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The Battle of the Little Bighorn
A division of the 7th Cavalry Regiment led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was sent up a trail into the Black Hills as an advance guard for a larger force. Custer’s men approached a camp known to the Sioux as Greasy Grass but marked on Custer’s map as Little Bighorn, and they found that the influx of Sioux, as well as Cheyenne and other allies, had swelled the population far beyond Custer’s estimation. Custer was outnumbered, and he and 268 of his men were killed. -
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the first major strike in an industry that propelled America’s industrial revolution. It was the first national strike, stretching from Atlantic to Pacific. In some cities, especially St. Louis, the struggle became one of the nation’s first general strikes. This was the first major strike broken by the U.S. military. Probably in no other strike had so many working people met a violent death at the hands of the authorities. -
Thomas Edison's Lightbulb
On Oct 14th, 1878 Thomas Edison filed his first patent on the "improvement in electric lights". However, he continued to test several types of material for metal filaments to improve upon his original design and by Nov 4, 1879, he filed another U.S. patent for an electric lamp using a carbon filament and several other materials. It was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours. -
Campaign for an eight-hour day
In the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day, long a rallying cry that united American laborers, culminated in a national strike on May 1, 1886. Somewhere between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand workers struck across the country. -
Haymarket Riot
A rally at Haymarket Square was organized by labor radicals to protest the killing and wounding of several workers by the Chicago police during a strike the day before at the McCormick Reaper Works. As the police advanced, an individual who was never identified threw a bomb at them. The police and possibly some members of the crowd opened fire. Seven police officers and at least one civilian died as a result of the violence that day, and an untold number of other people were injured. -
The Dawes General Allotment Act
Passed by Congress on February 8, 1887, the Dawes General Allotment Act splintered Native American reservations into individual family homesteads. Each head of a Native family was to be allotted 160 acres, the typical size of a claim that any settler could establish on federal lands under the provisions of the Homestead Act. Single individuals over age eighteen would receive an eighty-acre allotment, and orphaned children received forty acres. -
Populists Party nominates first presidential candidate
The Populists nominated former Civil War general James B. Weaver as their presidential candidate at the party’s first national convention in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 4, 1892. The Populists appealed to those convinced that there were deep flaws in the political economy of Gilded Age America. -
Spanish-American War begins
The Spanish-American War was an 1898 conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.
Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders embodied the idealized image of the tall, strong, virile, and fit American man that simultaneously epitomized the ideals of power that informed the United States’ imperial agenda.
