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Opinions Throughout History – National Security vs. Civil and Privacy Rights

Historical Snapshots

1890–1891

  • Massive immigration that was transforming the nation left the rural South largely unaffected

  • Two-thirds of the nation’s 62.9 million people still lived in rural areas; 32.7 percent were immigrants or the children of at least one immigrant parent

  • New Irish women immigrants to America, in demand as servants, outnumbered the men in 1890

  • The census showed that 53.5 percent of the farms in the US were fewer than 100 acres

  • The first commercial dry cell battery was invented

  • Three percent of Americans, age 18 to 21, attended college

  • Literary Digest began publication

  • Population of Los Angeles reached 50,000, up 40,000 in 10 years

  • Restrictive anti-black “Jim Crow” laws were enacted throughout the South

  • The first full-service advertising agency was established in New York City

  • Thousands of Kansas farmers were bankrupted by the tight money conditions

  • The $3 million Tampa Bay Hotel was completed in Florida

  • American Express Traveler’s Cheque was copyrighted

  • Ceresota flour was introduced by the Northwest Consolidated Milling Company

  • George A. Hormel & Co. introduced the packaged food Spam

  • Painter Paul Gauguin arrived in Papeete, Tahiti

  • The penalty kick was introduced into soccer

  • The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers was organized

  • New Scotland Yard became the headquarters of the London Metropolitan Police

  • Eugène Dubois discovered Homo erectus fossils in the Dutch colony of Java

  • Bicycle designer Charles Duryea, 29, and his toolmaker brother James designed a gasoline engine capable of powering a road vehicle

  • Edouard Michelin obtained a patent for a “removable” bicycle tire that could be repaired quickly in the event of puncture

  • The Jarvis winch, patented by Glasgow-born Scottish shipmaster John C. B. Jarvis, enabled ships to be manned by fewer men and helped develop the windjammer

  • Rice University and Stanford were chartered

  • John T. Smith patented corkboard using a process of heat and pressure to combine waste cork together for insulation

  • American Express issued the first traveler’s checks

  • Commercial bromine was produced electrolytically by Herbert H. Dow’s Midland Chemical Company in Michigan

  • Bacteriologist Anna Williams obtained her M.D. from the Women’s Medical College of New York and worked in the diagnostic laboratory of the city’s Health Department, the first such lab in America

  • Chicago’s Provident Hospital became the first interracial hospital in America

  • The lapidary encyclical “Of New Things” by Pope Leo XIII declared that employers have the moral duty as members of the possessing class to improve the “terrible conditions of the new and often violent process of industrialization”

  • Educator William Rainey Harper became president of the new University of Chicago with funding from merchant Marshall Field and oilman John D. Rockefeller

  • Irene Coit became the first woman admitted to Yale University

  • The electric self-starter for automobiles was patented

  • The Automatic Electric Company was founded to promote a dial telephone patented by Kansas City undertaker Almon B. Strowger, who suspected that “central” was diverting his incoming calls to a rival embalmer

  • Important books included Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy; The Light That Failed by Rudyard Kipling; The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and Tales of Soldiers and Civilians by Ambrose Bierce

1892–1893

  • American industry was benefiting from the 1890 decision by Congress to increase tariffs on foreign goods from 38 to 50 percent, making U.S. manufactured items less expensive

  • New York City boss Richard Croker’s fortune was estimated to be $8 million, not including his own railway car and a $2.5 million stud farm

  • An improved carburetor for automobiles was invented

  • The first successful gasoline tractor was produced by a farmer in Waterloo, Iowa

  • Chicago’s first elevated railway went into operation, forming the famous Loop

  • The $1 Ingersoll pocket watch was introduced, bringing affordable timepieces to the masses

  • The General Electric Company was created through a merger

  • Violence erupted at the steelworkers’ strike of the Carnegie-Phipps Mill at Homestead, Pennsylvania

  • President Benjamin Harrison extended for 10 years the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended Chinese immigration to the United States

  • The United States population included 4,000 millionaires

  • The name Sears, Roebuck & Company came into use

  • Pineapples were canned for the first time

  • Diesel patented his internal combustion engine

  • The Census Bureau announced that a frontier line was no longer discernible; all unsettled areas had been invaded

  • The first automatic telephone switchboard was activated

  • Cream of Wheat was introduced by Diamond Mill of Grand Forks, North Dakota

  • New York’s 13-story Waldorf Hotel was opened

  • The first Ford motorcar was road tested

  • The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad went into receivership

  • Wrigley’s Spearmint and Juicy Fruit chewing gum were introduced by William Wrigley, Jr.

1894

  • Approximately 12,000 New York City tailors struck to protest sweatshops

  • The first Sunday newspaper color comic section was published in the New York World

  • Antique-collecting became popular, supported by numerous genealogy-minded societies

  • A well-meaning group of anglophiles called the America Acclimatization Society began importing English birds mentioned in Shakespeare, including nightingales, thrushes and starlings, for release in America

  • Overproduction forced farm prices to fall; wheat dropped from $1.05 a bushel in 1870 to $0.49 a bushel

  • The first Greek newspaper in America was published as the New York Atlantis

  • New York Governor Roswell P. Flower signed the nation’s first dog-licensing law, with a $2.00 license fee

  • Hockey’s first Stanley Cup championship game was played between the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association and the Ottawa Capitals

  • Thomas Edison publicly demonstrated the kinetoscope, a peephole viewer in which developed film moved continuously under a magnifying glass

  • Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in Illinois went on strike to protest a wage reduction; President Cleveland ordered federal troops onto the trains to insure mail delivery

  • Labor Day was established as a holiday for federal employees

  • Congress established the Bureau of Immigration

  • Congress passed a bill imposing a 2 percent tax on incomes over $4,000, which was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court

  • The United States Government began keeping records on the weather

  • Astronomer Percival Lowell built a private observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and began his observations of Mars

  • The Regents of the University of Michigan declared that “Henceforth in the selection of professors and instructors and other assistants in instruction in the University, no discrimination will be made in selection between men and women”

  • French Baron Pierre de Coubertin proposed an international Olympics competition to be held every four years in a different nation to encourage international peace and cooperation

  • The Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze was released in movie theaters

1895

  • Mintonette, later known as volleyball, was created by William G. Morgan in Holyoke, Massachusetts

  • Oscar Wilde’s last play, The Importance of Being Earnest, was first shown at St. James’s Theatre in London

  • The Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed between China and Japan, marking the end of the first Sino-Japanese War

  • The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had the right to regulate interstate commerce, legalizing the military suppression of the Pullman Strike

  • The first professional American football game was played in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, between the Latrobe YMCA and the Jeannette Athletic Club

  • Rudyard Kipling published the story “Mowgli Leaves the Jungle Forever” in Cosmopolitan illustrated magazine

  • George B. Selden was granted the first U.S. patent for an automobile

  • Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a type of radiation later known as x-rays

  • Oscar Hammerstein opened the Olympia Theatre, the first to be built in New York City’s Times Square district

  • Alfred Nobel signed his last will and testament, setting aside his estate to establish the Nobel Prize after his death

  • Two hundred African-Americans left from Savannah, Georgia, headed for Liberia

  • George Brownell patented a machine to make paper twine

  • The Anti-Saloon League of America was formed in Washington D.C.

  • Frederick Blaisdell patented the pencil

  • George Washington Vanderbilt II officially opened his “Biltmore House” on Christmas in Asheville, North Carolina

  • Auguste and Louis Lumière displayed their first moving picture film in Paris

  • The London School of Economics and Political Science was founded in England

  • W. E. B. Du Bois became the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University

  • The gold reserve of the U.S. Treasury was saved when J. P. Morgan and the Rothschilds loaned $65 million worth of gold to the U.S. Government

1896–1897

  • The bicycle industry reported sales of $60 million; the average bike sold for $100

  • The earliest trading stamps, issued by S&H Green Stamps, were distributed

  • Michelob beer was introduced

  • The Klondike gold rush in Bonanza Creek, Canada, began

  • The Boston Cooking School Cook Book was published, advocating the use of precise measurements to produce identical results

  • Radioactivity was discovered in uranium

  • William Ramsay discovered helium

  • Five annual Nobel Prizes were established in the fields of physics, physiology and medicine, chemistry, literature, and peace

  • Bituminous coal miners staged a 12-week walkout

  • Continental Casualty Company was founded

  • Dow Chemical Company was incorporated

  • Radio transmission over long distances was achieved by Gugielmo Marconi

  • Winton Motor Carriage Company was organized

  • The NYC Health Board began enforcing a law regulating women in mercantile establishments

  • Mail Pouch tobacco was introduced

  • Ronald Ross discovered the malaria bacillus

  • Wheat prices rose to $1.09 per bushel

  • Jell-O was introduced by Pearl B. Wait

  • Boston’s H.P. Hill used glass bottles to distribute milk

1897

  • Thorstein Veblen developed the concepts for his book, Theory of the Leisure Class, which stated, “conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentlemen of leisure”

  • Continental Casualty Company was founded

  • Radical Emma Goldman, advocate of free love, birth control, homosexual rights and “freedom for both sexes,” was arrested

  • The Royal Automobile Club was founded in London

  • John Davison Rockefeller, worth nearly $200 million, stopped going to his office at Standard Oil and began playing golf and giving away his wealth

  • The Presbyterian Assembly condemned the growing bicycling fad for enticing parishioners away from church

  • Motorcar production reached nearly 1,000 vehicles

  • Nearly 150 Yiddish periodicals were being published, many of which advocated radical labor reform, Zionism, and even anarchism, to obtain reform

  • Republican William McKinley was sworn into office as America’s 25th president, helped by $7 million raised by manager businessman Mark Hanna, compared with $300,000 raised by opponent William Jennings Bryan

  • Prospectors streamed to the Klondike in search of gold

  • The Winton Motor Carriage Company was organized

1898

  • “Happy Birthday to You,” composed by sisters Mildred and Patty Hill in 1893 as “Good Morning to All,” was becoming popular

  • The “grandfather clause” marched across the South, ushering in widespread use of Jim Crow laws and restricting most blacks from voting

  • Pepsi-Cola was introduced in North Carolina, by pharmacist Caleb Bradham

  • J.P. Stevens & Company was founded in New York

  • Toothpaste in collapsible metal tubes was available due to the work of Connecticut dentist Lucius Sheffield

  • The trolley replaced horsedrawn cars in Boston

  • Wesson Oil was introduced

  • The boll weevil began spreading across cotton-growing areas of the South

  • The New York Times dropped its price from $0.03 to $0.01, tripling circulation

  • The Union Carbide Company was formed

  • Uneeda Biscuit was created

  • Bricklayers made $3.41 per day and worked a 48-hour week, while marble cutters made $4.22 per day

  • America boasted more than 300 bicycle manufacturing companies

  • Cellophane was invented by Charles F. Cross and Edward J. Bevan

1900

  • President William McKinley used the telephone as part of his re-election campaign; he was the last Union soldier to be elected president

  • Nationwide, 13,824 motorcars were on the road

  • Hamburgers were introduced by Louis Lassen in New Haven, Connecticut

  • The number of advertising agencies in New York City increased from 44 in 1870 to more than 400

  • Firestone Tire and Rubber Company was founded based on a patent for attaching tires to rims

  • John Davison Rockefeller’s wealth was estimated to be $200 million

  • A dinner party in New York attracted publicity when cigarettes rolled in $100 bills were given to guests before dinner

  • The cost of telephone service fell dramatically as more companies offered a 10-party line, allowing that many customers to share one line

  • The U.S. led the world in productivity, based on gross national product, producing $116 billion compared with $62.2 billion in Great Britain, $42.8 billion in France and $42 billion in Germany

  • 30,000 trolley cars operated on 15,000 miles of track across America

  • Cities like New York and San Francisco had one saloon for every 200 people

  • Louis Comfort Tiffany opened his first glass studio in New York

  • America’s economic boom entered its fourth year with 0.1 percent inflation

  • Cigarette smoking was extremely popular and widely advertised, particularly by American Tobacco

  • Excavation had begun on the New York subway system

  • U.S. railroads were charging an average of $0.75 per ton-mile, down from $1.22 in 1883

  • Automobile manufacturer Ransom Olds sold 425 cars during the year

  • The U.S. College Entrance Examination Board was formed to screen college applicants using a Scholastic Aptitude Test

  • The Junior League of the New York Settlement House attracted young débutantes to serve the less fortunate

  • Puerto Rico, obtained in the Spanish-American War in 1898, was declared a U.S. territory

  • A tidal wave in Galveston, Texas, killed 4,000 people

  • The U.S. Navy bought its first submarine

1901

  • Major movies included The Philippines and Our New Possessions, The Conquest of the Air, Drama at the Bottom of the Sea and Execution of Czolgosz, the man who shot President William McKinley

  • Pogroms in Russia forced many Jews to America

  • The U.S. constructed a 16-inch, 130-pound breech-loading rifle that was the most powerful in the world

  • Popular songs included “Ain’t Dat a Shame?,” “The Night We Did Not Care,” “When You Loved Me in the Sweet Old Days” and “Maiden with the Dreamy Eyes”

  • The first U.S. Open golf tournament under USGA rules was held at the Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton, Massachusetts

  • The U.S. granted citizenship to the five civilized tribes: the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chicasaw and Seminole

  • West Point officially abolished the practice of hazing cadets

  • The Boston Museum of Fine Arts was given funds to purchase Velásquez’s portrait, Don Baltazar and His Dwarf

  • Books included Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, To a Person Sitting in Darkness by Mark Twain, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud, The Octopus by Frank Norris and Springtime and Harvest by Upton Sinclair

  • North Carolina proposed a literacy amendment for voting

  • The Settlement Cookbook, published by a Milwaukee settlement worker to help immigrant women, carried the phrase, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”

  • Peter Cooper Hewitt created the first mercury-vapor electric lamp

  • Four widows of Revolutionary War soldiers remained on pensions; one veteran of the war of 1812 still lived

  • Researchers discovered a connection between obesity and heart disease

  • Of the 120,000 U.S. military troops on active duty, 70,000 were stationed in the Philippines fighting the insurgency

  • South Dakota passed legislation making school attendance mandatory for children eight to 14 years of age

  • The first vacuum cleaner was invented to compete with the Bissell Carpet Sweeper

  • The military began placing greater emphasis on the science of nutrition after England had to reject three out of five men in its recruiting for the Boer War in 1899

  • Vice President Teddy Roosevelt was made an honorary member of the Hebrew Veterans of the War with Spain; many of its members had fought as Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War

  • Christy Mathewson of New York pitched professional baseball’s first no-hitter, defeating St. Louis 5-0

  • The length of time required to cross the Atlantic Ocean was one week, compared to one month in 1800

  • The median age of men for their first marriage was 25.9 years, and 21.9 for women

1902–1903

  • The Brownie Box camera was introduced by Eastman Kodak Company, costing $1.00

  • Firestone Tire and Rubber Company began operations based on a patent for attaching tires to rims

  • The first modern submarine, the Holland, was purchased by the navy

  • Uneeda Biscuits achieved sales of more than 10 million packages per month

  • Life expectancy nationwide in 1900 was estimated to be 47 years

  • The U.S. census reported the U.S. population at 76 million and projected that it would grow to 106 million over the next 20 years, pushed by a steady influx of immigrants

  • Membership in the American Federation of Labor reached the million-person mark

  • The National Association of Manufacturers launched an anti-union campaign that promoted the right of Americans to work when and where they pleased, depicting labor organizers as agitators and socialists

  • The price of coal in New York went from $5.00 to $30.00 a ton during a five-month strike of anthracite coal workers

  • Rayon was patented by U.S. Chemist A. D. Little

  • Russian American Morris Michtom and his wife introduced the teddy bear with movable arms, legs, and head

  • Philip Morris Corporation was founded

  • Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of Tiffany and Co., died, leaving an estate of $35 million

  • The automat restaurant was opened by Horn & Hardart Baking company in Philadelphia

  • The Wright Brothers made the first sustained manned flights in a controlled gasoline-powered aircraft

  • The 24-horsepower Chadwick motorcar cost $4,000, capable of going 60 mph

  • Massachusetts created the first automobile license plate

  • Bottle-blowing machines cut the cost of manufacturing electric light bulbs

  • The Harley-Davidson motorcycle was introduced

  • An automatic machine to clean a salmon and remove its head and tail was devised by A.K. Smith, speeding processing and cutting costs

  • Sanka Coffee was introduced by German coffee importer Ludwig Roselius

1904

  • Marie Louise Van Vorst infiltrated factories to expose the problems of child labor

  • Post Toasties were introduced by the Postum Company

  • The St. Louis Fair spawned iced tea and the ice cream cone

  • Ladies’ Home Journal published an exposé of the U.S. patent medicine business

  • Montgomery Ward mailed three million free catalogues, while Sears, Roebuck distributed a million copies of its spring catalogue

