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Panama Canal
U.S. acquires Panama Canal Zone (treaty signed Nov. 17). Wright brothers make the first controlled, sustained flight in heavier-than-air aircraft at Kitty Hawk, N.C. (Dec. 17). -
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt's second inauguration -
Works Progress Administration
Works Progress Administration is established (April 8). Social Security Act is passed (Aug. 14). Bureau of Investigation (established 1908) becomes the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover. -
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft is inaugurated as the 27th president (March 4). Mrs. Taft has 80 Japanese cherry trees planted along the banks of the Potomac River. -
President Harding Dies
President Harding dies suddenly (Aug. 2). He is succeeded by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge. Teapot Dome scandal breaks, as Senate launches an investigation into improper leasing of naval oil reserves during Harding administration (Oct.) -
Hattie Wyatt Caraway
Hattie Wyatt Caraway of Arkansas is the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate, to fill a vacancy caused by the death of her husband (Jan. 12). She is reelected in 1932 and 1938. Amelia Earhart completes first solo nonstop transatlantic flight by a woman (May 21). -
Twentieth Amendment
Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, sometimes called the “Lame Duck Amendment,” is ratified, moving the president's inauguration date from March 4 to Jan. 20 (Jan. 23). Franklin Roosevelt is inaugurated as the 32nd president (March 4). New Deal recovery measures are enacted by Congress (March 9–June 16). Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, repealing Prohibition (Dec. 5). -
Congress passes foreign aid bill
Congress passes foreign aid bill including the Marshall Plan, which provides for European postwar recovery (April 2). Soviets begin blockade of Berlin in the first major crisis of the cold war (June 24). In response, U.S. and Great Britain begin airlift of food and fuel to West Berlin (June 26). -
Joseph McCarthy- McCarthyism
The 1950 events sharply increased the sense of threat from Communism in the U.S. -
Korean War
In South Korea, Republic Of Korea elections. Many conservatives ousted by moderates. -
The Korean War
Was a war between the Republic of Korea (South Korea), supported by the United Nations, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), at one time supported by the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. -
Korean War
MacArthur unilaterally issues an ultimatum to the People's Republic of China. -
the Ku Klux Klan
Christmas Eve bombing of the home of NAACP -
Korean War
Truman announces he will not run for reelection. -
Puerto Rico becomes a U.S. commonwealth
Puerto Rico becomes a U.S. commonwealth (July 25). First hydrogen bomb is detonated by the U.S. on Eniwetok, an atoll in the Marshall Islands (Nov. 1). -
Korean War
US air attack on Pyongyang. -
Korean War
"Terms of Reference," regulating POW repatriation, signed. -
Korean War
Peace Treaty signed at Panmunjom. 38th parallel reset as boundary between communist North and anti-communist South. Cold War tensions continue unabated. -
Joseph McCarthy - McCarthyism
Already infamous for his aggressive interrogations of suspected Communists, Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957) earned more notoriety via these televised 1954 Congressional hearings. McCarthy had turned his investigations to army security, but the army in turn charged him with using improper influence to win preferential treatment for a former staff member, Pvt. G. David Schine. When the senator tried to emphasize army lawyer Joseph Welch’s Communist ties, Welch delivered his famous -
Civil Rights Movment
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that formed the basis for state-sanctioned discrimination, drawing national and international attention to African Americans’ plight. In the turbulent decade and a half that followed, civil rights activists used nonviolent protest and civil disobedience to bring about change, and the federal government made legislative headway with initiatives such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Man -
Emmett Till's Murder
A 14-year-old African American teenager was brutally murdered by white men while visiting relatives in Mississippi. -
Vietnam War
Was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The U.S. government involved in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam as part of their wider strategy of containment. -
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African-American seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white man while riding on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. For doing this, Rosa Parks was arrested and fined for breaking the laws of segregation. Rosa Parks' refusal to leave her seat sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and is considered the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. -
Martin Luther King Jr
Helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) -
The Space Race
It was a competition between the Soviet Union and the U.S. to be the first to get to Space. -
The "Little Rock Nine"
