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The Ford Model T was introduced by Henry Ford in 1908, with the first one rolling off the line in late September/early October, revolutionizing transportation as the first affordable, mass-produced car using assembly line techniques, making it accessible to everyday people and changing society forever
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The Zimmermann Telegram was a secret 1917 German proposal to Mexico for a military alliance against the U.S., offering to help Mexico regain lost territories, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, if the U.S. entered World War I.
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The Armistice of World War I was a truce signed on November 11, 1918, at the 11th hour, ending the fighting on the Western Front between Germany and the Allies and effectively concluding the Great War
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The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1920, granted women the right to vote by prohibiting the denial or abridgment of voting rights based on sex
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Charles Lindbergh's famous flight in May 1927 was the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight, from New York to Paris, in his custom-built Ryan monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. The historic 33.5-hour journey, covering 3,610 miles, made him an instant global celebrity and significantly advanced public interest and investment in aviation, ushering in a new era of air travel.
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The Wall Street crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash, was a major stock market crash in the United States, which began in October 1929 with a sharp decline in prices on the New York Stock Exchange
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The New Deal was a series of U.S. government programs and reforms under President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) from 1933-1938, designed to combat the Great Depression through Relief, Recovery, and Reform, creating jobs, stabilizing the economy, and establishing social safety nets like Social Security, fundamentally expanding the government's role in American life
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Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, by President Paul von Hindenburg. This event was a crucial turning point that led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.
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The Munich Agreement was reached in Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. The agreement provided for the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, where three million people, mainly ethnic Germans, lived
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On September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler's Germany invaded Poland using its new blitzkrieg ("lightning war") tactics, overwhelming Polish defenses with rapid, coordinated attacks by tanks, aircraft, and infantry, marking the start of World War II
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The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Empire of Japan on the United States Pacific Fleet at its naval base at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. At the time, the U.S. was a neutral country in World War II
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The Normandy landings were the landing operations and associated airborne operations on 6 June 1944 of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during the Second World War. Codenamed Operation Neptune and often referred to as D-Day, it is the largest seaborne invasion in history
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The United Nations is a global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the articulated mission of maintaining international peace and security
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On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, during World War II. The aerial bombings killed 150,000 to 246,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only uses of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict
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The Long Telegram, sent by U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan from Moscow in February 1946, was an 8,000-word analysis of Soviet behavior that became the foundation for America's Cold War policy of containment, arguing the USSR was inherently aggressive and expansionist, requiring a patient but firm U.S. strategy to counter its influence until the Soviet system eventually collapsed
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an intergovernmental military alliance between 32 member states—30 in Europe and 2 in North America. Founded in the aftermath of World War II, NATO was established with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949
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The Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb by developing their own program, aided by espionage from spies within the American Manhattan Project, successfully testing their first device, "First Lightning" (Joe-1), on August 29, 1949, in Kazakhstan, shocking the West and escalating the Cold War
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The Korean War was an armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula fought between North Korea and South Korea and their allies. North Korea was supported by China and the Soviet Union, while South Korea was supported by the United Nations Command led by the United States.
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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even if the segregated facilities are equal in quality
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The Vietnam War was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam and their allies. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations
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On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, defying segregation laws and leading to her arrest, which ignited the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott, a pivotal 381-day protest that ended with a Supreme Court ruling against segregated buses, making her a symbol of peaceful resistance
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The Cuban Missile Crisis was a tense, 13-day standoff in October 1962 between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war after the U.S. discovered Soviet nuclear missile sites being built in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida
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John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963
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The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed by the U.S. Congress in August 1964, granted President Lyndon B. Johnson broad authority to escalate U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, serving as the primary legal justification for the Vietnam War without a formal declaration of war
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Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin landed the Lunar Module Eagle on July 20 at 20:17 UTC, and Armstrong became the first person to step onto the surface about six hours later, at 02:56 UTC on July 21.
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The internet wasn't invented by one person but evolved from the U.S. military's ARPANET in the late 1960s, a project to share data resiliently. Key developments include Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's creation of TCP/IP protocols (1970s) for network communication and Tim Berners-Lee inventing the World Wide Web (HTML, HTTP) in 1989, making the internet accessible to the public via browsers by 1991.
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The Watergate break-in was the June 17, 1972, burglary of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in Washington D.C.'s Watergate complex by operatives linked to President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign (CRP), aiming to plant bugs and steal documents, leading to a massive cover-up, extensive investigations, public hearings, and ultimately, Nixon's resignation in 1974, establishing a legacy of political scandal and distrust
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Richard Nixon's resignation speech was a national television address delivered from the Oval Office by U.S. president Richard Nixon the evening of August 8, 1974, during which Nixon announced his intention to resign the presidency the following day, August 9, 1974, due to the Watergate scandal
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The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was a pivotal moment symbolizing the end of the Cold War, triggered by East German official Günter Schabowski mistakenly announcing immediate free travel, leading to massive crowds overwhelming guards and demanding passage, resulting in joyous scenes as Berliners from East and West celebrated atop the wall, chipping away at it, and beginning the path to German reunification in 1990
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Nineteen terrorists from al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airplanes, deliberately crashing two of the planes into the upper floors of the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center complex and a third plane into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia
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The pandemic caused severe social and economic disruption around the world, including the largest global recession since the Great Depression