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Compromise of 1877
The agreement that finally resolved the 1876 election and officially ended Reconstruction. In exchange for the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, winning the presidency, Hayes agreed to withdraw the last of the federal troops from the former confederate states. This deal effectively completed the southern return to white-only, Democratic-dominated electoral politics. -
Chinese Exclusion Act
legislation that prohibited most further Chinese immigration to the United States. This was the first major legal restriction on immigration in U.S. history -
USS Maine
U.S. Battleship that exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898; Evidence suggests an internal explosion, however Spanish military was framed by Yellow Journalism; The incident was a catalyst for the Spanish American War -
Open Door Policy
American statement that the government did not want colonies in China, but favored free trade there -
Teapot Dome Scandal
Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall took bribes from oil company executives to give the use of government land to their oil companies. Fall became the first Cabinet official sent to jail. -
Scopes Trial
The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which made it unlawful to teach human evolution -
Battle of Midway
U.S. naval victory over the Japanese fleet in June 1942, in which the Japanese lost four of their best aircraft carriers. It marked a turning point in the pacific theater of World War II. -
D-day
Led by Eisenhower, over a million troops (the largest invasion force in history) stormed the beaches at Normandy and began the process of re-taking France. The turning point of World War II. -
Marshall Plan
a United States program of economic aid for the reconstruction of Europe. Approximately $130 billion in current dollar value as of March 2016) in economic support to help rebuild Western European economies -
Berlin Airlift
A military operation in the late 1940s that brought food and other needed goods into West Berlin by air after the government of East Germany, which at that time surrounded West Berlin, had cut off its supply routes. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
In 1955, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus, Dr. Martin L. King led a boycott of city busses. After 11 months the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public transportation was illegal. -
Immigration Act of 1965
Established new immigration system that allowed more immigrants into the U.S., 1965; eliminated the quota restrictions in immigration, replaced by numerical limits that did not discriminate against specific countries; provided that the relatives of legal US residents could be admitted outside of the numerical limits -
1963 March on Washington
In August 1963, civil rights leaders organized a massive rally in Washington to urge passage of President Kennedy's civil rights bill. The high point came when MLK Jr., gave his "I Have a Dream" speech to more than 200,000 marchers in front of the Lincoln Memorial. -
9/11
A series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda on the United States. the day on which Islamic terrorists, believed to be part of the Al-Qaeda network, hijacked four commercial airplanes and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City and a third one into the Pentagon in Virginia: the fourth plane crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania. -
Biggest event in U.S History