  • Typhoid fever in NYC was traced to “Typhoid Mary” Mallon, a carrier of the disease who took jobs handling food, often under an assumed name

  • The National Women’s Trade Union League was formed by middle-class and working women to foster women’s education and help women organize unions

  • The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice targeted playing cards, roulette, lotto, watches with obscene pictures, and articles of rubber for immoral use

  • Florida gained the title to the Everglades swamp and immediately made plans for drainage

  • Louis Sherry’s on NYC’s 5th Avenue opened the New York Riding Club, where members could eat in the saddle

  • A Packard Model F went from San Francisco to New York City in 51 days, the first authenticated transcontinental auto trip

  • Women’s groups led by the wealthy, who were fighting for better conditions for working women, were branded “the mink brigade”

  • Horace Fletcher’s book ABC of Nutrition advocated chewing your food 32 times a bite, sparking a special trend for mastication

  • Malaria and yellow fever disappeared from the Panama Canal after army surgeons discovered the link to mosquitoes and developed successful disease control

  • The sixth moon of Jupiter was sighted

  • Marie Curie discovered two new radioactive elements in uranium ore—radium and polonium

  • The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens, History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Tarbell, and In Reckless Ecstasy by Carl Sandburg were published

  • Laura Ziegler held a grand opening for her brothel in Fort Smith, Arkansas, hosted by the mayor and other dignitaries; her cost of $3 was higher than the $1 charged at most establishments

  • President Teddy Roosevelt ruled that Civil War veterans over 62 years were eligible to receive a pension

  • Central heating, the ultraviolet lamp, Dr. Scholl arch supports, E. F. Hutton, the Caterpillar Tractor Company and offset printing all made their first appearance

  • Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” to describe the useless spending habits of the rich in his book, Theory of Business Enterprise

  • The counterweight elevator was designed by the Otis Company, replacing the hydraulic elevator and allowing buildings to rise more than 20 stories

  • The U.S. paid $40 million to purchase French property in the Panama Canal region

  • The New York subway opened, with more than 100,000 people riding on the first day

  • Popular songs included “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” and “Come Take a Trip in My Air-Ship”

  • A massive fire in Baltimore destroyed 26,000 buildings

  • The Olympics were held in St. Louis as part of the St. Louis Exposition, and basketball was presented as a demonstration sport

  • Novocain, the crash helmet, snow chains and the vacuum tube were invented

1905–1906

  • Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) attacked the American Federation of Labor for accepting the capitalist system

  • A New York law limiting hours of work in the baking industry to 60 per week was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court

  • U.S. auto production reached 15,000 cars per year, up from 2,500 in 1899

  • William Randolph Hearst acquired Cosmopolitan magazine for $400,000

  • Royal Typewriter Company was founded by New York financier Thomas Fortune Ryan

  • Sales of Jell-O reached $1 million

  • Oklahoma was admitted to the Union

  • Planters Nut and Chocolate Company was created

  • A-1 Sauce was introduced in the U.S. by Hartford’s G.F. Heublein & Brothers

  • Samuel Hopkins Adams’ The Great American Fraud exposed the fraudulent claims of many patent medicines

  • Anti-liquor campaigners received powerful support from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, lead by Frances E. Willard, who often fell to her knees and prayed on saloon floors

  • Former President Grover Cleveland wrote in The Ladies’ Home Journal that women of sense did not wish to vote: “The relative positions to be assumed by men and women in the working out of our civilizations were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.”

  • President Theodore Roosevelt admonished well-born white women who were using birth control for participating in willful sterilization, a practice known as racial suicide

1907–1908

  • The New York Times inaugurated the custom of dropping an illuminated ball to greet the new year in what everyone now calls Times Square

  • Cadillac was advertised at $800.00, a Ford Model K at $2,800.00

  • Horses were sold for $150.00 to $300.00

  • The first self-contained electric clothes washer was developed in Chicago

  • The American Society for Keeping Woman in Her Proper Sphere was formed

  • The first Christmas “stamps” were sold to raise money for tuberculosis research

  • Mother’s Day is celebrated, unofficially, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  • New York City passed the Sullivan Ordinance prohibiting women from smoking in public places

  • Publication of the Christian Science Monitor began

  • Wealthy American Reformer Maud Younger founded the Waitresses’ Union in San Francisco after waitressing herself in order to learn about the life of working women

  • The first canned tuna fish was packed in California

  • Westinghouse Electric went bankrupt

  • Two subway tunnels were opened to traffic in New York City

  • The “Rich Man’s Panic” resulted in financial reforms that increased the flexibility of the money supply and eventually led to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913

  • The U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling holding that laws limiting the maximum number of hours that women can work to 10 hours a day are constitutional

  • Many U.S. banks closed as economic depression deepened

  • President Theodore Roosevelt called a White House Conference on conservation

  • Cornelius Vanderbilt’s yacht, the North Star, was reported to cost $250,000 with a yearly maintenance bill of $20,000

  • The 47-story Singer Building in New York became the world’s tallest skyscraper

  • Both the Muir Woods in California and the Grand Canyon were named national monuments worthy of preservation

  • The first transatlantic wireless telegraph stations connected Canada to Ireland, and messages could be sent for $0.15 a word

  • The AC spark plug, Luger pistol, and oscillating fan all came on the market

  • Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first sorority for black women, was founded in Washington, D.C.

  • Nancy Hale became the New York Times’ first female reporter

  • The U.S. Army bought its first aircraft, a dirigible, but because no one could fly it except its owner, it was never used

  • The Olympic Games were played in London with the U.S. the unofficial winner with 23 gold medals

  • Thomas Edison’s Amberol cylinders, with more grooves per inch, extended the length of time a single recording would play from two to four minute

  • More than 80 percent of all immigrants since 1900 came from Central Europe, Italy, and Russia

1909

  • D.W. Griffith featured 16-year-old Mary Pickford in his films and she made $40.00 a week starring in silent movies

  • 20,000 members of Ladies Waist Maker’s Union staged a three-month strike and won most of their demands

  • A tobacconist convention protested the automobile, concerned that it would lure people away from homes and clubs and smoking would be diminished

  • The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, authorizing income taxes, was passed by Congress

  • More than 25 miners were killed in an explosion at the Saint Paul Mine in Cherry, Illinois

  • Chicago’s Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, ended her term as appointed member of the Chicago Board of Education, where she had lobbied for compulsory education and laws to end child labor

  • Milton Hershey, the father of the modern candy industry, had sales of $5 million a year making almond bars, kisses, and chocolate cigars

  • The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded by W.E.B. DuBois, Chicago reformer Jane Addams, Mary W. Ovington, and others

  • The International Ladies’ Garment Worker’s Union called a strike to protest poor working conditions and low wages

  • The Kansas attorney general ruled that women may wear trousers

  • Western women began to wear V-neck shirts, which some condemned as immoral

  • The U.S. Congress passed the Mann White Slave Traffic Act to prohibit interstate and foreign transport of females for immoral purposes

  • The U.S. Senate heard a resolution to abolish sex discrimination in the Constitution

1910–1911

  • Nationwide only 43 percent of 16-year-olds were still in school

  • Western Union abolished the $0.40 to $0.50 charge for placing telegraph messages by telephone

  • Women’s Wear Daily began publication in New York

  • U.S. cigarette sales reached 8.6 billion cigarettes, with 62 percent controlled by the American Tobacco Trust

  • Florida orange shipments rebounded to their 1894 level

  • 70 percent of bread was baked at home, down from 80 percent in 1890

  • The Flexner Report showed most North American medical schools were inferior to those in Europe

  • Halley’s Comet stirred fear and excitement, as many hid in shelters or took ‘comet’ pills for protection

  • The average man made $15.00 for a 58-hour work week and 42 percent was spent on food

  • A movement began to restrict the sale of morphine except by prescription

  • More than 10,000 nickelodeons were now operating nationwide

  • Father’s Day and the Boy Scouts of America made their first appearances

  • The concept of the “weekend” as a time of rest gained popularity

  • New York’s Ellis Island had a record one-day influx of 11,745 immigrants in 1911

  • 2,200 communities nationwide had between 2,500 and 50,000 people; in 1860 the number was 400 communities

  • Actress Blanche Sweet was one of D.W. Griffith’s regulars in the one- and two-reelers that dominated the movie industry

  • David Horsley moved his study from Bayonne, New Jersey, to the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood to establish a movie studio on Sunset Boulevard

  • The Underwood Company attempted to create a noiseless typewriter

  • The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York City aroused nationwide demands for better work conditions, a fire made deadly because the single exit door was locked to prevent the workers from stealing thread

  • A record 12,000 European immigrants arrived at Ellis Island on a single day

  • During a discussion concerning trade with Canada, a congressional group proposed to annex the neighboring country

  • The Self-Mastery Colony in New Jersey and Parting of the Ways home in Chicago were created to help the deserving poor

  • California women gained suffrage by constitutional amendment

  • F.W. Woolworth was incorporated

  • The electric self-starter for the motorcar was perfected and adopted by Cadillac

  • Marmon Wasp won the first Indianapolis 500-mile race, averaging 75 miles per hour

  • Direct telephone links were opened between New York and Denver

  • The use of fingerprinting in crime detection became widespread

  • On the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bull Run, Civil War veterans from both the North and South mingled at the battlefield site

  • Marie Curie won an unprecedented second Nobel Prize, but was refused admission to the French Academy of Science

  • 60,000 Bibles were placed in hotel bedrooms by the Gideon Organization of Christian Commercial Travelers

  • The socialist-backed magazine, The Masses, was founded in Greenwich Village, printing articles concerning “what is too naked for the money-making press.”

  • A climbing divorce rate of one in 12 marriages, from one in 85 in 1905, caused concerns

1912–1913

  • Congress extended the eight-hour day to all federal employees

  • Women composed a quarter of all workers employed in nonagricultural jobs

  • L.L. Bean was founded by merchant Leon Leonwood Bean

  • Medical schools opened their doors to women in the 1890s, but admission was restricted to five percent of the class

  • One-third of American households employed servants, who worked 11 to 12 hours a day

  • Domestic service was the largest single category of female employment nationwide, often filled by immigrants

  • Nationwide approximately 57 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds no longer attended school

  • Ford produced more than 22 percent of all U.S. motorcars

  • Oreo biscuits were introduced by National Biscuit Company to compete with biscuit bon-bons

  • A merger of U.S. film producers created Universal Pictures Corporation

  • A&P began rapid expansion featuring stores that operated on a cash-and-carry basis

  • Brillo Manufacturing Corporation was founded

  • Congress strengthened the Pure Food and Drug Law of 1906

  • The 60-story Woolworth building opened in New York

  • Peppermint Life Savers were introduced as a summer seller when chocolate sales traditionally declined

  • 5,000 suffragists marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., where they were heckled and slapped

  • Congress strengthened the Pure Food and Drug Law of 1906

  • The “Armory Show” introduced Post-Impressionism and Cubism to New York

  • Vitamin A was isolated at Yale University

  • Zippers, in use since 1891, became popular

  • Grand Central Station in New York City was completed

  • Henry Ford pioneered new assembly-line techniques in his car factory

  • A Chicago company produced the first refrigerator for domestic use

  • The first jury of women was drawn in California

  • The first federal income tax was imposed on incomes over $3,000, affecting 62,000

  • U.S. industrial output rose to 40 percent of the world’s total production, up from 20 percent in 1860

  • Camel, the first modern, blended cigarette, was produced, with a package design inspired by “Old Joe,” a dromedary in the Barnum & Bailey circus

  • A sheriff in Spartanburg, South Carolina, was tried for preventing a lynching, then acquitted

  • Teacher Bridget Peixico was fired after 19 years by the New York Board of Education when she became a mother, but reinstated by the courts, which ruled that “illness…caused by maternity (cannot be) construed as neglect of duty.”

  • The Schaeffer pen, Quaker Puffed Rice, Chesterfield cigarettes, a dental hygienist’s course, and the erector set were all introduced for the first time

1914

  • The Federal League, baseball’s third major league after the American and National Leagues, expanded to eight teams

  • Rookie baseball pitcher George “Babe” Ruth debuted with the Boston Red Sox

  • Movie premieres included The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine, Home Sweet Home, and Kid Auto Races at Venice

  • Theodore W. Richards won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work in the determination of atomic weights

  • Thyroxin, the major thyroid hormone, was isolated by Edward Kendall at the Mayo Clinic

  • Yale University opened its Coliseum-sized “Bowl” large enough to seat 60,000

  • The New Republic magazine, passport photo requirements, non-skid tires, international figure skating tournaments, Kelvinator and The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) all made their first appearance

  • Pope Pius X condemned the tango as “new paganism”

  • Former President Theodore Roosevelt returned from South America with 1,500 bird and 500 mammal specimens and a claim that he had discovered a new river

  • The writings of Margaret Sanger sparked renewed controversy about birth control and contraception

  • Chicago established the Censorship Board to remove movie scenes depicting beatings or dead bodies

  • Tuition, room and board at Harvard University cost $700 per year

  • Ford Motor Company produced 240,700 cars, nearly as many as all other companies combined

  • The outbreak of war in Europe spurred U.S. production of pasta, which had previously been imported

  • Popular songs included “St. Louis Blues,” “The Missouri Waltz,” “Play a Simple Melody,” “Fido Is a Hot Dog Now,” and “If You Don’t Want My Peaches, You’d Better Stop Shaking My Tree”

  • In college football, five first team All Americans were from Harvard

  • New York was the nation’s largest city with population of 5.3 million, Chicago boasted 2.4 million, Philadelphia 1.7 million and Los Angeles 500,000 President Woodrow Wilson declared Mother’s Day an official holiday

1915–1916

  • The United States population passed 100 million

  • Boston had constructed 26 playgrounds in the city

  • An attempt by Congress to exclude illiterates from immigrating, a bill promoted by the unions to protect jobs, was vetoed by President Howard Taft in 1913, reasoning that illiteracy, which was often due to lack of opportunity, was no test of character

  • U.S. Pullman-car porters pay reached $27.50 per month, prompting U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations to ask if wages were too high

  • Kraft processed cheese was introduced by Chicago-based J.L. Kraft and Brothers

  • Pyrex glass was developed by Corning Glass researchers

  • IWW organizer Joe Hill was executed by firing squad

  • The Woman’s Peace Party was founded with social worker Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House in Chicago, as its first president

  • The Victor Talking Machine Company introduced a phonograph called the Victrola

  • An easy divorce law requiring only six months of residence was passed in Nevada

  • D.W. Griffith’s controversial three-hour film epic, The Birth of a Nation, opened in New York, with a ticket cost of an astronomical $2.00

  • A Chicago law restricted liquor sales on Sunday

  • American Tobacco Company selected salesmen by psychological tests

  • After Mexico requested that the United States remove its troops during the Mexican Civil War, 17 Americans and 38 Mexicans died in a clash

  • The U.S. bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark for $25 million

  • Railway workers gained the right to an eight-hour day, preventing a nationwide strike

  • Ring Lardner published You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters, John Dewey wrote Democracy and Education and Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems was released

  • The Federal Land Bank System was created to aid farmers in acquiring loans

  • Popular songs included “Ireland Must Be Heaven for My Mother Came from There” and “There’s a Little Bit of Bad in Every Good Little Girl”

  • Orange Crush, Nathan’s hotdogs, Lincoln Logs and mechanical windshield wipers all made their first appearance

  • Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the country, distributing information in English, Italian and Yiddish

  • The Mercury dime and Liberty fifty-cent piece went into circulation

  • High school dropout Norman Rockwell published his first illustration in The Saturday Evening Post

  • Actor Charlie Chaplin signed with Mutual for a record $675,000 salary

  • Multimillionaire businessman Rodman Wanamaker organized the Professional Golfers Association of America

  • South Carolina raised the minimum working age of children from 12 to 14

  • Lucky Strike Cigarettes were introduced, costing $0.10 for a pack of 20

  • Stanford Terman introduced the first test for measuring intelligence, coining the term “IQ” for intelligence quotient

1917

  • Oregon defeated the University of Pennsylvania 14–0 in college football’s 3rd Annual Rose Bowl

  • German saboteurs set off the Kingsland Explosion at Kingsland, New Jersey, leading to U.S. involvement in World War I

  • President Woodrow Wilson called for “peace without victory” in Europe before America entered World War I

  • An anti-prostitution rally in San Francisco attracted 27,000 people after which 200 houses of prostitution were closed

  • WW I Allies intercepted the Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered to give the American Southwest back to Mexico if Mexico declared war on the United States; America responded by declaring war on Germany

  • The Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded their first commercial record, which included the “Dixie Jazz Band One Step”

  • The Jones Act granted Puerto Ricans United States citizenship

  • The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to: Laura E. Richards, Maud Howe Elliott, and Florence Hall for their biography, Julia Ward Howe; Jean Jules Jusserand for With Americans of Past and Present Days; and Herbert Bayard Swope for New York World

  • The Silent Protest was organized by the NAACP in New York to protest the East St. Louis Riot as well as lynchings in Texas and Tennessee

  • An uprising by several hundred farmers against the newly created WWI draft erupted in central Oklahoma and came to be known as the Green Corn Rebellion

  • Dutch dancer Mata Hari was falsely accused by the French of spying for Germany and executed by firing squad

  • President Woodrow Wilson used the Federal Possession and Control Act to place most U.S. railroads under the United States Railroad Administration, hoping to more efficiently transport troops and materiel for the war effort

1918

  • As an energy-saving measure, the nation adopted daylight saving time during the war, 150 years after it was first recommended by Benjamin Franklin

  • Girls Scouts collected peach stones which, when heated, turned into charcoal for use in gas mask filters

  • Women assembled bombs in defense plants, learned to repair cars, carried the mail, directed traffic and worked as trolley car conductors

  • The Committee on Public Information turned out patriotic press releases and pamphlets by the millions and drew upon a roster of 75,000 speakers to provide speeches for every occasion

  • Civilians abstained from wheat on Mondays and Wednesdays, meat on Tuesdays, and pork on Thursdays and Saturdays

  • Some Americans swore off any beer that had a German name, sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage,” hamburger was “Salisbury steak,” and dachshunds were called “liberty pups”

  • Labor unrest was at its most turbulent since 1890, as inflation triggered 2,665 strikes involving over four million workers

  • Inflation reached 8.9 percent, dramatically increasing prices

  • The Economic Consequences of the Peace by J. M. Keynes, Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson were all published

  • Seventy lynchings occurred in the South as membership in the Ku Klux Klan increased to 100,000 across 27 states

  • Herbert Hoover was named director of a relief organization for liberated countries, both neutral and enemy

  • Peter Paul’s Konobar, the Drake Hotel in Chicago and a state gas tax (in Oregon) all made their first appearance

  • Hockey’s Stanley Cup was cancelled after one player died and many others were stricken with the deadly flu

1919–1920

  • Boston police struck against pay scales of $0.21 to $0.23 per hour for 83- to 98-hour weeks.

