safety. -
Peak year of immigration through Ellis Island
From 1900 to 1914—the peak years of Ellis Island's operation—an average of 1,900 people passed through the immigration station every day. Most successfully passed through in a matter of hours, but others could be detained for days or weeks. -
The Assassination on Austria’s archduke Franz Ferdinand starts WWI
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 on June 28, 1914. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I by early August. -
The Panama Canal is completed and opened for traffic
On August 15, 1914, the Panama Canal was opened to traffic. Panama later pushed to revoke the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, and in 1977 U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos signed a treaty to turn over the canal to Panama by the end of the century. -
The United States enters WWI
On April 6, 1917, the U.S. joined its allies--Britain, France, and Russia--to fight in World War I. Under the command of Major General John J. Pershing, more than 2 million U.S. soldiers fought on battlefields in France. Many Americans were not in favor of the U.S. entering the war and wanted to remain neutral. -
Ratification of the 18th Amendment - Prohibition
The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes,” is ratified by the requisite number of states on January 16, 1919. ... In 1933, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was passed and ratified, repealing prohibition. -
Women got the right to vote.
More than 20 nations around the world had granted women the right to vote, along with 15 states, more than half of them in the West. Suffragists had marched en masse, been arrested for illegally voting and picketing outside the White House, gone on hunger strikes and endured brutal beatings in prison—all in the name of the American woman’s right to vote. See a timeline of the push for the 19th Amendment—and subsequent voting rights milestones for women of color