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US HISTORY (1850-1950)
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Compromise of 1850
Senator Henry Clay introduced a series of resolutions on January 29, 1850, in an attempt to seek a compromise and avert a crisis between North and South. As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished. -
Bleeding Kansas
The bill proposed organizing the Nebraska territory, which also included an area that would become the state of Kansas. Anti-slavery and pro-slavery settlers contested control of the Kansas territory. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Antislavery supporters were outraged because, under the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery would have been outlawed in both territories. It had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing white male settlers in those territories to determine through popular sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory -
Dred Scott Decision
Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott, an African American, was not a citizen and had no right to sue in court. The Court also ruled that Congress had no right to forbid slavery in the territories. -
Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. It freed all slaves in states still in rebellion on January 1,1863. -
Battle of Gettysburg
The battle was q turning point for the Civil War. Grant became Union commander and Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865. -
The 13th Amendment
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. In Congress, it was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. -
14th Amendment
was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. The amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws, and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War. -
Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be granted a United States patent for a device that produced clearly intelligible replication of the human voice. The telephone was the first device in history that enabled people to talk directly with each other across large distances. -
Phonograph
The phonograph is a device introduced in 1877 for the mechanical recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc. To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. -
Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882. It was one of the most significant restrictions on free immigration in US history, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers. -
Dawes Act
Shock at mistreatment of Indians by Helen Hunt Jackson and other reformers led to this attempt to "Americanize" Indians. An Indian could apply to take his own private land from the tribe's reservation land. -
Homestead strike
was an industrial lockout and strike. The battle was one of the most serious disputes in U.S. labor history. -
16th Amendment
The amendment within the Constitution that gives Congress the power to collect taxes on income without apportioning it among the states. The Sixteenth Amendment was passed in 1909 and ratified in 1913. -
Ford Assembly Line
Henry Ford installed the first moving assembly line for the mass production of an entire automobile. His innovation reduced the time it took to build a car from more than 12 hours to two hours and 30 minutes. -
First movie
The film, Cupid Angling, was produced by Leon F. Douglass. The film was made in the Douglass Natural Color process, the only feature film made in this process. -
19th Amendment
it gave women the right to vote. Women had increased opportunities in employment and education. -
Social Security Act
A law enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 to create a system of transfer payments in which younger, working people support older, retired people. it was the most important and long lasting achievement of the New Deal. -
First computer
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer. It was built during World War II by the United States. -
Berlin Blockade
The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. -
McCarthyism
Senator Joseph McCarthy lost his inflence when he challened the army. The term "McCarthyism" now refers to anti-Communist hysteria. -
Brown v. Board of Education
The Supreme Court ruled that segregation had no place in public education. Southern reactions to the decision were violent. -
Emmett Till's murder
Emmett Louis Till was an African-American teenager who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. His mother decided to have an open-casket funeral so that all the world could see what racist murderers had done to her only son. -
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War conflict pitting the U.S. and the remnants of the French colonial government in South Vietnam against the indigenous but communist Vietnamese independence movement, the Viet Minh, following the latter's expulsion of the French in 1954. -
Space Race
The Soviet sending Sputnik into space caused the United States to increase spending on science education. -
Eisenhower Doctrine
The United States opposed the spread of Communism in the Middle East and sent troops to Lebanon. -
Little Rock Nine
Nine black students enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, testing a landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. -
Peace Corps
Kennedy founded the Peace Corps to create peace between the nations. -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
A few months after Kennedy became president, the Cuban exiles attempted to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, however Kennedy failed to give them air cover and the invasion failed. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
The closest the world has come to a nuclear war. Americans discovered that Soviet nuclear missiles were about to be installed in Cuba. These missiles would have threatened Florida and other targets in the United States. -
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
The march was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history and called for civil and economic rights for African Americans. In result, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism. -
Assassination of JFK
Shortly after noon on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1:00 p.m. -
The 24th Amendment
The 24th Amendment prohibited poll taxes. -
Civil Rights Act
It outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public. -
Malcolm X assassination
On February 19, 1965, Malcolm X told interviewer Gordon Parks that the Nation of Islam was actively trying to kill him. On February 21, 1965, one week after his home was firebombed, Malcolm X was shot to death by Nation of Islam members while speaking at a rally of his organization in New York City. -
George Wallace
Wallace put his wife, Lurleen, on the ballot in his place in 1966. After winning a landslide election, she died in office in 1968. Wallace himself was elected again in 1970, and won two more elections in 1974 and 1982—becoming the first individual (and only person to date) to fill four terms as governor of Alabama. -
Martin Luther King Jr. Assassinated
Shortly after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and mortally wounded as he stood on the second-floor balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. He was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. at St. Joseph Hospital. -
Robert F. Kennedy assassination
The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, a United States Senator and brother of assassinated President John F. Kennedy, took place shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles, California. After winning the California and South Dakota primary elections for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, Kennedy was shot as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassado -
John Lennon's Murder
He was shot by Mark David Chapman in the archway of the building where he lived, The Dakota, in New York City on Monday, 8 December 1980. Lennon had just returned from Record Plant Studio with his wife, Yoko Ono. -
HIV/AIDS
The United States of America became the first country to officially recognise a strange new illness among a small number of gay men. Today, it is generally accepted that the origin of AIDS probably lies in Africa.