  • The cost of living in New York City was up 79 percent from 1914

  • The dial telephone was introduced in Norfolk, Virginia

  • Wheat prices soared to $3.50 per bushel as famine swept Europe

  • Kellogg’s All-Bran was introduced by the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flakes Company

  • U.S. ice cream sales reached 150 million gallons, up from 30 million in 1909

  • The New York Daily News became the first tabloid (small picture-oriented) newspaper

  • Boston Red Sox pitcher and outfielder Babe Ruth hit 29 home runs for the year and the New York Yankees purchased his contract for $125,000

  • More than four million American workers struck for the right to belong to unions

  • The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 1.4 million women had joined the American work force since 1911

  • Following the 1918 strike by the Union Streetcar Conductors protesting the employment of female conductors, the War Labor Board ruled in favor of the continued employment of women

  • Southern leaders of the National Association of Colored Women protested the conditions of domestic service workers, including the expectation of white male employers of the right to take sexual liberties with their servants

1921

  • The first religious radio broadcast was heard over station KDKA AM in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  • Henry E. Huntington bought Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy and Reynolds’ Portrait of Mrs. Siddons for $1 million

  • Books included John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers; Symptoms of Being Thirty-Five by Ring Lardner; The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, and Dream Psychology by Sigmund Freud

  • The DeYoung Museum opened in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

  • The Mounds candy bar, Eskimo Pie, Betty Crocker, Wise potato chips, Band-Aids, table tennis, and Drano all made their first appearance

  • The Allies of World War I Reparations Commission decided that Germany was obligated to pay 132 billion gold marks ($33 trillion) in annual installments of 2.5 billion

  • The Emergency Quota Act was passed by Congress, establishing national quotas on immigration

  • Cigarette consumption rose to 43 billion annually despite its illegality in 14 states

  • The first vaccination against tuberculosis was administered

  • Researchers at the University of Toronto led by biochemist Frederick Banting announced the discovery of the hormone insulin

  • Adolf Hitler became Führer of the Nazi Party

  • Harold Arlin announced the Pirates-Phillies game from Forbes Field over Westinghouse KDKA in Pittsburgh in the first radio broadcast of a baseball game

  • Sixteen-year-old Margaret Gorman won the Atlantic City Pageant’s Golden Mermaid trophy to become the first Miss America

  • Literature dealing with contraception was banned and a New York physician was convicted of selling Married Love

  • Centre College’s football team, led by quarterback Bo McMillin, defeated Harvard University 6-0 to break Harvard’s five-year winning streak

  • Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the photoelectric effect

  • During an Armistice Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, the Tomb of the Unknowns was dedicated by President Warren G. Harding

  • Hyperinflation was rampant in Germany after the Great War, where 263 marks were needed to buy a single American dollar

1922

  • Seventeen-year-old Clara Bow won a magazine contest for “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” while Charles Atlas won for “World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man”

  • During his third trial, movie star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was exonerated of starlet Virginia Rappe’s murder, but not before a highly publicized sex trial

  • The self-winding wristwatch, Checker Cab, Canada Dry ginger ale, and State Farm Mutual auto insurance all made their first appearance

  • California became a year-round source of oranges

  • Automobile magnate Henry Ford, who earned $264,000 a day, was declared a “billionaire” by the Associated Press

  • Radio station WEAF objected to airing a toothpaste commercial, deciding that care of the teeth was too delicate a subject for broadcast

  • The first commercially prepared baby food was marketed

  • The U.S. Post Office burned 500 copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses

  • The mah-jongg craze swept the nation, outselling radios

  • Protestant Episcopal bishops voted to erase the word obey from the marriage ceremony

  • Thom McAn introduced mass-produced shoes through chain stores for $3.99 a pair

  • Hollywood’s black list of “unsafe” persons stood at 117

  • Radio became a national obsession, listened to for concerts, sermons and sports

  • Syracuse University banned dancing

  • A cargo ship was converted into the first U.S. aircraft carrier

  • Publications for the year included T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned and H.G. Wells’s The Outline of History; Willa Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours

  • The tomb of King Tutankhamen, in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt, was discovered

  • New York’s Delmonico’s Restaurant closed

  • The first mechanical telephone switchboard was installed in New York

  • Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld forbade his stars to perform on radio because it “cheapens them”

  • Vanity Fair reported that the flapper “will never . . . knit you a necktie, but she’ll go skiing with you. . . . She may quote poetry to you, not Indian love lyrics but something about the peace conference or theology”

1923–1924

  • The Popsicle was patented under the name Epsicle

  • Butterfinger candy was marketed by dropping parachuted bars from an airplane

  • Commercially canned tomato juice was marketed by Libby McNeill & Libby

  • The electric shaver was patented by Schick

  • A.C. Nielson Company was founded

  • Zenith Radio Corporation was founded

  • 10 auto makers accounted for 90 percent of sales; a total of 108 different companies were now producing cars

  • Hertz Drive Ur Self System was founded, creating the world’s first auto rental concern

  • 30 percent of all bread was baked in the home, down from 70 in 1910

  • The first effective chemical pesticides were introduced

  • American Mercury magazine began publication

  • Radio set ownership reached three million

  • Ford produced two million Model T motorcars, with the price of the touring car falling to $290.00

  • Dean Witter and Company was founded

  • Microbiologists isolated the cause of scarlet fever

  • Emily Post published Etiquette, which made her the arbiter of American manners

1925-1926

  • James Buchanan “Buck” Duke donated $47 million to Trinity College at Durham, North Carolina and the college changed its name to Duke

  • College football surpassed boxing as a national pastime, largely because of the popularity of “Galloping Ghost” Red Grange

  • With prohibition the law of the land, party-goers hid liquor in shoe heels, flasks form-fitted to women’s thighs, and perfume bottles

  • The Charleston, a dance that originated in Charleston, South Carolina, was carried north and incorporated into the all-black show Shuffle Along; white dancers immediately adopted the lively dance

  • The U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional an Oregon law that required all grammar school-aged children to attend school

  • When Henry Ford paid $2.4 million in income tax, 500,000 people wrote to him begging for money

  • The Methodist Episcopal General Conference lifted its ban on theatre attendance and dancing

  • Walt Disney began creating cartoons, featuring “Alice’s Wonderland”

  • Currently, 56 different companies were selling home refrigerators, with an average price of $450

  • The permanent wave, contact lenses, IBM, deadbolt locks, and the college-bound notebook all made their first appearance

  • Florida land prices collapsed as investors learned that their purchased lots were under water

  • The $10 million Boca Raton Hotel in Florida was completed

  • Al Capone took control of Chicago bootlegging

  • Chesterfield cigarettes were marketed to women for the first time

  • Aunt Jemima Mills was acquired by Quaker Oats Company for $4 million

  • Machine-made ice production topped 56 million pounds, up 1.5 million from 1894

  • The first ham in a can was introduced by Hormel

  • The first blue jeans with slide fasteners were introduced by J.D. Lee Company

  • Synthetic rubber was pioneered by B.F. Goodrich Rubber Company chemist Waldo Lonsburg Serman

  • Cars appeared for the first time in such colors as “Florentine Cream” and “Versailles Violet”

  • 40 percent of Americans earned at least $2,000 a year

  • “Yellow-Drive-It-Yourself-Systems” became popular, costing $0.12 a mile for a Ford and $0.22 a mile for a 6-cylinder car

  • Earl Wise’s potato chips were so successful he moved his business from a remodeled garage to a concrete plant

  • Wesson Oil, National Spelling Bees, and the New Yorker magazine all made their first appearances

  • Congress reduced the taxes on incomes of more than $1 million, from 66 to 20 percent

  • The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded

  • To fight the depression in the automobile industry, Henry Ford introduced the eight-hour day and five-day work week

  • With prohibition under way, the Supreme Court upheld a law limiting the medical prescription of whiskey to one pint every 10 days

  • 2,000 people died of poisoned liquor

  • *The illegal liquor trade netted $3.5 billion a year, with bootleg Scotch at $48 a case

  • The movies became America’s favorite entertainment, with more than 14,500 movie houses showing 400 movies a year

  • The United States sesquicentennial was celebrated

  • True Story Magazine reached a circulation of two million with stories such as “The Diamond Bracelet She Thought Her Husband Didn’t Know About”

  • Flues with slide fasteners were introduced by H.D. Lee Company

  • Philadelphia’s Warwick Hotel and the Hotel Carlyle in New York were opened

  • 40 percent of all first-generation immigrants owned their own homes, while 29 percent of all second-generation immigrants were homeowners

  • Kodak introduced 16 mm film

  • Sinclair Lewis refused to accept the Pulitzer Prize because it “makes the writer safe, polite, obedient, and sterile”

  • Martha Graham debuted in New York as a choreographer and dancer in Three Gopi Maidens

  • The Jazz Singer, the first talking film, made its debut

  • Women’s skirts, the shortest of the decade, now stopped just below the knee with flounces, pleats, and circular gores that extended from the hip

  • Ethel Lackie of the Illinois Athletic Club broke the world’s record for the 40-yard freestyle swim with a time of 21.4 seconds

1927–1928

  • 20 million cars were on the road, up from 13,824 in 1900

  • Transatlantic telephone service between London and New York began at a cost of $75.00 for three minutes

  • J.C. Penney opened its 500th store, and sold stock to the public

  • Wonder Bread was introduced

  • Broccoli became more widely marketed in the United States

  • Rice Krispies were introduced by W.K. Kellogg

  • Peanut butter cracker sandwiches, sold under the name NAB, which stands for National Biscuit Company, were sold for $0.05 each

  • U.S. per capita consumption of crude oil reached 7.62 barrels

  • Presidential candidate Herbert Hoover called for “a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage”

  • The Ford Model A appeared in four colors including “Arabian Sand”

  • The Hayes list of dos and don’ts for Hollywood films included licentious or suggestive nudity, ridicule of clergy, and inference of sexual perversion

  • The Al Capone gang netted $100 million in the illegal liquor trade as Prohibition continued

  • President Calvin Coolidge urged the nation to pray more

  • The post-war education obsession included a variety of “how-to” courses and books

  • A phonograph with an automatic record changer was introduced

  • Volvo, Lender Bagels, and Movietone News all made their first appearances

  • The German dirigible Graf Zeppelin landed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on its first commercial flight across the Atlantic

  • Future President Herbert Hoover promoted the concept of the “American system of rugged individualism” in a speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden

  • Three car mergers took place: Chrysler and Dodge; Studebaker and Pierce-Arrow; and Chandler and Cleveland

  • The Boston Garden officially opened

  • The first successful sound-synchronized animated cartoon, Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie starring Mickey Mouse, premiered

  • The first issue of Time magazine was published, featuring Japanese Emperor Hirohito on its cover

  • North Carolina Governor O. Max Gardner blamed women’s diet fads for the drop in farm prices

  • Bolero by Maurice Ravel made its debut in Paris

  • George Gershwin’s musical An American in Paris premiered at Carnegie Hall in NYC

  • The clip-on tie was created

  • Real wages, adjusted for inflation, had increased 33 percent since 1914

  • Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek captured Peking, China, from the communists and gained U.S. recognition

  • Aviator Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from Newfoundland to Wales in about 21 hours

  • The first all-talking movie feature, The Lights of New York, was released

  • Fifteen nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, developed by French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg

  • Actress Katharine Hepburn made her stage debut in The Czarina

  • Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovered curative properties of penicillin

  • My Weekly Reader magazine made its debut

  • Ruth Snyder became the first woman to die in the electric chair

  • Bell Labs created a way to end the fluttering of the television image

  • President Calvin Coolidge gave the Congressional Medal of Honor to aviator Charles Lindbergh

1929

  • A Baltimore survey discovered rickets in 30 percent of the children

  • The U.S. Presidential inauguration was carried worldwide by radio

  • German Kurt Barthel set up the first American nudist colony in New Jersey, which began with three married couples

  • Of the 20,500 movie theaters nationwide, 9,000 installed sound during the year to adapt to “talkies”

  • Calvin Coolidge was elected director of the New York Life Insurance Company

  • The “Age of the Car” was apparent everywhere, as one-way streets, traffic lights, stop signs, and parking regulations were hot topics

  • At least 32,000 speakeasies thrived in NYC, while the Midwest called similar institutions “beer flats,” “Blind Pigs,” and “shock houses”

  • On September 3, the stock market peaked and on November 13, it reached bottom, with U.S. securities losing $26 billion in value

  • Within a few weeks of the stock market crash (Black Tuesday), unemployment rose from 700,000 to 3.1 million nationwide

  • Following the stock market crash, New York Mayor Jimmy Walker urged movie houses to show cheerful movies

  • Coast-to-coast commercial travel required 48 hours using both airplanes and overnight trains

  • Lt. James Doolight piloted an airplane using instruments alone

  • Commander Richard E. Byrd planted a U.S. flag on the South Pole

  • W.A. Morrison introduced quartz-crystal clocks for precise timekeeping

  • Ford introduced a station wagon with boxed wood panels

  • Radio program Amos ’n’ Andy was so popular that Atlantic City resorts broadcast the show over loudspeakers

  • Admission to New York theaters ranged from $0.35 to $2.50

  • On St. Valentine’s Day, six notorious Chicago gangsters were machine-gunned to death by a rival gang

  • American manufacturers began to make aluminum furniture, especially chairs

  • The cartoon Popeye, the Oscar Meyer wiener trademark, 7-Up, front-wheel-drive cars, and Business Week magazine all made their first appearances

1930–1931

  • Unemployment passed four million

  • More than 1,352 banks closed in 1930, and 2,294 closed in 1931

  • The first analog computer was placed in operation by Vannevar Bush

  • The U.S. car boom collapsed in the wake of the Depression and one million auto workers were laid off

  • Gasoline consumption rose to nearly 16 billion gallons

  • Trousers became acceptable attire for women who played golf and rode horses

  • Radio set sales increased to 13.5 million

  • Advertisers spent $60 million on radio commercials

  • Boeing hired eight nurses to act as flight attendants

  • Fortune Magazine was launched by Henry R. Luce at $1.00 per issue

  • The University of Southern California polo team refused to play against the University of California at Los Angeles until its one female member was replaced by a male

  • Laurette Schimmoler of Ohio became the first woman airport manager, earning a salary of $510 a year