On 4 September 1957, the first day of school at Central High, a white mob gathered in front of the school, and Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the black students from entering. In response to Faubus’ action, a team of NAACP lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, won a federal district court injunction to prevent the governor from blocking the students’ entry. With the help of police escorts, the students successfully entered the school through a side entrance -
Explorer I
Explorer I, first American satellite, is launched (Jan. 31). -
The Assassination of John F Kennedy
22 November 1963, at 12:30pm, President Kennedy was travelling in an open top car through the streets of Dallas when three loud rifle shots rang through the air, apparently shot from the sixth floor of the nearby Book Depository building. According to official reports, the first of these bullets missed its mark, while the second penetrated the back of the President’s neck. Kennedy’s steel-boned back brace which he wore to alleviate his constant pain held Kennedy in a upright position. -
Kennedy's Assassination
John F. Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States. He dealt with the Cold War and believed in Civil Rights. Unfortunately, the loving president was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald -
Lyndon B. Johnson
A Great Society" for the American people and their fellow men elsewhere was the vision of Lyndon B. Johnson. In his first years of office he obtained passage of one of the most extensive legislative programs in the Nation's history. Maintaining collective security, he carried on the rapidly growing struggle to restrain Communist encroachment in Vietnam. Sworn in when Kennedy was assasinated. -
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act (July 2)
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act (July 2). -
The Civil Rights Act
After a long "war" for equallity, the U.S. finally passes the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The legislation outlawed any form of discrimination against, race, gender, age or religion. Although the legislation was passed, it took many years to actually see the results of it. -
Gulf of Tonkin Incident
The USS Maddox was struck by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of the Vietnam's. Similar to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1918, during World War I. This incident let Americans support the war in Vietnam and allowed Congress to suppot the sending of troops to Asia. -
The Vietnam War
Vietnam was the longest war in American history and the most unpopular American war of the 20th century. It resulted in nearly 60,000 American deaths and in an estimated 2 million Vietnamese deaths. Even today, many Americans still ask whether the American effort in Vietnam was a sin, a blunder, a necessary war, or whether it was a noble cause, or an idealistic, if failed, effort to protect the South Vietnamese from totalitarian government. -
Malcolm X
The prison releases Malcolm on parole. Malcolm moves in with his brother Wilfred and becomes very active in the Detroit temple of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm receives permission to drop his last name, which a white slave owner gave to one of his ancestors. He adopts the placeholder “X” as his last name, using the letter to represent the lost name of his African ancestors. Malcolm X soon meets the Nation of Islam’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and rises quickly from the rank of temple assistant. -
Black Panthers
In the fight for civil rights in America for African Americans, there were 2 types of fights, violent and nonviolent. Martin Luther King Jr. led the nonviolent fight and the violent fight was led by the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The Panthers advocated for
"Black Power" and they openly carried weapons. -
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King, Jr. became the predominant leader in the Civil Rights Movement to end racial segregation and discrimination in America during the 1950s and 1960s and a leading spokesperson for nonviolent methods of achieving social change. His eloquence as a speaker and his personal charisma, combined with a deeply rooted determination to establish equality among all races despite personal risk won him a world-wide following. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, on the balcony of a motel. -
The Space Race
The Space Race was a competition between the USA and the USSR to explore space using artificial satellites and manned spacecraft. It can be seen as a part of the larger arms race, as developments in space research could easily be transferred to military research. Both countries started work on developing reconnaissance satellites well before the height of the Space Race. The Vostok spacecraft used by the USSR to put Yuri Gagarin into space, for example, was developed from the Zenit spy satellite -
Woodstock Festival
The Woodstock Festival was a three-day concert (which rolled into a fourth day) that involved lots of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll - plus a lot of mud. The Woodstock Music Festival of 1969 has become an icon of the 1960s hippie counterculture. -
The Pentagon Papers
