Turn of the Century

  • Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor

  • Alaska is purchased from Russia

  • Completion of the Transcontinental Railroad

  • John D. Rockefeller started Standard Oil

  • Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone

  • Thomas Edison brings light to the world with the light bulb

    Thomas Edison brings light to the world with the light bulb
    At his labortorary in New Jersey he built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb.
  • Chinese Exclusion Act

  • Sherman Antitrust Act

    Sherman Antitrust Act
    Was the first federal act that outlawed monopolistic business practices. Was the first measure passed by the U.S. congress to prohibit trusts.
  • Ellis Island opens

  • Carnegie Steel's Homestead Strike

  • Plessy V Ferguson

    Plessy V Ferguson
    Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation. "Separate but equal" movement. Ferguson thought that African Americans should not fight but just let things play out with hope things would change soon. Plessy believed that African Americans needed to fight now to make a change and let their voice be heard.
  • Hawaii is annexed

  • U.S. declares war on Spain

  • Rudyard Kipling published "The White Man's Burden" in The New York Sun

  • start of the Boxer Rebellion

  • Tenement Act

    Tenement Act
    first laws to ban the construction of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings in New York. required buildings to have outward facing windows, indoor bathrooms, proper ventilation, and fire safeguards.
  • Philippine Insurrection comes to an end

  • Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe doctrine declares the U.S. right to intervene in the Western Hem

  • Upton Sinclair releases "The Jungle"

    Upton Sinclair releases "The Jungle"
    the most famous influential and enduring of all muckraking novels. the book was an expose of conditions in the Chicago stockyards.
  • Pure Food and Drug Act, Meat Inspection Act passed

    Pure Food and Drug Act, Meat Inspection Act passed
    congress moved on legislation that prevents the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious food, drugs, or medicine and liquors.
  • Peak year of immigration through Ellis Island

  • Creation of the NAACP

  • Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

    Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
    fire broke out on the top floors of the factory. women were trapped inside because the owners had locked the fire escape exit doors. fire ladders were too short to reach the upper floors. some women jumped to their death
  • Assassination of Austria's archduke Franz Ferdinand starts WWI

  • Panama Canal is completed and opened for traffic

    Panama Canal is completed and opened for traffic
    passage through Ancon, an american cargo passenger ship
  • U.S. enters WWI

    U.S. enters WWI
    we ntered the war as soon as the pearl harbor was bombed
  • Women got the right to vote

    Women got the right to vote
    this was a huge turning point for women's suffrage. the right of citizens of the U.S. to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the U.S. or any state account of tax.
  • Ratification of the 18th Amendment - Prohibition