  • The fledgling movie industry now employed 100,000 people

  • Alka-Seltzer was introduced by Miles Laboratories

  • Clairol hair products were introduced by U.S. chemists

  • Bird’s Eye Frosted Foods were sold nationally for the first time

  • Unemployment reached eight million, or 15.9 percent, inflation was at -4.4 percent, and the gross national product at -16 percent

  • For the first time, emigration exceeded immigration

  • As the sale of glass jars for canning increased, sales of canned goods declined

  • Admissions to state mental hospitals tripled in 1930-1931 over the previous eight years

  • More than 75 percent of all cities banned the employment of wives

  • The National Forty-Hour Work Week League formed, calling for an eight-hour workday in an effort to produce more jobs

  • Major James Doolittle flew from Ottawa to Mexico City in a record 11 hours and 45 minutes

  • Pope Pius XI posed for the first telephoto picture to be transmitted from the Vatican, a picture that took 10 minutes to transmit

  • To generate income, Nevada legalized both gambling and the six-month divorce

  • Nearly 6,000 cases of infantile paralysis struck New York and many cities experienced partial quarantines

  • Farmers attempted to stop an invasion of grasshoppers with electrified fences; 160,000 miles of America’s finest farmlands were destroyed by the insect

  • Alka-Seltzer was introduced by Miles Laboratories

  • Chicago gangster Al Capone was convicted of evading $231,000 in federal taxes

  • New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was opened

  • Silent film extra Clark Gable appeared in the movie A Free Soul, gaining instant stardom, while Universal studios recruited Bette Davis

1932

  • Forbes magazine predicted that the number of television sets would reach 100,000, up from 15,000 in 1931

  • As the depression worsened, wages dropped 60 percent in only three years

  • Wages for picking figs were $0.10 per 50-pound box, $1.50 a day for 15 boxes; for picking peas the pay was $0.14 cents a pound

  • New York’s Radio City Music Hall, with 6,200 seats, opened as the world’s largest movie theater

  • The Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York created an interest in snow skiing

  • The Zippo lighter, Mounds candy bar, Fritos corn chips, Johnson Glo-Coat wax, and tax on gasoline all made their first appearance

  • Reacting to the depression, President Herbert Hoover reduced his own salary by 20 percent

  • The FBI created a list of “public enemies”

  • Light in August by William Faulkner, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway and Sweeney Agonistes by T. S. Eliot were all published

  • James Chadwick discovered the neutron

  • Radio premieres included “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show,” “National Barn Dance,” “The Jack Benny Program” and “Tom Mix”

  • Unemployment was officially recorded at 23.6 percent

  • Across America, 31 percent of homes had telephones

  • Amelia Earhart became the first woman to make a solo transatlantic flight

  • Movie openings included Mata Hari, Scarface, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Tarzan, the Ape Man

  • President Hoover declared: “Grass will grow in the streets of 100 cities” if Franklin Roosevelt was elected

  • The “Great I Am” Movement, promising wealth to its followers, gained popularity

  • The Federal Reserve Board’s index of production was down 55 percent from 1929

  • Baseball cards began to appear in packages of bubble gum, accompanied by tips on how to improve one’s game

1933

  • Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge began in San Francisco Bay

  • Congress voted for independence for the Philippines, against President Hoover

  • The Twentieth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, changing Inauguration Day from March 4 to January 20, starting in 1937

  • The Lone Ranger debuted on the radio

  • The New York City-based Postal Telegraph Company introduced the singing telegram

  • In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempted to assassinate President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt

  • Newsweek was published for the first time

  • King Kong, starring Fay Wray, premiered at Radio City Music Hall in NYC

  • Mount Rushmore National Memorial was dedicated

  • President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”

  • Frances Perkins became U.S. Secretary of Labor and the first female Cabinet member

  • Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, was opened

  • The Civilian Conservation Corps was established to relieve unemployment

  • Karl Jansky detected radio waves from the Milky Way Galaxy, leading to radio astronomy

  • The Tennessee Valley Authority was created

  • The Century of Progress World’s Fair opened in Chicago

  • Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony cartoon The Three Little Pigs was released

  • The first drive-in theater opened in Camden, New Jersey

  • The electronic pari-mutuel betting machine was unveiled at the Arlington Park race track near Chicago

  • The first Major League Baseball All-Star Game was played at Comiskey Park in Chicago

  • Army Barracks on Alcatraz was acquired by the Department of Justice for a federal penitentiary

  • Albert Einstein arrived in the United States as a refugee from Nazi Germany

  • The Dust Bowl in South Dakota stripped topsoil from desiccated farmlands

  • The Twenty-first Amendment officially went into effect, legalizing alcohol in the U.S.

  • The first Krispy Kreme doughnut shop opened in Nashville, Tennessee

1934

  • Leni Riefenstahl directed Triumph of the Will, documenting the rise of the Third Reich in Germany

  • Donald Duck, Walgreen’s drugstores, Flash Gordon, Seagram’s Seven Royal Crown and the term “hi-fi” all made their first appearance

  • Ernest and Julio Gallo invested $5,900 in a wine company

  • The birth of the Dionne quintuplets in Ontario stirred international interest

  • The ongoing drought reduced the national corn crop by nearly one billion bushels

  • Edna St. Vincent Millay published Wine from These Grapes; F. Scott Fitzgerald completed Tender Is the Night

  • Dicumarol, an anticoagulant, was developed from clover

  • ”Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “Honeysuckle Rose” were all popular songs

  • The Securities and Exchange Commission was created

  • It Happened One Night won Best Picture, Best Director (Frank Capra), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert) and Best Actor (Clark Gable)

  • The U.S. Gold Reserve Act authorized the president to devalue the dollar

  • Enrico Fermi suggested that neutrons and protons were the same fundamental particles in two different quantum states

  • The FBI shot John Dillinger, Public Enemy No. I, generating a hail of publicity

  • Greyhound bus lines cut its business fares in half to $8 between New York and Chicago to encourage more traffic

1935–1936

  • The Social Security Act passed Congress

  • The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act gave $5 billion to create jobs

  • Fort Knox became the United States Repository of gold bullion

  • One-tenth of one percent of U.S. corporations made 50 percent of earnings

  • Sulfa-drug chemotherapy was introduced to relieve veneral disease sufferers

  • Nylon was developed by Du Pont

  • Beer cans were introduced

  • One-third of farmers received U.S. treasury allotment checks for not growing crops

  • New York State law allowed women to serve as jurors

  • Polystyrene became commercially available in the United States for use in products such as kitchen utensils and toys

  • An eight-hour work day became law in Illinois

  • Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind sold a record one million copies in six months

  • A Fortune poll indicated that 67 percent favored birth control

  • Trailer sales peaked; tourist camps for vacationing motorists gained popularity

  • Approximately 38 percent of American families had an annual income of less than $1,000

  • Ford unveiled the V-8 engine

  • Recent advances in photography, including the 35 mm camera and easy-to-use exposure meters, fueled a photography boom

  • The population of America reached 127 million

  • Life magazine began publication, with an early claim that one in 10 Americans had a tattoo

  • New York’s Triborough Bridge opened, with a toll of $0.25

  • The National Park Service created numerous federal parks and fish and game preserves, adding a total of 600,000 additional acres to state preserves

  • Mercedes-Benz created the first diesel-fueled passenger car

  • The WPA Federal Art Project employed 3,500 artists who produced 4,500 murals, 189,000 sculptures and 450,000 paintings

  • Dust storms destroyed large portions of farmland in Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska and the Dakotas

  • A sleeper berth from Newark to Los Angeles cost $150

  • New York’s Fifth Avenue double-decker bus fare was between $0.05 and $0.10

  • Margaret Mitchell’s book, Gone with the Wind, sold a record one million copies in six months

  • The photo-finish camera, bicycle traffic court, screw-cap bottle with pour lip, the Presbyterian Church of America and Tampax all made their first appearance

  • Congress passed the Neutrality Acts designed to keep America out of foreign wars

  • A revolt against progressive education was led by Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago

  • Molly Dewson of the National Consumers’ League led a fight to gain the appointment of more female postmasters

  • The first successful helicopter flight was made

  • The “Chase and Sanborn Hour,” with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and “The Shadow,” starring Robert Hardy Andrews, both premiered on radio

1937–1938

  • The United Automobile Workers were recognized by General Motors as sole bargaining agent for employees

  • Minimum wage policy for women was upheld by the Supreme Court

  • Packard Motor Car Company sold a record 109,000 cars

  • General Motors introduced automatic transmission

  • Icemen made regular deliveries to more than 50 percent of middle class households

  • Spam was introduced by George A. Hormel & Company

  • Popular Photography magazine began publication

  • Congress’s wage-and-hour law limited the work week to 44 hours

  • Recovery stumbled, Wall Street’s Dow Jones Industrial Average fell

  • Eastern Airlines was created

  • Owens-Corning Fiberglass Corporation was incorporated to produce products utilizing newly developed fiberglass

  • High-definition color television was demonstrated

  • The ballpoint pen was patented

  • Consumption of beef and dairy products increased by three percent

  • Nylon stockings went on sale

  • From September 1, 1936, to June 1, 1937, 484,711 workers were involved in sit down strikes

  • A study showed that people spent 4.5 hours daily listening to the radio

  • Spinach growers erected a statue to cartoon character Popeye in Wisconsin

  • Seeing-eye dogs came into use for aiding the blind

  • The Fair Labor Standards Act established the Minimum Hourly Rate at 25 cents

  • The Federal National Mortgage Association known as Fannie Mae was established

  • Aviator Howard Hughes set a new record, flying around the world in three days, 19 hours

  • The March of Dimes’ Polio Foundation was created by Franklin Roosevelt

  • A Gallup poll indicated that 58 percent of Americans believed that the U.S would be drawn into war, and 65 percent favored boycotting German goods

  • Race horse Seabiscuit defeated War Admiral, earning the title best horse in America

  • Action comics issued the Superman comic

  • New York staged a World’s Fair called “The World of Tomorrow” which was visited by 25 million people

  • Fifty percent of Americans polled selected radio as the most reliable news medium, while 17 percent chose newspapers

  • Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds was broadcast, causing mass panic by listeners who thought that his story of aliens landing in the eastern U.S. was real

  • Adolf Hitler was named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year”

  • Kate Smith sang Irvin Berlin’s “God Bless America” on an Armistice Day radio broadcast

  • Disney Studios released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

  • Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town was performed

  • A toothbrush became the first commercial product made with nylon yarn as the bristles

  • Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia

  • Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling in round one of their rematch at Yankee Stadium in New York City

  • In the prior five years, 60,000 German immigrants had arrived in America

  • Movie box office receipts reached an all-time high and averaged an annual $25 per family

1939

  • World War II began in Europe with the Germans invading Poland in September and the Russians invading Finland in November

  • The Birth Control Federation of America began its “Negro Project” designed to control the population of people it deemed less fit to rear children

  • The Social Security Act was amended, allowing extended benefits to seniors, widows, minors, and parents of a deceased person

  • After the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) denied her the chance to sing at Constitution Hall because of her race, Marian Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., before a crowd of 75,000

  • Reader’s Digest reached a circulation of eight million, up from 250,000 10 years earlier

  • Despite the depression, the sale of radios continued to rise so that 27.5 million families owned 45 million radio sets

  • The Federal Theatre Project was disbanded after accusations of communist influence

  • Hollywood production code restrictions were lifted, allowing Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind to say, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

  • Enrico Fermi and John R. Dunning of Columbia University used the cyclotron to split uranium and obtain a massive energy release, suggesting a “chain reaction”

  • Paul Miller developed the insecticide DDT

  • Due to the war, Finland stopped shipping cheese to the U.S., and Swiss production took its place

  • Gangster Louis Lepke surrendered to popular newspaper and radio columnist Walter Winchell, who handed him over to J. Edgar Hoover

  • The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sit-down strikes were illegal

  • The first baseball game was televised

  • General Motors controlled 42 percent of the U.S. market in cars and trucks, and the company’s 220,000 employees made an average of $1,500 annually

  • Transatlantic airmail service, the marketing of nylon stockings, the use of fluorescent lighting, and Packard’s air-conditioned automobile were all introduced

  • The Sears, Roebuck catalogue still featured horse-drawn farm wagons, washing machines run by gasoline, and refrigerators designed to cool with a block of ice

  • Zippers on men’s trousers became standard equipment

1940

  • RKO released Walt Disney’s second full-length animated film, Pinocchio, and Tom and Jerry make their debut in Puss Gets the Boot

  • Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben discovered Carbon-14, the basis of the radiocarbon dating method used to determine the age of archaeological and geological finds

  • Truth or Consequences debuted on NBC Radio

  • Booker T. Washington became the first African-American to be depicted on a U.S. postage stamp

  • Following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill became prime minister of the Great Britain

  • McDonald’s restaurant opened in San Bernardino, California

  • In WWII action, the Dutch and Norway armies surrendered to German forces as France fell

  • President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress for approximately $900 million to construct 50,000 airplanes per year

  • The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp opened in Poland

  • WW I General John J. Pershing, in a nationwide radio broadcast, urged all-out aid to Britain in order to defend America, while national hero Charles Lindbergh led an isolationist rally at Soldier Field in Chicago

  • The U.S. transferred 50 U.S. destroyers to Great Britain in return for 99-year leases on British bases in the North Atlantic, West Indies, and Bermuda

  • Nazi Germany rained bombs on London for 57 consecutive nights

  • In Lascaux, France, 17,000-year-old cave paintings were discovered by a group of young Frenchmen hiking through Southern France

  • The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 created the first peacetime draft in U.S. history

  • The U.S. imposed a total embargo on all scrap metal shipments to Japan

  • Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican challenger Wendell Willkie to become the first and only third-term president

  • Agatha Christie’s mystery novel And Then There Were None was published

1942–1943

  • Unemployment nationwide fell to 4.7 percent from its 1933 high of 25.2 percent

  • Office of Price Administration was formed to control prices

  • A tire-rationing plan and gas rationing began

  • Paine, Webber, Jackson, & Curtis was created

  • Zinc-coated pennies were issued by the U.S. Mint

  • Florida surpassed California as the leading U.S. producer of oranges

  • Kellogg introduced Raisin Bran cereal

  • Sunbeam bread was introduced

  • Maxwell House instant coffee was included in military K rations

  • Dannon yogurt was introduced

  • U.S. automobile production was halted until 1945

  • Congress approved income-tax withholding from paychecks

  • Zenith Radio Corporation introduced a $40.00 hearing aid

  • Shoes were rationed to three pairs per year, per person

  • The sale of sliced bread was banned

  • Sale of Bibles increased 25 percent as religious books grew in popularity

  • Women’s trousers sold 10 times more than the previous year

  • Vegetables consumed in the U.S. came from victory gardens (40 percent) and gardens developed by Japanese-Americans detained in camps

  • The motion picture industry produced 80 war movies

  • Enrico Fermi secretly accomplished a controlled nuclear fission reaction at the University of Chicago; he sent a coded message to President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The Italian navigator has entered the new world.”

  • Reports of the deportation of Jews from Occupied Western Europe reached the U.S.

1944

  • President Roosevelt’s $109 billion federal budget earmarked $100 billion for the war effort

  • Rent controls were imposed nationwide

  • American Broadcasting Company (ABC) was created by Lifesavers millionaire Edward Noble

  • Russell Marker pioneered the oral contraceptive, Syntex S.A.