US involvment in Vietnam had been documented since Truman was president. Daniel Ellsberg, who opposed to the war and the illegal happenings sent the papers to the NY Times who published it and put it on display for the world to see. After the American public saw this, they started to lose faith in their government and they could not believe the lies they were being told. -
The Watergate Scandal
The Watergate scandal was when John Mitchell and John Dean tried to steal documents from the Democratic National Comitee. Instead of exposing this to the public, the Nixon administration tried to cover it up. The releasing of many documents and tapes lead to the resignation of Nixon as president. -
Watergate Scandal
This scandal occurred during Nixon's presidency. The Republican members of Nixon's Party broke into the Democratic Headquarters. When the information was leaked, it was also discovered that Nixon attempted to cover it up. Those that were guilty were indicted and Nixon resigned. -
Richard Nixon: Watergate Scandal
A $25,000 cashier's check, apparently earmarked for the Nixon campaign, wound up in the bank account of a Watergate burglar, The Washington Post reports. -
Iran Hostage Crisis
On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 American hostages. The immediate cause of this action was President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow Iran’s deposed Shah, a pro-Western autocrat who had been expelled from his country some months before, to come to the United States for cancer treatment. However, the hostage-taking was about more than the Shah’s medical care: it was a dramatic way for the student revolutionaries to declare... -
John Lennon's Murder
Lennon was fatally shot in front of his New York City home by deranged fan Mark David Chapman. Only two months earlier, on October 9, 1980, Lennon had celebrated his 40th birthday with his wife, Yoko Ono, and five-year-old son, Sean (who coincidentally shares the same birthday). The occasion was uniquely momentous for Lennon, as Ono had surprised both her husband and son with a sky-written message above their Manhattan apartment building: "Happy Birthday John & Sean - Love Yoko." -
Ronald Reagan Assasination Attempt
March 30, 1981, tragedy almost befell the American government when John Hinckley, a deranged drifter trying to impress actress Jodie Foster, on whom he had developed an obsession after seeing her in Taxi Driver, fired six shots from a .22-caliber revolver at President Ronald Reagan as the president left a speech he had given to the National Conference of Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO at the Washington Hilton. -
Reagan's Assassination Attempt
Ronald Reagan was the 40th president of the United States. The assassination attempt occured 69 days into his presidency, while he was leaving washington hilton hotel after giving a speech. Reagan was shoot and wounded along with three other men byJohn Hickley Jr. -
HIV/AIDS
AIDS was first recognized as a new disease in 1981, when a number of young gay men in New York and Los Angeles were diagnosed with symptoms not usually seen in individuals with healthy immune systems. This information was reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the branch of the U.S. government that monitors and tries to control disease outbreaks. Many new cases were soon discovered of what appeared to be a disease associated with the breakdown of the body's immune system. -
The Falling of The Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was both the physical division between West Berlin and East Germany from 1961 to 1989 and the symbolic boundary between democracy and Communism during the Cold War. -
Fall of Communism
The revolutions of 1989 marked the death knell of communism in Europe. As a result, not only was Germany reunified in 1990, but soon, revolution spread to the Soviet Union itself. After surviving a hard-line coup attempt in 1991, Gorbachev was forced to cede power in Russia to Boris Yeltsin, who oversaw the dissolution of the Soviet Union. -
The Breakup Of The Soviet Union
In December of 1991, as the world watched in amazement, the Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen separate countries. Its collapse was hailed by the west as a victory for freedom, a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, and evidence of the superiority of capitalism over socialism. The United States rejoiced as its formidable enemy was brought to its knees, thereby ending the Cold War which had hovered over these two superpowers since the end of World War II. -
Emmet Tills Murder
While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. His assailants--the white woman's husband and her brother--made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with -
President Clinton
President Clinton denies having had a sexual relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky (Jan. 17). President Clinton releases 1999 federal budget plan; it is the first balanced budget since 1969 (Feb. 2). In televised address, President Clinton admits having had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky (Aug. 17). U.S. launches missile attacks on targets in Sudan and Afghanistan following terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (Aug. 20). -
Best U.S History Project ever made
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