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Thomas Woodrow Wilson was an American politician who served as the 28th president of the United States for two terms. .After a policy of neutrality at the outbreak of World War I, Wilson led America into war in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” He started his presidency on March 4, 1913 and ended his time in office on March 4, 1921.
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World War I, which is also known as the Great War, began in 1914 and ended a little over four years later on November 11, 1918. The war was between the Central Powers, those being Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, and they fought against the Allied Powers Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States. The Allied Powers won the war, but by the end of it, about 8.8 million military personnel and 6.6 million civilians had died.
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On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat sank the RMS Lusitania, a British ocean liner en route from New York to Liverpool, England. There were about 1,900 passengers and crew members on board and more than 1,100 died from it. The sinking of the Lusitania played a significant role in turning the public against Germany, both in the United States and abroad.
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The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was a movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. It was caused primarily by the poor economic conditions as well as the prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld.
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Jeannette Rankin was born on a ranch near Missoula, Montana Territory in 1880 and was the first woman to ever hold federal office in the United States. She was elected in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1917 and unsuccessfully ran for a senate seat in 1918. She left Congress in 1919 to to become an important figure in a number of suffrage and pacifist organizations, but she was later elected as a representative from Montana again in 1940.
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The Selective Service Act of 1917 authorized the United States federal government to raise a national army for service in World War 1 through conscription. The act gave former president Woodrow Wilson the power to draft soldiers and required all men in the U.S. between the ages of 21 and 30 to register for military service. Within a few months, about 10 million men across the country had registered in response to the draft.
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The Espionage Act of 1917 is a United States federal law passed shortly after the U.S. entry into World War I. The act prohibited obtaining information, recording pictures, or copying descriptions of any information relating to the national defense if there was any intent of using it to harm he U.S. or to better another nation.
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Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, and he seized power and destroyed the tradition of csarist rule. The Bolsheviks would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union through political motions and social changes.
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The Fourteen Points was a statement of principles for peace that was to be used for peace negotiations in order to end World War I. The principles were outlined January 8, 1918 by a speech made by President Woodrow Wilson on war aims and peace terms to the United States Congress.
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The Influenza epidemic, also referred to as 'The Spanish Flu" was a severe pandemic in history that spread worldwide during 1918-1919. About 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. The first case was discovered in 1918 and a vaccine wasn't developed until the 1940s.
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The Sedition Act made it a crime for American citizens to "print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing" about the U.S. Government. Anyone caught making false statements that interfered with the prosecution of the war; insulting the U.S. government, abusing the flag, the Constitution or the military had harsh penalties imposed on them.
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Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer distributed leaflets declaring that the draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment. They advised peaceful action but urged the public to disobey the draft. Schenck was charged with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act by attempting to obstruct recruitment. They were convicted of violating this law and appealed on the grounds that the statute violated the First Amendment. The government argued the decision January 9-10, but it was decided on March 3, 1919.
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The Treaty of Versailles was the formal peace treaty that ended World War I between the Allies and Germany, their main enemy during the war. It included a provision, championed by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, for the creation of an international body called the League of Nations. On November 19, 1919, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles because of objections to the League of Nations. The U.S. would never ratify the treaty or join the League of Nations.
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The 19th Amendment is the right of U.S. citizens to vote can not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State because of one's sex. The amendment was passed on May 21, 1919 but it was later ratified on August 18, 1920.
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Warren G. Harding becomes the 29th U.S. president by a landslide victory in both the Electoral College and popular vote returns the Republican Party to the White House. Harding gained over 16 million popular votes to Democratic candidate James M. Cox's 9 million and won the Electoral contest with a 404 to 127 landslide.
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The Teapot Dome Scandal was a bribery scandal that involved secretary Interior, Albert Fall, who accepted valuable gifts & large sums of money from private oil companies. In exchange for all of this, Fall allowed the oil companies to control government oil reserves and wanted exclusive rights to drill for oil on federal land. The sites included land near a teapot-shaped outcrop in Wyoming known as Teapot Dome, and two other sites in California. The scandal was exposed on April 14, 1922.
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President Warren G. Harding dies in office after becoming ill following a trip to Alaska, and is succeeded by his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge would oppose the League of Nations, but approved of the World Court.
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Work on the gigantic sculpture at Mount Rushmore begins. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum would complete the task of chiseling the busts of four presidents; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, fourteen years later.
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Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean. She went on to set many more records, continued flying, and breaking gender barriers for years until she disappeared during her attempt to fly around the world on July 2, 1937.
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Postwar prosperity ends in the 1929 Stock Market crash. The plummeting stock prices led to losses between 1929 and 1931 of an estimated $50 billion and started the worst American depression in the nation's history.