  • An automatic, general purpose digital computer was completed at Harvard University

  • The Federal Highway Act established the interstate highway system

  • War was costing the U.S. $250 million per day

  • The GI Bill of Rights was enacted to finance college education for veterans

  • U.S. soybean production rose as new uses were found for beans

  • U.S. grocers tested self-service meat markets

  • Gasoline averaged $0.21 per gallon

  • American Jewish Congress reported that over three million Jews were killed by the Nazis

  • Paper shortages limited Christmas cards, causing recycling of brown grocery bags and publishers to experiment with soft-cover books

  • Amos ‘n’ Andy was canceled after 15 years and 4,000 consecutive radio shows

  • Uncle Ben’s converted rice appeared

  • On D-Day (June 6) the Normandy invasion was mounted by 6,939 naval vessels, 15,040 aircraft, and 156,000 troops; 16,434 were killed, 76,535 were wounded, and 19,704 went missing

  • Nearly half the steel, tin, and paper needed for the war was provided by salvaged goods

  • Jell-O became a popular dessert substitute for canned fruit, and baking powder sales fell as women continued to join the work force

  • Horse racing was banned because of the war

  • A New York judge found the book Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscene and ordered publisher Dial Press to trial

  • Bill Mauldin’s cartoon Willie & Joe, originally in Yank and Stars and Stripes, was picked up by the domestic press and achieved great acclaim

  • More than 81,000 GIs were killed, wounded, or captured in the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last big offensive of the war

  • Because of a shortage of cheese and tomato sauce, the sale of pasta fell dramatically

  • Gen. Douglas MacArthur returned to the Philippines; his American army annihilated the troops commanded by Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya; 50,000 Japanese were killed, and fewer than 400 were captured

  • Nationwide, 372,000 German POWs were being held in the United States

  • The Dow Jones reached a high of 152, a low of 135, and unemployment was 1.2 percent

  • Victory bonds became an obsession, with actress Hedy Lamarr offering to kiss any man who bought $25,000 worth; Jack Benny auctioned his $75 violin—Old Love in Bloom— for a million dollars’ worth of bonds

  • “Kilroy was here” became the graffiti symbol of valor for GIs everywhere

  • Herr Adolf Hitler was among the citizens of enemy nations whose assets were frozen during the war; $22,666 from the sale of Mein Kampf was later used to pay Americans’ claims against enemy nationals

  • Chiquita brand bananas were introduced

  • $80 million was spent on spectator sports in the U.S. who had 409 golf courses

  • Seven laboratories refined and improved DDT, of which 350,000 pounds monthly was used by the military to spray in an effort to reduce typhus and malaria

1945

  • President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office and Harry Truman became president

  • WW II ended

  • Penicillin was introduced commercially

  • Approximately 98 million Americans went to the movies each week

  • The Beechcraft Bonanza two-engine private plane was introduced

  • The U.S. Gross National Product was $211 billion, double the GNP of 1928

  • Ballpoint pens, costing $12.50 each, went on sale

  • About one million Americans suffered from malaria

  • Tupperware Corporation was formed

  • Strikes idled 4.6 million workers, the worst stoppage since 1919

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at a post-1929 high of 212.50

  • Wage and price controls ended in all areas except rents, sugar, and rice

  • U.S. college enrollments reached an all-time high of more than 2 million

  • Ektachrome color film was introduced by Kodak Company

  • Tide Detergent was introduced

  • Timex watches were introduced with at starting price of $6.95

  • Hunt Foods established “price at time of shipment” contracts with customers

  • The U.S. birth rate soared to 3.4 million, up from 2.9 million in the previous year

  • Super glue and coats for lapdogs were introduced

  • New York State forbade discrimination by employers, employment agencies and labor unions on the basis of race, the first time in American history a legislative body enacted a bill outlawing discrimination based on race, creed, or color

  • The Boy Scouts collected 10 million pounds of rubber and more than 370 million pounds of scrap metal during the war, while Chicago children collected 18,000 tons of newspapers in just five months

  • Ernie Pyle’s Brave Men, a celebration of military heroism, sold more than a million copies; Richard Wright’s Black Boy, a memoir of black life, sold 540,000 copies

  • An RCA 10-inch television set sold for $374.00

1946

  • United Airlines announced it had ordered jet planes for commercial purposes

  • Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was published, written while he was in the Navy Medical Corps in charge of severe disciplinary cases

  • FDR’s stamp collection brought $211,000 at auction

  • Automobile innovation included wide windows on the Studebaker and combined the wood station wagon and passenger car with the Chrysler Town and Country

  • With more men returning from war, the birth rate increased 20 percent over 1945

  • Albert Einstein and other distinguished nuclear scientists from the Emergency Committee of Atomic Science promoted the peaceful use of atomic energy

  • A year after the end of WW II, the military went from 11 million to one million soldiers

  • As wages and prices increased, the cost of living went up 33 percent over 1941

  • With sugar rationing over, ice cream consumption soared

  • The National Broadcasting Company and Philco Corporation established a two-way television relay service between New York and Philadelphia

  • Blacks voted for the first time in the Mississippi Democratic primary

  • Oklahoma City offered the first rapid public treatment of venereal diseases

  • Former Secretary of State Henry Wallace became editor of the New Republic

  • The New Yorker published John Hersey’s Hiroshima

  • John D. Rockefeller, Jr., donated $8.5 million for the construction of the United Nations building along the East River in New York City

  • Family Circle, Scientific American, and Holiday all began publication

1947

  • A Gallup poll reported that 94 percent of Americans believed in God

  • Gerber Products Company sold two million jars of baby food weekly

  • A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams opened on Broadway

  • The Freedom Train, with 100 of America’s greatest documents, toured the United States

  • The American Meat Institute reported that Americans abandoned wartime casseroles for meat five nights a week

  • Seventy-five percent of all corn production was now hybrid

  • Esquire magazine promoted the “bold look” for the man of “self-confidence and good taste,” featuring wide tie clasps, heavy gold key chains, bold striped ties, big buttons and coordinating hair color and clothing

  • Bikini bathing suits arrived on American beaches

  • The American Friends Service Committee won the Nobel Peace Prize

  • One million homes had television sets

  • Gillette and Ford paid $65,000 to sponsor the first televised baseball World Series, during which an estimated 3.7 million people watched the Brooklyn Dodgers fall to the New York Yankees

  • New York began a fluoridation program for 50,000 children

  • Drive-up windows at banks were gaining popularity

  • House prices doubled, and the price of clothing increased 93 percent from 1939

  • Minute Maid Corp., Ajax, Everglades National Park, the Cannes Film Festival and the Tony Awards all made their first appearance

  • American Association of Scientific Workers urged the U.S. to study bacteriological warfare

1948

  • Nationwide, 50 cities banned comic books dealing with crime or sex, as psychiatrist Fredric Wertham charged that heavy comic-book reading contributed to juvenile delinquency

  • President Harry Truman ordered racial equality in the armed forces

  • Jack Benny sold his NBC radio program to CBS for $2 to $3 million, and the IRS took 75 percent for personal income taxes

  • A transistor developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories permitted miniaturization of electronic devices such as computers, radios and television

  • Gerber Products Company sold two million cans and jars of baby food weekly

  • Dial soap was introduced as the first deodorant soap

  • Garbage disposals, heat-conducting windshields, Nestlé’s Quick, Michelin radial tires and Scrabble all made their first appearance

  • The Nikon camera was introduced to compete with the Leica

  • 360,000 soft-coal workers went on strike, demanding $100 per month in retirement benefits at age 62

  • Dwight D. Eisenhower requested that the Democratic Party draft him as a candidate for president of the United States

  • Peter Goldmark of CBS invented a high-fidelity, long-playing record containing up to 45 minutes of music

  • Ben Hogan won the U.S. Open and was the top PGA money winner with $36,000

  • A new liquid hydrogen fuel was created that was touted as having the potential to send men to the moon

  • The Dow-Jones Industrial Average hit a high of 193

  • The United Nations passed the Palestine Partition Plan, creating the State of Israel

  • Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist

1949

  • Visas were no longer necessary for travel to many countries outside the Iron Curtain

  • The FCC ended an eight-year ban on radio editorializing, and stations were warned to present all sides of controversial questions

  • Harry Truman, surprising the pollsters, won a second term, inviting blacks, for the first time, to the Presidential Inaugural, which was telecast

  • The postwar baby boom leveled off with 3.58 million live births

  • The minimum wage rose from $0.40 to $0.75 an hour

  • Congress increased the president’s salary to $100,000 per year, with an additional $50,000 for expenses

  • The Polaroid Land camera, which produced a picture in 60 seconds, sold for $89.75

  • Following the communist takeover of China, and Russia’s development of the A-bomb, many feared an impending war with Russia

  • The United Nations Headquarters in New York was dedicated

  • Despite inflation fears, prices began to fall

  • The Dow Jones hit a high of 200, while unemployment averaged 5.9 percent

  • More than 500,000 steelworkers went on strike, which ended when companies agreed to workers’ pension demands

  • Hank Williams joined the country music program, the Grand Ole Opry.

  • Life magazine asked, “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the U.S.?”

  • The Hollywood Ten were fired for refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee if they were communists, filed suit against Hollywood producers

  • A poll indicated that women believed three children constituted the ideal family and wanted no babies until the second year of marriage, while 70 percent of families believed in spanking, and less than 30 percent said grace at meals

  • Baby-boom children reached kindergarten age and educators estimated that school enrollment would increase 39 percent the following year

  • Postwar demand for automobiles fueled a record-breaking buying spree

  • Gov. James E. Folsom of Alabama signed a bill forbidding the wearing of masks, attempting to stop raids by hooded men who whipped people, particularly minorities

  • 90 percent of boys and 74 percent of girls questioned in a national poll of HS students believed it was “all right for young people to pet or ‘neck’ when they were out on dates”

  • Lawyer Frieda Hennock was the first woman member of the Federal Communications Commission

1950–1951

  • The Korean War began

  • Congress increased personal and corporate income taxes

  • Auto registrations showed one car for every 3.7 Americans

  • Blue Cross insurance programs covered 3.7 million Americans

  • Five million homes had television sets, compared to 45 million with radios

  • President Harry Truman ordered the Atomic Energy Committee to develop the hydrogen bomb

  • Boston Red Sox Ted Williams became baseball’s highest paid player with a $125,000 contract

  • Senator Joseph McCarthy announced that he had the names of 205 known Communists working in the State Department

  • Otis Elevator installed the first passenger elevator with self-opening doors

  • Coca-Cola’s share of the U.S. cola market was 69 percent compared to Pepsi-Cola’s share at 15 percent

  • The FBI issued its first list of the Ten Most Wanted Criminals

  • The first kidney transplant was performed on a 49-year old woman at a Chicago hospital

  • Charles M. Schultz’s comic strip, Peanuts, debuted in eight newspapers

  • Smokey the Bear, an orphaned cub found after a forest fire in New Mexico, became the living symbol of the U.S. Forestry Service

  • Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook was published

  • Miss Clairol hair coloring and Minute Rice was marketed

  • M&M candy, created in 1940, was now stamped with an “M” to assure customers they were getting the real thing

  • The first Xerox copy machine was introduced

  • The average cost of a four-year college was $1,800, up 400 percent since 1900

  • The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, limiting the term of the president to two terms, was adopted

  • Univak, the first general-purpose electronic computer, was dedicated in Philadelphia

  • CBS introduced color television in a program hosted by Ed Sullivan and Arthur Godfrey

  • Lacoste tennis shirts with an alligator symbol were introduced in the U.S. by French manufacturer Izod

  • Earl Tupper created the home sale party to market his plastic storage containers directly to householders

  • Jet news magazine was launched

  • Chrysler Corporation introduced power steering in cars

  • More than 75 percent of all U.S. farms were now electrified

  • Harvard Law School admitted women

  • Nationwide 3.8 million people played golf on approximately 5,000 courses, comprising 1.5 million acres of land

  • North Korean forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, took Seoul, and rejected American truce offers

  • H&R Block, formed in 1946 in Kansas City, began offering tax preparation services when the IRS stopped preparing people’s taxes

  • Margaret Sanger urged the development of an oral contraceptive

  • The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company reported a link between 15 pounds of excess weight and dying younger than the average life span

  • Massive flooding covered more than a million acres of land in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois

  • The latest census reported that eight percent of the population was more than 65 years old, up from four percent in 1900

  • For the first time in history, women outnumbered men in the U.S.

  • Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for espionage against the U.S.

  • President Truman dispatched an air force plane when Sioux City Memorial Park in Iowa refused to bury John Rice, a Native American who had died in combat; his remains were interred in Arlington National Cemetery

  • Sugarless chewing gum, dacron suits, pushbutton-controlled garage doors, telephone company answering service, college credit courses on TV, and power steering all made their first appearance

  • Charles F. Blair flew solo over the North Pole

  • Entertainer Milton Berle signed a 30-year, million-dollar-plus contract with NBC

  • New York and other major cities increased the cost of a phone call from $0.05 to $0.10

1952

  • The Federal Reserve Board voted to dissolve the A.P. Giannini banking empire, headed by Transamerica Corporation, which controlled the nation’s largest bank, Bank of America

  • Popular movies included High Noon, The Greatest Show on Earth, and The African Queen

  • The Metropolitan Opera in New York charged $8.00 for an evening performance and $30 per seat on opening night

  • Books published included Invisible Man, East of Eden, The Natural, The Old Man and the Sea, and Charlotte’s Web

  • Vice presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon declared he was not a quitter in his famous “Checkers” speech

  • Jonah Salk at the University of Pennsylvania began testing a vaccine against polio

  • W. F. Libby of the University of Chicago dated Stonehenge in England to 1842 BC

  • Reports circulated that the U.S. had exploded a hydrogen bomb

  • Sony introduced the transistor radio

  • Songs included “Walking My Baby Back Home,” “Wheel of Fortune,” and “Glow Worm”

  • Nationwide, 55,000 people were stricken with polio, an all-time high

  • The New Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible was published

  • The U.S. Air Force reported 60 UFO sightings in two weeks

  • President Harry Truman ordered seizure of the nation’s $7 billion steel industry to prevent a walkout of 650,000 workers, but the Supreme Court ruled the move unconstitutional

  • The Today Show premiered on NBC-TV

  • Edward Mills Purcell and Felix Bloch won the Nobel Prize in physics for work in the measurement of magnetic fields in atomic nuclei

  • Mad Magazine was introduced, with a circulation of 195,000; 55 percent of college students and 43 percent of high school students voted it their favorite periodical

  • Products making their first appearance included the 16 mm home movie projector, two-way car radios, adjustable showerheads, bowling alleys with automatic pin boys and Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes

  • Fifty-two million automobiles were on the highways, up from 25 million in 1945

  • Thirty-seven-year-old Jersey Joe Walcott knocked out Ezzard Charles to become the oldest heavyweight boxing champion at 37

  • An all-white jury in North Carolina convicted a black man for leering at a white woman 75 feet away, deemed assualt

1953

  • The Screen Actors Guild adopted by-laws banning communists from membership

  • A link was made between coronary heart disease and diets high in animal fats

  • New York subway fares rose from $0.05 to $0.15

  • Nationwide, 30 million attended performances of classical music, 15 million attended major league baseball, and 7.2 million children took music lessons

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average showed a high of 293 and a low of 255

  • Per capita state taxes averaged $68.04

  • An airmail stamp cost $0.07 per ounce and a postcard stamp cost $0.02

  • All-black military units had largely disappeared, with 90 percent integrated into white military units

  • Leland Kirdel wrote in Coronet magazine, “The smart woman will keep herself desirable. It is her duty to be feminine and desirable at all times in the eyes of the opposite sex.”

  • In the McCarthyism age, libraries were ordered to remove books by “communists, fellow travelers, and the like”

  • Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz signed an $8 million contract to continue “I Love Lucy” for 30 months

  • Optimistic about peace with Korea, president Dwight D. Eisenhower restored the traditional Easter egg roll for children on the White House lawn

  • TV Guide and Playboy both began publication

  • The number of comic books exploded, comprising 650 titles

  • Nationwide, 25 percent of young Americans were now attending college, thanks to the GI Bill—an increase of 65 percent from before the Second World War

  • President Eisenhower pledged rigid economy in government, a lifting of controls, and an effort toward a more balanced budget

  • During his inaugural address, Eisenhower called on Americans to make whatever sacrifices necessary to meet the threat of Soviet aggression, defining the contest as a matter of freedom against slavery

  • Charlie Chaplin said it was “virtually impossible” to continue work in the United States because of “vicious propaganda” by powerful reactionary groups

  • General Motors introduced the Chevrolet Corvette, the first plastic-laminated, fiberglass sports car, at a cost of $3,250

  • Elvis Presley paid $4.00 to cut “My Happiness” in Memphis for his mother’s birthday

  • Russia’s Joseph Stalin died in May and the coronation of England’s Queen Elizabeth occurred in June

  • New York’s Seeman Brothers introduced the instant ice tea

  • Nearly half of U.S. farms now had tractors

  • 17 million homes had television sets

  • Four out of five men’s shirts sold in America were white

  • The DC-7 propeller plane, Sugar Smacks, 3-D cartoons and movies, and Irish Coffee all made their first appearance

1954–1955

  • The Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools illegal

  • The first nuclear-powered submarine, Nautilus, was launched

  • Gasoline averaged $0.29 per gallon

  • Texas Instruments introduced the first practical silicon transistor

  • Taxpayers with incomes of more than $100,000 paid more than $67,000 each in taxes

  • Sales of Viceroy cigarettes leaped as smokers shifted to filter-tipped cigarettes

  • Open-heart surgery was introduced by Minneapolis physician C. Walton Lillehe

  • RCA introduced the first color television set

  • The $13 million, 900-room Fontainebleau Hotel opened at Miami Beach

  • Sports Illustrated Magazine was introduced

  • Swanson & Sons introduced frozen TV dinners

  • Dr. Jonas E. Salk, U.S. developer of anti-polio serum, started inoculating school children in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  • The U.S. boasted 1,768 million newspapers, publishing 59 million copies daily

  • The U.S. population contained six percent of the world’s population, 60 percent of all cars, 58 percent of all telephones, 45 percent of all radio sets, and 34 percent of all railroads

  • Marian Anderson, the first black soloist of the Metropolitan Opera, appeared as Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera

  • Blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted segregated city bus lines, and Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up the only seat available, which was in the front of the bus

  • The first Chevrolet V-8 engine motorcar was introduced

  • The federal minimum wage rose from $0.75 to $1.00 per hour

  • Whirlpool Corporation was created by the merger of three companies

  • National Review and Village Voic e began publication

  • Crest was introduced by Proctor and Gamble

  • Special K breakfast food was introduced by Kellogg Company

  • The nation now had 1,800 suburban shopping centers

  • The number of millionaires in the United States was reported to be 154

  • New television shows introduced that year included The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Father Knows Best, Lassie, and Tonight with Steve Allen.

  • HEW Secretary Oveta Culp Hobby opposed the free distribution of the Salk vaccine to poor children as “socialized medicine by the back door”

  • Disneyland in Anaheim, California, opened

  • The first television press conference featured President Dwight Eisenhower

  • Smog and poisoned air became a public concern

  • Confidential Magazine had a circulation of 4.5 million readers

  • President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, and the stock market plunged $14 billion

  • The population explosion created a shortage of 120,000 teachers and 300,000 schoolrooms

  • Weekly church attendance comprised 49 million adults—half the total adult population

  • Jacqueline Cochran became the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound

  • Nationwide, the U.S. had 214,000 physicians, 95,000 dentists, and 1,604,000 hospital beds

  • The Chase Manhattan Bank, Sperry Rand, H&R Block, and the Dreyfus Fund all made their first appearance

  • Racial segregation on interstate buses and trains was ordered to end

  • President Eisenhower submitted a 10-year, $101 billion highway construction program to Congress

  • The AFL and CIO merged, with George Meany as president

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a high of 488, and a low of 391

  • The Ford Foundation gave $500 million to colleges and universities nationwide

  • Whirlpool Corporation merged with Seeger Refrigerator Company and began producing refrigerators, air conditioners, and cooking ranges

1956

  • The nation boasted 7,000 drive-in theaters

  • The DNA molecule was photographed for the first time

  • Teen fashions for boys included crew cut haircuts known as “flattops”

  • Procter and Gamble created disposable diapers called Pampers

  • Ford Motor Company went public and issued over 10 million shares which were sold to 250,000 investors

  • A survey showed 77 percent of college-educated women were married, 41 percent worked part-time, and 17 percent worked full-time

  • Boston religious leaders urged the banning of rock ‘n’ roll

  • Eleven percent of all cars sold were station wagons

  • Airlines carried as many passengers as trains

  • Broadway openings included Waiting for Godot, Long Day’s Journey into Night, My Fair Lady, Bells Are Ringing and Separate Tables

  • After vowing never to allow Elvis Presley’s vulgarity on his TV show, Ed Sullivan paid Presley $50,000 for three appearances

  • Midas Muffler Shops, Comet, Raid, Salem cigarettes, La Leche League, Imperial margarine and women ordained as ministers in the Presbyterian Church all made their first appearance

  • Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitched the first perfect game in the World Series

  • John F. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage and Russia Leaves the War by George F. Kennan won in the U.S. History category

  • An art canvas purchased in Chicago for $450 was discovered to be a Leonardo valued at $1 million

  • Television premieres included As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, The Price Is Right and The Steve Allen Show

  • Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev assailed past President Joseph Stalin as a terrorist, egotist and murderer

  • American colleges began actively recruiting students from the middle classes

  • Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Nonviolence is the most potent technique for oppressed people. Unearned suffering is redemptive.”

  • Hit songs included “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hound Dog,” “Mack the Knife,” “The Party’s Over” and “Friendly Persuasion”

  • European autos gained in popularity, including Volkswagens, Jaguars, Ferraris, Saabs and Fiats

  • Ngo Diem was elected president of South Vietnam

1957–1958

  • President Eisenhower sent paratroopers to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect nine black students seeking to attend all-white Central High School

  • “Beat” and “beatnik” took hold as words to describe the “Beat Generation”

  • Unemployment in the U.S. reached 5.2 million, a post-war high

  • Martin Luther King, Jr., helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and became its first president

  • Evangelist Billy Graham held a five-month-long revival at Madison Square Garden in New York that attracted more than 500,000 people

  • After 38 years, Collier’s Magazine published its final issue

  • Tennis player Althea Gibson became the first black athlete to win at Wimbledon

  • Sputnik I, the first manmade satellite, was sent into orbit around the earth by the Soviets

  • Painkiller Darvon was introduced by Eli Lilly

  • A University of Wisconsin study showed that 20 percent of Americans lived in poverty

  • New York’s first trolley car was retired

  • Frisbee was introduced by Wham-O Manufacturing

  • Per capita margarine consumption exceeded butter

  • A record 4.3 million babies were born

  • The cost of 100,000 computerized multiplication computations fell from $1.26 in 1952 to $0.26.

  • Volkswagen sold 200,000 Beetles and Ford introduced the Edsel

  • An intensive study of birth control with pills was begun in Puerto Rico

  • Fortune named Paul Getty America’s richest man, with his wealth estimated at $1 billion

  • Average wages for a factory production worker were $2.08 an hour, or $82.00 a week

  • BankAmericard credit card was introduced

  • First-class postal rates climbed to $0.04 per ounce

  • The VD rate increased from 122,000 cases to 126,000, the first increase since 1948

  • Sweet’n’ Low sugarless sweetener was introduced

  • The Everly Brothers’ song “Wake Up Little Susie” was banned in Boston

  • One in three women went regularly to the beauty shop, many for apricot or silver-colored hair

1958

  • Life Magazine’s series, “Crisis in Education,” focused on major U.S. educational problems, including poor curricula, overcrowding, and poorly paid teachers

  • The Pizza Hut chain began in Kansas City

  • Paul Robeson, denied a passport for eight years because of his Leftist comments, was allowed to tour overseas

  • The cost of college doubled from 1940 to 1958 to $1,300 a year

  • The construction of a nuclear power plant at Bodega Head, California, was stopped by a court action of environmental groups

  • Gasoline cost 30.4 cents per gallon

  • Paperback edition of Lolita sold a million copies

  • Elvis Presley was inducted into the army as No. 53310761

  • Eleanor Roosevelt was first on the “Most Admired Women” list for the 11th time, and Queen Elizabeth was second

  • SANE (Scientists Against Nuclear Energy) was formed with 25,000 members

  • Several television quiz shows were exposed for providing contestants with answers beforehand

  • Ford Motor Company introduced the Edsel

  • Unemployment reached a postwar high of 6.8 percent

  • The United States’ standing army included 2.6 million men and women

  • Kansas and Colorado were invaded by grasshoppers

  • John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society contended that materialism and conformity characterized the U.S. and argued for redistribution of income to end poverty

  • The sale of television sets topped 41 million

  • First-class postal rates climbed to $0.04 per ounce

  • Sixty-four percent of American households now had incomes above $4,000 a year

  • More than 250,000 people attended the Jehovah’s Witness Convention at Yankee Stadium

  • The Grammy award, John Birch Society, Chevrolet Impala, Sweet ’n’ Low, Cocoa Krispies, American Express, and Green Giant canned beans all made their first appearance

1959

  • To offset the rising cost of tinplate, Coors beer started using an aluminum can

  • Movie premieres included Ben-Hur starring Charlton Heston; Some Like It Hot with Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon; and Pillow Talk featuring Doris Day, Rock Hudson and Tony Randall

  • Mary Leakey discovered the skull of the 1.78 million-year-old Australopithecus in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanganyika

  • Television’s top-10 shows were Gunsmoke; Wagon Train; Have Gun, Will Travel; The Danny Thomas Show; The Red Skelton Show; Father Knows Best; 77 Sunset Strip; The Price Is Right; Wanted: Dead or Alive and Perry Mason

  • The Soviet Lunik II became the first manmade object to strike the moon

  • Rock ’n’ roll stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were killed in an airplane crash

  • Modern art was declared duty-free

  • The U.S. Navy successfully orbited a Vanguard satellite, the forerunner of the first weather station in space

  • “A Raisin in the Sun,” “The Miracle Worker,” “The Tenth Man,” “Five Finger Exercise,” “Sweet Bird of Youth” and “Mark Twain Tonight” all premiered on Broadway

  • Fiction bestsellers included Exodus by Leon Uris, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Hawaii by James Michener, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene L. Burdick, Poor No More by Robert Ruark and Dear and Glorious Physician by Taylor Caldwell

  • NASA selected the Mercury Seven astronauts: John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Virgil Grissom, Gordon Cooper, Walter Schirra, Donald Slayton and Alan Shepard

  • Perry Como signed a $25 million contract with Kraft Foods

1960

  • The National Association of Broadcasters reacted to a payola scandal by threatening fines for any disc jockeys who accepted money for playing particular records

  • Four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, North Carolina, began a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter, which triggered similar nonviolent protests throughout the southern U.S.

  • Joanne Woodward received the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

  • Adolph Coors III, chairman of the board of the Coors Brewing Company, was kidnapped for $500,000 and later found dead

  • The U.S. announced that 3,500 American soldiers would be sent to Vietnam

  • Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes received the first patent for a laser

  • The U.S. launched the first weather satellite, TIROS-1

  • Ben Hur won the Oscar for Best Picture

  • A Soviet missile shot down an American spy plane; pilot Francis Gary Powers was captured, tried, and released 21 months later in a spy swap with the U.S.

  • President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960 into law

  • The U.S. FDA approved birth control as an additional indication for the drug Searle’s Enovid, making it the world’s first approved oral contraceptive pill

  • Nuclear submarine USS Triton completed the underwater circumnavigation of Earth

  • The Soviet Union beat Yugoslavia 2-1 to win the first European Football Championship

  • Harper Lee released her critically acclaimed novel To Kill a Mockingbird

  • Presidential candidates Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy participated in the first televised presidential debate

  • Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on a table at a United Nations General Assembly meeting to protest the discussion of Soviet Union policy toward Eastern Europe

  • Black entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. married Swedish actress May Britt, causing a stir

  • Basketball player Wilt Chamberlain grabbed 55 rebounds in a single game

  • Production of the DeSoto automobile brand ceased

  • President Eisenhower authorized the use of $1 million toward the resettlement of Cuban refugees, who were arriving in Florida at the rate of 1,000 a week

  • The U.S. Supreme Court declared in Boynton v. Virginia that segregation on public transit was illegal

  • The U.S. Census listed all people from Latin America as white, including blacks from the Dominican Republic, European whites from Argentina, and Mexicans who resembled Native Americans

  • The world population was 3,021,475,000

1961–1962

  • President Kennedy established the Peace Corps two months after his inauguration

  • DNA genetic code was broken

  • New York’s First National Bank offered fixed-term certificates of deposit

  • IBM’s Selectric typewriter was introduced

  • Harper and Row was created through a merger

  • Right wing activities of the John Birch Society stirred concerns in Congress

  • Black and white “Freedom Riders” tested integration in the South, and were attacked and beaten in Alabama

  • Cigarette makers spent $115 million on television advertising

  • R.J. Reynolds acquired Pacific Hawaiian Products Company in an attempt to diversify away from tobacco products

  • Sprite was introduced by Coca-Cola Company

  • A Gallup poll recorded that 74 percent of teens interviewed believed in God, 58 percent planned to go to college, most of the 16- to 21-year-old girls interviewed expected to be married by age 22, and most wanted four children

  • 4,000 servicemen were sent to Vietnam as advisers

  • Minimum wage rose from $1.00 to $1.25 per hour

  • Canned pet foods were among the top three selling categories in grocery stores

  • The Cuban missile crisis pitted the United States against the Soviet Union

  • President Kennedy reduced tariff duties to stimulate foreign trade

  • Electronic Data Systems was founded by H. Ross Perot

  • 90 percent of American households had at least one television set

  • The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) began color telecasts 3.5 hours per week

  • Diet-Rite Cola was introduced as the first sugar-free soft drink

  • Tab-opening aluminum drink cans were introduced

  • In May, 1962, the stock market plunged 34.95 points, the sharpest drop since the 1929 crash

  • Late-night television show, The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson, began

  • Demonstrations against school segregation occurred throughout the South

  • President John F. Kennedy contributed his salary to charity

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average reached a high of 767

  • Movie premieres included To Kill a Mockingbird, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Manchurian Candidate, The Longest Day and Lawrence of Arabia

  • The Students’ Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized the freedom ballot in the South, aggressively registering blacks to vote in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia

  • Astronaut John Glenn orbited the earth three times, saying, “It was quite a day. I don’t know what you can say about a day when you see four beautiful sunsets.”

  • Popular songs included “Go Away, Little Girl,” “What Kind of Fool Am I?,” “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “The Sweetest Sounds”

  • Nine New York daily newspaper unions staged a strike that lasted five months

  • Walter Cronkite replaced Douglas Edwards on the CBS Evening News

  • Jackie Robinson was inducted as the first African-American into the Baseball Hall of Fame

  • One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Happiness Is a Warm Puppy by Charles M. Schulz, Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown, and Pigeon Feathers by John Updike were all published

  • Mariner II became the first successful interplanetary probe, confirming that the high temperatures of Venus were inhospitable to life

  • Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring stated that more than 500 new chemicals were entering our bodies because of widespread insecticide use

  • Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway

  • Inflation was at 0.4 percent, unemployment at 5.5 percent

  • Eighty percent of households had a telephone

1964

  • The first meeting between leaders of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches since the fifteenth century took place between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I in Jerusalem

  • In his first State of the Union Address, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “War on Poverty”

  • Surgeon General Luther Leonidas Terry reported that smoking may be hazardous to one’s health (the first such statement from the U.S. Government)

  • Thirteen years after its proposal and nearly two years after its passage by the Senate, the 24th Amendment, prohibiting the use of poll taxes in national elections, was ratified

  • General Motors introduced the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser and the Buick Sport Wagon

  • The Beatles vaulted to the #1 spot on the U.S. singles charts with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and launched the “British Invasion” with an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show

  • The Supreme Court ruled that congressional districts must be approximately equal in population

  • Muhammad Ali beat Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, Florida, and was crowned the Heavyweight Champion of the World

  • Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa was convicted by a federal jury of tampering with a federal jury in 1962

  • In New York Times Co. v Sullivan, the Supreme Court ruled that, under the First Amendment, speech criticizing political figures cannot be censored

  • The first Ford Mustang rolled off the assembly line at Ford Motor Company

  • A Dallas, Texas, jury found Jack Ruby guilty of killing John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald

  • Merv Griffin’s game show Jeopardy! debuted on NBC

  • The Beatles dominated the top five positions in the Billboard Top 40 singles in America: “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Twist and Shout,” “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please Please Me”

  • Three high school friends in Hoboken, NJ, opened the first BLIMPIE restaurant

  • The Rolling Stones released their debut album, The Rolling Stones

  • The New York World’s Fair opened to celebrate the 300th anniversary of New Amsterdam being taken over by British forces and renamed New York in 1664

  • John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz ran the first computer program written in BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), an easy-to-learn, high-level programming language

  • College students marched through Times Square and San Francisco in the first major student demonstration against the Vietnam War

  • Three civil rights workers were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, by local Klansmen, cops, and a sheriff

  • President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, legally abolishing racial segregation in the United States

  • At the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, presidential nominee Barry Goldwater declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”

  • The Supreme Court ruled that, in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, establishments providing public accommodations must refrain from racial discrimination

  • Cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered

  • Dr. Farrington Daniels’s book, Direct Use of the Sun’s Energy, was published by Yale University Press

  • The first Moog synthesizer was designed by Robert Moog

1965

  • Americans purchased $60 million worth of prescription weight-loss drugs, twice the dollar amount spent just five years earlier

  • “Flower Power” was coined by Allen Ginsburg at a Berkeley antiwar rally

  • Unemployment, at 4.2 percent, was at its lowest point in eight years

  • The 1,250-room Washington Hilton opened in Washington, DC

  • The U.S. Immigration Bill abolished national origin quotas

  • Avis Rent-A-Car was acquired by International Telephone and Telegraph

  • The Voting Rights Act, which eliminated literacy tests and provided federal oversight in elections, stimulated a dramatic increase in voting by African-Americans

  • America’s place in harvesting seafood fell from first in 1945 to fifth as the country became a major fish importer

  • The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut statute forbidding the use of contraceptives and eliminated state and local film censorship

  • Pope Paul VI visited the United Nations headquarters and delivered a message of peace

  • After extended hearings on cigarette smoking, Congress required that cigarette packages warn: “Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health”

  • Americans paid $7.5 million more than in 1940 for prepackaged food

  • The birth rate fell to 19 per 1,000 people, the lowest since 1940

  • Cereal packaged with fruits preserved through freeze-drying was introduced

  • Miniskirts, Cranapple, Diet Pepsi, the Sony home videotape recorder and all-news radio stations made their first appearance

  • A 150-mile commuter rail system in San Francisco and Oakland began construction

  • Kraft foods sponsored the first commercial television program transmitted between the U.S. and Switzerland via the Early Bird communications satellite

  • Production of soft-top convertible automobiles reached a record 507,000

  • For the first time since 1962, the administration did not ask Congress for a fallout shelter construction program

  • The U.S. Public Health Service announced an ambitious program to eradicate syphilis in the U.S. by 1972

1966–1967

  • Student protests against the Vietnam War began

  • Student deferments from the draft were abolished, and draft calls reached 50,000 young men a month

  • The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded

  • The largest year-to-year rise in the cost of living since 1958 was announced—2.8 percent

  • The term “Black Power” was introduced into the Civil Rights movement, signifying the rift between the pacifist followers of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s SCLC and the militants following Stokely Carmichael, SNCC and CORE

  • Taster’s Choice freeze-dried instant coffee was introduced

  • 41 percent of non-white families made less than $3,000 annually

  • New York World Journal & Tribute closed; Rolling Stone magazine was founded

  • 2.7 million Americans received food stamp assistance

  • Nearly 10,000 farmers received more than $20,000 each in subsidies

  • Annual per capita beef consumption reached 105.6 pounds

  • Burger King Corporation was acquired by Pillsbury Corporation

  • New style dance halls, like the Fillmore in San Francisco, introduced strobe lights, liquid color blobs, glow paint, and psychedelic posters

  • The Clean Waters Restoration Act allocated funds for preventing river and air pollution

  • The National Association of Broadcasters instructed all disc jockeys to screen all records for hidden references to drugs or obscene meanings

  • The U.S. population passed 200 million

  • The Rare and Endangered Species list was introduced by the Department of the Interior

  • The phrase “Third World” for underdeveloped countries gained currency of usage

  • Connection between a low-cholesterol diet and a reduced incidence of heart disease was shown in a five-year study

  • Both CBS and NBC televised the Super Bowl

  • The first rock festival was held at Monterey, California, featuring the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company starring Janis Joplin

  • Heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali was denied conscientious objector status after refusing induction in the Army

  • The United States revealed that it had developed an anti-ballistic missile defense plan against Chinese attack

  • Hit songs included Natural Woman, Soul Man, I Never Loved a Man, Penny Lane, By The Time I Get to Phoenix, and Can’t Take My Eyes Off You

  • Army physician Captain Harold Levy refused to train Green Berets heading to Vietnam in the treatment of skin disease, and was court-martialed and sent to prison

  • Coed dorms opened at numerous colleges across the country

  • Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles won a Grammy for best album

  • Jogging, Mickey Mouse watches, protest buttons and psychedelic art were popular fads

  • U.S. troop levels in Vietnam reached 225,000 and the U.S. death toll reached 15,997

  • Thurgood Marshall became the first African American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court

  • Television premieres included The Flying Nun, The Carol Burnett Show, Ironsides and The Phil Donahue Show

  • Annual beef consumption, per capita, reached 105.6 pounds, up from 99 pounds in 1960

  • Black leader Rap Brown said of the ghetto riots, “Violence is as American as apple pie”

1968–1969

  • The U.S. gross national product reached $861 billion

  • Vietnam War protests intensified across the nation

  • Richard Nixon was elected president

  • BankAmericard holders numbered 14 million, up 12 million in two years

  • Civil Rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee and riots occurred in over 199 cities nationwide

  • Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles shortly after winning the California Democratic primary

  • Responding to the King and Kennedy assassinations, Sears & Roebuck removed toy guns from its Christmas catalog

  • Automobile production reached 8.8 million

  • Volkswagen captured 57 percent of the U.S. automobile import market

  • Television advertising revenues hit $2 billion, twice that of radio

  • First-class postage climbed to $0.06

  • Yale College admitted women

  • Uniform Monday Holiday Law was enacted by Congress, creating 3-day holiday weekends

  • Nationwide 78 million television sets existed

  • Neil Armstrong walked on the moon

  • Pantyhose production reached 624 million pairs in 1969, up from 200 million in 1968

  • The average U.S. farm produced enough food for 47 people, and the average farm government subsidy was $1,000

  • Blue Cross health insurance covered 68 million Americans

  • Penthouse magazine began publication, and Saturday Evening Post folded

  • The National Association of Broadcasters began phasing out cigarette advertising

  • The U.S. began the first troop withdrawals from Vietnam, and Vietnam casualties exceeded the total for the Korean War

  • Richard Nixon’s 43.3 percent victory was the lowest presidential margin since 1912

  • Pope Paul VI’s ban on contraception was challenged by 800 U.S. theologians

  • 20,000 people were added monthly to NYC’s welfare rolls, as one-fourth of the city’s budget went to welfare

  • The Vietnam War became the longest war in U.S. history and approximately 484,000 U.S. soldiers were fighting in it

  • President Nixon announced the withdrawal of 25,000 U.S. troops from South Vietnam

  • Music concerts drew millions as artists such as the Rolling Stones, the Who, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane launched tours

  • A copy of the first printing of the Declaration of Independence sold for $404,000

  • “The Johnny Cash Show,” “Hee Haw,” and “The Bill Cosby Show” all premiered

  • Following student protests, universities nationwide either made ROTC voluntary or abolished the program

  • After weeks of debate, U.S. and Vietnam delegates agreed only on the shape of the table used when South Vietnam and the National Liberation Front joined the talks

  • Black militant defendant Bobby Seale was ordered bound and gagged by Judge Julius Hoffmann when Seale repeatedly disrupted the Chicago Eight trial

  • The popularity of paperback novels detailing life in “today’s easy-living, easy-loving playground called suburbia” skyrocketed

  • Actor Richard Burton bought Elizabeth Taylor a 69.42-carat diamond from Cartier

  • John Lennon and Yoko Ono married

  • 448 universities experienced strikes or were forced to close as student demands included revisions of admissions policies and the reorganization of academic programs

  • Penthouse magazine, vasectomy outpatient service and automated teller machines all made their first appearance

  • The underdog New York Jets, led by quarterback Joe Namath, upset the Baltimore Colts to become the first AFL Super Bowl winner

  • Robert Lehman bequeathed 3,000 works valued at more than $100 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

  • Bestsellers included Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and Penelope Ashe’s Naked Came the Stranger

  • To protest the Miss America contest, feminists dropped girdles and bras in the trash

  • Hippie cult leader Charles Manson was charged with the Hollywood murders of pregnant Sharon Tate and three others

  • The first draft lottery was held

1970

  • Pan American Airways offered the first commercially scheduled 747 service from John F. Kennedy International Airport to London’s Heathrow Airport

  • Black Sabbath’s debut album, regarded as the first heavy metal album, was released

  • The Chicago Seven defendants were found not guilty of conspiring to incite a riot, in charges stemming from violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, while five were found guilty on the lesser charge of crossing state lines to incite a riot

  • The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty went into effect, after ratification by 56 nations

  • The United States Army charged 14 officers with suppressing information related to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam

  • Postal workers in a dozen cities went on strike for two weeks and President Nixon assigned military units to New York City post offices

  • Earth Day was proclaimed by San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto

  • Paul McCartney announced the disbanding of the Beatles, as their twelfth album, Let It Be, was released

  • An oxygen tank in the Apollo 13 spacecraft exploded, forcing the crew to abort the mission and return in four days

  • Four students at Kent State University in Ohio were killed and nine wounded by Ohio National Guardsmen during a protest against the U.S. incursion into Cambodia

  • The U.S. promoted its first female generals: Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington

  • Venera 7 was launched and became the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from the surface of another planet

  • The Women’s Strike for Equality took place down Fifth Avenue in New York City

  • Elvis Presley began his first concert tour since 1958 at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Arizona

  • The first New York City Marathon took place

  • Guitarist Jimi Hendrix died in London of drug-related complications

  • Monday Night Football debuted on ABC

  • In Paris, a Communist delegation rejected President Nixon’s October 7 peace proposal for the Vietnam War as “a maneuver to deceive world opinion”

  • Garry Trudeau’s comic strip Doonesbury debuted in dozens of U.S. newspapers

  • Southern Airlines Flight 932 crashed, killing all 75 on board, including 37 players and five coaches from the Marshall University football team

  • The Soviet Union landed Lunokhod 1 on the moon—the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on a natural satellite

  • The North Tower of the World Trade Center was the tallest building in the world at 1,368 feet

  • Alvin Toffler published his book Future Shock

1971

  • President Richard Nixon ordered a 90-day freeze on wages and prices

  • First-class postal rates rose to $0.08 per ounce

  • New York Times published the first installment of the “Pentagon Papers,” a classified history of American involvement in the Vietnam War, and 75 percent of those polled opposed publication of the secret papers

  • Tennis player Billie Jean King became the first woman athlete to earn $100,000 in one year

  • The Supreme Court mandated busing as a means of achieving school desegregation

  • A poll showed that 34 percent of Americans found marriage obsolete, up from 24 percent in 1969

  • Look magazine ceased publication

  • Beef consumption per capita rose from 113 pounds to 128.5 pounds

  • Cigarette advertising was banned by Congress from television

  • Three fourths of all moviegoers were under age 30

  • Gourmet magazine circulation doubled to 550,000 in just four years as the fancy food industry continued to grow

  • Phrases “think tank,” “body language,” “gross out,” and “workaholic” all entered the language

  • The National Cancer Act was passed, providing $1.5 billion a year for research, as the president urged an all-out attempt to find a cure

  • The Supreme Court ruled that qualification for conscientious-objector status necessitated opposing all wars, not just the Vietnam War

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a record $5.5 million for a Velásquez portrait

  • The diamond-bladed scalpel was developed for eye microsurgery

  • Young women were appointed U.S. Senate pages for the first time

  • The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that companies may not refuse to hire women with small children if the same policy is not applied to men

  • The United States Public Health Service no longer advised children to be vaccinated against smallpox

  • Direct dialing began between New York and London

  • Snowmobiles, dune buggies, auto trains, and a law banning sex discrimination all made their first appearance

1972–1973

  • Nearly 30 percent of U.S. petroleum was imported

  • Dow Jones closed at 1,003.15 on November 14, above 1,000 for the first time

  • San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit System opened

  • Ms. Magazine began publication and Life magazine suspended publication

  • The Polaroid SX-70 system produced color prints

  • NYC’s 110-story World Trade Center opened

  • America’s birth rate fell to 15.8 per 1,000, the lowest since 1917

  • The average farmer produced enough food for 50 people and farm labor represented five percent of the work force

  • The median sales price of an existing single-family house reached $28,900

  • Vodka outsold whiskey for the first time

  • The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration’s budget rose to $700 million

  • By a five-to-four vote, the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment was “cruel and unusual punishment” pending further legislation from the states

  • The number of fast-food establishments increased to 6,784, up from 1,120 in 1958

  • The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to single persons

  • Congress passed Title IX, which entitled women to participate equally in all sports

  • The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Le Duc Tho, who refused the honor

  • Television premieres included Barnaby Jones, Police Story, The Young and the Restless and The Six-Million-Dollar Man

  • Space-exploring Pioneer X produced significant detail of Jupiter and its great red spot

  • The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford captured the Academy Award for Best Picture

  • Popular movies included The Paper Chase, Scenes from a Marriage, The Last Detail, The Exorcist and American Graffiti

  • A computerized brain scanner known as CAT was marketed

  • Hit songs for the year were “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” “Delta Dawn,” “Let’s Get It On,” “Me and Mrs. Jones,” “Rocky Mountain High,” “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love?” and Roberta Flack earned the Best Record Grammy for “Killing Me Softly with His Song”

  • Richard Nixon resigned the presidency of the United States and vice president Gerald Ford became president

  • The OPEC oil embargo raised the price of crude oil by 300 percent, causing shortages and long lines at the nation’s gasoline pumps

  • Bestsellers included Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, Once Is Not Enough by Jacqueline Susann, Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and I’m O.K., You’re O.K. by Thomas Harris

  • Words and phrases entering popular usage were Skylab, juggernaut, biofeedback, ego trip, let it all hang out, and nouvelle cuisine

  • The “pet rock” fad captured the imagination of America

1974–1975

  • The pocket calculator was marketed

  • 110,000 clothing workers staged a nationwide strike

  • Unemployment reached 6.5 percent, the highest since 1961

  • The universal product code was designed for the supermarket industry

  • Year-long daylight savings time was adopted to save fuel

  • 3M developed Post-it stock to stick paper to paper

  • ITT’s Harold Green was the nation’s highest paid executive at $791,000 per year

  • Time, Inc., issued People Magazine devoted to celebrity journalism

  • Walgreen’s drug chain exceeded $1 billion in sales for the first time

  • The first desktop microcomputer became available

  • The Equal Opportunity Act forbade discrimination based on sex or marital status

  • Minnesota became the first state to require businesses, restaurants, and institutions to establish no-smoking areas

  • New York City averted bankruptcy with a $2.3 billion federal loan

  • The biggest money-making films of the year were Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and The Exorcist

  • Beef consumption fell nine percent, while chicken consumption rose nearly 35 percent

  • Car sales fell 35 percent from 1973, and home construction was down 40 percent

  • McDonald’s opened its first drive-through restaurants

  • AT&T, the world’s largest private employer, banned discrimination against homosexuals

  • Time-sharing of vacation real estate was introduced in the United States

  • A record 120,000 Americans declared personal bankruptcy

  • The “typical” nuclear family—working father, housewife, and two children—represented only seven percent of the population; average family size was 3.4, down from 4.3 in 1920

  • Harvard changed its five-to-two male to female admissions policy to equal admissions

  • Unemployment reached 9.2 percent

  • The Atomic Energy Commission was dissolved

  • The Supreme Court ruled that the mentally ill cannot be hospitalized against their will unless they are dangerous to themselves or to others

  • Chrysler, and other auto companies, offered rebates to counter record low sales

  • The Brewers’ Society reported that Americans consumed an average of 151 pints of beer per year, 11.5 pints of wine, and 9.1 pints of spirits

  • Penthouse sales surpassed those of Playboy

  • The Rolling Stones tour grossed $13 million, and singer Stevie Wonder signed a record contract for $13 million

  • A Massachusetts physician was convicted of manslaughter by a Boston jury for aborting a fetus and was sentenced to a year’s probation

  • Rape laws were changed in nine states, lessening the amount of corroborative evidence necessary for conviction and restricting trial questions regarding the victim’s past sex life

  • An endangered whooping crane was born in captivity

  • TV advertisements for tampons appeared for the first time

1976–1977

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at 1,004, inflation hit 8.7 percent, and unemployment hit 8.3 percent

  • Jimmy Carter was elected president

  • Bicentennial festivities swept the nation, highlighted by ‘Operation Sail’ in NYC in which 16 of the world’s tallest and oldest windjammers along with thousands of other ships began a tour of the world’s major ports

  • Congress passed a law to admit women to military academies

  • The Supreme Court ruled that employers were not required to give paid maternity leave

  • Renowned lawyer F. Lee Bailey defended Patty Hearst, daughter of publisher William Randolph Hearst, against changes of bank robbery claiming she was ‘brainwashed’

  • President Gerald Ford ordered a major inoculation campaign against a projected swine flu epidemic

  • The repeal of the Fair Trade law prevented manufacturers from fixing retail prices

  • Colossus Cave, the first computer game, was designed at Princeton

  • The arrest rate for women since 1964 rose three times faster than the rate for men

  • Sales of bran cereals and high fiber bread increased dramatically, as consumers responded to widely published medical reports of health benefits of high-fiber diets

  • California legalized the concept of “living wills,” giving the terminally ill the right to decree their own deaths

  • The Apple computer was developed in a California garage

  • Average SAT scores dipped to 472 (math) and 435 (English) from 501 and 480 in 1968

  • One of five children lived in a one-parent home, as three out of five marriages ended in divorce

  • ABC offered the industry’s first $1 million per year contract to Barbara Walters of NBC

  • Clothier Abercrombie & Fitch declared bankruptcy

  • Mobil Petroleum bought Montgomery Ward for $1 billion

  • Balloon angioplasty was developed for reopening diseased arteries of the heart

  • 20,000 shopping malls generated 50 percent of total retail sales nationwide

  • American Express became the first service company to top $1 billion in sales

  • Li’l Abner cartoon ceased publication

  • Three major networks controlled 91 percent of prime-time audiences

  • Cheryl Tiegs, the world’s highest-paid model, earned $1,000 a day

  • 1.9 million women operated businesses

  • The U.S. and Canada signed a pact to build a gas pipeline from Alaska to the Midwest

  • Consumers boycotted coffee due to soaring prices

  • Sales of imported cars broke all records, passing 1.5 million

  • The Supreme Court reversed a New York law that prohibited the distribution of contraceptives to minors

  • The FDA banned the use of the additive Red Dye # 2 in foods, drugs, and cosmetics

  • Widespread looting occurred during a blackout in NYC and Westchester county that affected nine million people

  • Pepsi topped Coca-Cola in sales for the first time

  • 45 million people watched the highest-rated TV interview in history, featuring former President Richard Nixon on the David Frost program, for which he was paid $600,000, plus 10 percent of the show’s profits

  • The Supreme Court ruled that the spanking of schoolchildren by teachers was constitutional

  • CBS anchor Walter Cronkite helped arrange a meeting in Israel between Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin

  • Elvis Presley died, and within a day of his death, two million of his records sold

  • Men’s fashion became more conservative, marked by narrow, small-patterned silk ties and Oxford and broadcloth shirts

  • More than 400,000 teenage abortions were performed, a third of the U.S. total

  • The CB radio fad resulted in record sales

  • Generic products, pocket TVs, and public automatic blood pressure machines all made their first appearance

1978

  • Television’s late-night host, Johnny Carson, made $4 million, while Happy Days’ star Henry Winkler made $990,000

  • Alex Haley’s book Roots sparked an interest in genealogy, particularly among African- Americans

  • Fifty percent of all shoe sales were sneakers, topping 200 million pairs

  • Airline deregulation eliminated federal controls on fares and routes, as eight airlines controlled 81 percent of the domestic market

  • Legal retirement age was raised to 70

  • Gold sold for $245 per ounce

  • California voters adopted Proposition 13 to control property taxes

  • The tax code permitted 401(k) savings plans for the first time

  • Legalized gambling in Atlantic City, NJ; microchip technology in washing machines; Garfield cartoons; pocket math calculators; and 45-rpm picture disc records all made their first appearance

  • Morris the Cat, the advertising symbol for Nine Lives cat food, died at the age of 17

  • The number of unmarried couples living together more than doubled from 523,000 in 1970 to 1,137,000

  • Attracted by jobs and housing, more than 1,000 families were moving to Dallas, Texas, each month

  • Pepsico acquired Mexican fast-food chain, Taco Bell

  • The cost of a first-class postage stamp rose to $0.15 per ounce

  • The USDA warned of the dangers of nitrites in processed and cured meat products, reporting that sodium nitrite may cause cancer

  • Edith Bunker, a character on the television show All in the Family, said, “With credit, you can buy everything you can’t afford”

  • The King Tutankhamen show touring America produced $5 million for the Cairo Museum

  • Attendance for the North American Soccer League rose 50 percent to 5.3 million fans

  • If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries—What Am I Doing in the Pits? by Erma Bombeck, The World According to Garp by John Irving and The Complete Book of Running by James Fixx were all on the bestseller list

1979

  • The divorce rate increased 68 percent since 1968 and the median duration of marriage was 6.6 years

  • The Sony Walkman, a portable cassette player with headphones, was introduced

  • U.S. Trust reported that 520,000 Americans—one in every 424—were millionaires

  • Sales of health foods zoomed from $140 million in 1940 to $1.6 billion

  • Jiffy Lube fast oil-change automotive service center opened

  • Inflation was at its worst in 33 years, and prices increased more than 13.3 percent

  • The Supreme Court ruled that “husbands only” alimony laws were unconstitutional

  • Ford Motor Company acquired 25 percent of Japan’s Mazda Motor Company

  • The near-meltdown of a nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island ignited anti-nuclear fears nationwide

  • California became the first state to initiate gas rationing, creating alternate-day purchasing

  • Avon Products acquired Tiffany and Company

  • The prime lending rate at banks hit 14.5 percent

  • Massachusetts became the seventh state to increase the legal drinking age from 18 to 20

  • Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden toured 50 cities to speak out against nuclear power

  • Electronic blackboards, nitrite-free hot dogs, Cracker Jack ice cream bars and the video digital sound disc all made their first appearance

  • The play Grease passed Fiddler on the Roof as the longest-running Broadway show

  • More than 315,000 microcomputers were sold

1980

  • Yellow ribbons became a symbol of American concern for the hostages in Iran

  • The divorce rate had grown from one in three marriages in 1970 to one in two

  • The World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eradicated

  • A 10-year study correlated fatal heart disease to the saturated-unsaturated fat ratio in the diet

  • The combination of First Lady Nancy Reagan’s elegance and the wedding of Lady Diana to Prince Charles stimulated a return to opulent styles

  • Cordless telephones, front-wheel-drive subcompact cars, 24-hour-a-day news coverage and Discover magazine made their first appearance

  • The prime rate hit 21 percent, and gold was $880 per ounce

  • Supply-side economics proposed that government increase incentives, such as tax reform, to stimulate production

  • The 1980 U.S. Census reported the smallest population growth since the Great Depression

  • Dallas, M*A*S*H, The Dukes of Hazzard, 60 Minutes, Three’s Company, Private Benjamin, Diff’rent Strokes, House Calls, The Jeffersons and Too Close for Comfort were top-rated television shows

  • An eight-year Veteran’s Administration study showed Vietnam vets suffered more emotional, social, educational and job-related problems than did veterans of other wars

  • Top albums of the year included Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Blondie’s Eat to the Beat, Off the Wall by Michael Jackson and Glass Houses by Billy Joel

  • Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, reported that “passive smoking” can lead to lung cancer

  • The “Stop Handguns Before They Stop You” Committee ran an advertisement reading, “Last year handguns killed 48 people in Japan, 8 in Great Britain, 34 in Switzerland, 52 in Canada, 58 in Israel, 21 in Sweden, 42 in West Germany, 10,720 in U.S. God Bless America”

1981–1982

  • The IBM Personal Computer was marketed for the first time

  • 12,000 striking air-traffic controllers were fired by President Ronald Reagan

  • Public debt hit $1 trillion

  • New York and Miami increased transit fares from $0.60 to $0.75 per ride

  • Kellogg’s introduced Nutri-Grain wheat cereal

  • U.S. first-class postal rates went to $0.18, then $0.20

  • Sears & Roebuck bought real estate broker Coldwell Banker & Co., and a securities concern, Dean Witter Reynolds

  • The U.S. population hit 228 million

  • National unemployment rose to eight percent, including 16.8 percent for blacks and 40 percent for black teenagers

  • A court order broke up the A&T U.S. monopoly into AT&T long-distance and regional telephone companies

  • The Japanese marketed a wristwatch-sized television with a 1.2-inch screen

  • USA Today, the first national general interest daily newspaper, was introduced

  • 2.9 million women operated businesses

  • Braniff International Airline declared bankruptcy

  • United Auto Workers agreed to wage concessions with Ford Motor Company

  • U.S. Steel acquired Marathon Oil

  • The computer “mouse” was introduced by Apple

  • The first successful embryo transfer was performed

  • NutraSweet was introduced as a synthetic sugar substitute

  • 35.3 million lived below the poverty line

  • Cellular telephones (“carphones”) became available to motorists, costing $3,000 plus $150.00 per month for service

  • VCR sales increased 72 percent from the previous year; the U.S. now boasted 3.4 million units in use

  • The Rubik’s Cube tested the patience of Americans

  • Dr. Ruth began her radio talk show, emphasizing sexual issues

1983

  • Prices for computers plummeted—Timex sold a personal computer for $99.95, while the Commodore VIC 20 sold for $199—and they were used in 1.5 million homes—five times the number in 1980

  • The first artificial heart transplant recipient was Barney Clark, age 61

  • The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, inscribed with the 57,939 names of American soldiers killed or missing in Vietnam, was dedicated in Washington, DC

  • Dun and Bradstreet reported a total of 20,365 bankruptcies by October, the highest figure since the Great Depression

  • The United Auto Workers agreed to wage concessions with Ford Motor Company

  • Efforts at library censorship tripled, and books under fire included The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Catcher in the Rye

  • The computer “mouse” was introduced by Apple

  • The first successful embryo transfer was performed

  • Columbia, the last all-male college in the Ivy League, began accepting women

  • President Ronald Reagan proclaimed May 6 “National Day of Prayer” and endorsed a constitutional amendment to permit school prayer, which was defeated

  • A professional football strike cut the regular season to nine games

  • The proposed equal rights amendment (ERA) ran out of time for passage, receiving 35 of the 38 state ratifications required

  • Ocean Spray was introduced in paper bottles

  • The compact disk, polyurethane car bumpers, the Honda Accord, and the NCAA major college basketball championship for women all made their first appearances

  • Ameritech received the FCC’s first cellular phone license

  • Bestselling books included In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Megatrends by John Naisbitt, Jane Fonda’s Workout Book by Jane Fonda and On the Wings of Eagles by Ken Follet

  • Over-the-counter drug packaging became more “tamper-proof” in response to the 1982 cyanide tampering of Tylenol bottles in Chicago

  • Hit songs featured “Billie Jean,” “Every Breath You Take,” “Maniac,” “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” “Say, Say, Say,” and “Islands in the Stream”

  • Average tuition for four-year private colleges was $7,475, while Harvard cost $8,195

  • Martin Luther King, Jr. became the first person since Abraham Lincoln whose birthday was declared a national holiday

  • Worldwide AIDS cases totaled 2,678, with 1,102 deaths since it appeared in 1978

  • MTV was received in 17.5 million homes

  • A Chorus Line became the longest-running show in Broadway history

  • Following the terrorist truck bombing in Beirut that killed 239 Marines, South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings said, “If they’ve been put there to fight, then there are far too few. If they’ve been put there to be killed, there are far too many.”

  • The per-capita personal income in New York was $12,314; in Alaska, $16,257; and in Mississippi, $7,778

  • Magazines with the highest circulation were Reader’s Digest, TV Guide, National Geographic, Modern Maturity, Better Homes and Gardens, and AARP News Bulletin

1984

  • Dow and six other chemical companies settled with Agent Orange victims for $180 million

  • The California Wilderness Act passed, designating 23 new areas in 20 states

  • The Supreme Court modified the Miranda ruling to say that illegally obtained evidence was admissible in court if otherwise obtainable

  • Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, resigned after sexually explicit photographs of her surfaced in a national magazine

  • Major movie openings included Amadeus, The Killing Fields, Places in the Heart, Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, The Gods Must Be Crazy, The Karate Kid and Terminator

  • The American Cancer Society made specific dietary food recommendations endorsing whole grains and fruits and vegetables high in vitamin A and C

  • Bruce Merrifield won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing an automated method to make proteins

  • The Bill Cosby Show premiered on television featuring for the first time a professional upper middle class black family

  • The Olympics produced a record $150 million surplus after being run as a private enterprise for the first time

  • After four-year closure and a cost of $55 million, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC reopened at twice its original size

  • Androgynous rock singers such as Michael Jackson, Boy George, Prince, Duran Duran and Grace Jones captured national attention

  • President Reagan proclaimed in his State of the Union speech, “America is back standing tall, looking to the eighties with courage, confidence and hope”

  • The unemployment rate reached 7.5 percent, and stock market reached a high of 1,287

  • Television premieres included Miami Vice, The Bill Cosby Show, Murder, She Wrote, and Highway to Heaven

  • Ages of the U.S. Supreme Court justices became an issue in the national election with five of the nine justices over the age of 75

  • Sheep cloning, a woman walking in space, the Apple Macintosh, required seatbelts use, male bunnies at the Playboy Club and PG-13 ratings all made their first appearance

  • The Reagan administration threatened to withdraw aid from nations that advocated abortion

1985

  • The AMA reported that medical malpractice suits had tripled since 1975, and the average award increased from $95,000 to $333,000

  • The U.S. Army ruled that male officers were forbidden to carry umbrellas

  • Videocassette movie-rental income equaled movie theater receipts

  • “Live Aid” concerts in Philadelphia and London were viewed on television by 1.6 billion people and grossed $70 million for famine-stricken Africa

  • Highly addictive, inexpensive cocaine derivative “crack” became popular, selling for $5 to $10 per vial

  • Parents and school boards fought over keeping AIDS-afflicted children in public schools

  • General Westmoreland dropped his $120 million 1982 libel suit against CBS for its documentary alleging that he deceived the public concerning Vietcong strength

  • A single optic fiber carried 300,000 simultaneous phone calls in Bell Laboratory tests

  • Capital Cities Communications bought television network ABC for $3.5 billion

  • The Nobel Peace Prize went to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, founded by two cardiologists, one at Harvard, the other in Moscow

  • The Supreme Court upheld affirmative-action hiring quotas

  • World oil prices collapsed, bottoming out at $7.20 per barrel

  • The U.S. national debt topped $1.8 trillion

  • NYC transit fares rose from $0.75 to $1.00

  • Coca-Cola introduced new-formula Coke but public outcry forced Coke to bring back the “Classic Coke” one year later

  • Rock Hudson became one of the first public figures to acknowledge his battle with AIDS, raising public awareness of the disease

  • The words golden parachute, leveraged buyout, and poison pill all entered the corporate language

1986–1987

  • U.S. Protestants numbered 53 million in more than 23,000 churches

  • The Supreme Court upheld Affirmative Action hiring quotas

  • The U.S. national debt topped $2 billion

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 1,955 and the prime rate dropped to seven percent

  • Retailer Sears & Robuck celebrated its 100th anniversary

  • Office Depot, one of the first office supply warehouse-type stores, opened in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida

  • A supercomputer capable of 1,720 billion computations per second went online

  • The first bio-insecticides, designed to eliminate insects without harming the environment, were announced

  • Elementary and secondary schoolteachers earned an average salary of $26,700

  • Approximately 35 percent of high school graduates entered college

  • The Hands Across America chain, stretching from New York City to Long Beach, California, raised $100 million for the poor and homeless

  • Eight airlines controlled 90 percent of the domestic market

  • The Clean Water Bill passed to address pollution of estuaries and rainwater

  • A New York Stock Exchange seat sold for $1.5 million

  • The trade deficit hit a record $16.5 billion

  • Harvard University celebrated its 350th birthday

  • Fitness foods (high in fiber and low in sodium, fat, cholesterol, calories, caffeine) accounted for 10 percent of the $300 billion retail food market

  • The first open-air use of a genetically engineered bacteria, a frost retardant, was attempted on strawberry plants

  • Under a new law, three Americans became the first foreign lawyers permitted to practice in Japan

  • The stock market peaked at 2,722 in August, then fell a record 508 points in a single day in October

  • When sports coverage of the U.S. Tennis Open intruded into traditional news time, journalist Dan Rather stormed off the set and TV screens were blank for six minutes

  • The federal budget exceeded $1 trillion for the first time

  • The Last Emperor, Fatal Attraction, Three Men and a Baby and Radio Days all held their movie premieres

  • Fifty thousand people gathered at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, on the tenth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death

  • Sixty percent of American kitchens had microwave ovens

  • Forty states restricted smoking in public buildings, restaurants and schools, following the Surgeon General’s warnings on the negative impact of secondhand smoke

  • Toni Morrison’s Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; David Herbert Donald won the biography prize for Look Homeward: The Life of Thomas Wolfe

  • The last known dusky seaside sparrow died of old age, marking the extinction of the species

  • Congress overrode the president’s veto of the $20 billion Clean Water Bill

  • The phrase “couch potato” came into popular usage

  • Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, criticized the U.S. educational system and called for a return to “great books” in its attack on cultural relativism

  • Fifty-eight-year-old artist Andy Warhol died of a heart attack after routine gallbladder surgery

  • Ansell America became the first condom manufacturer to advertise on television

  • Professional baseball player Mark McGwire set a rookie home run record at 49

  • The Supreme Court ruled that states may require all-male private clubs to admit women

1988

  • Black teenager Tawana Brawley gained national publicity when she claimed she was raped by a group of white men; a grand jury found no evidence of the charges and called her advisors, including Al Sharpton, “unethical”

  • Ninety percent of major corporations reported sexual harassment complaints

  • Former chief aid Donald Regan claimed that Nancy Reagan used astrology to plan her husband’s activities

  • Women accounted for nearly half of all graduating accountants, one third of MBAs and one quarter of lawyers

  • American lawyers’ salary averaged $914 a week, nurses $516, and secretaries $299

  • Robots were used for picking fruit

  • Fundamentalists picketed The Last Temptation of Christ, but the film was an unexpected financial success

  • Professional heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson’s fight with Michael Spinks produced a $40 million gate, and Spinks was knocked out in one round

  • U.S. auto makers produced 13 million cars and trucks

  • Harvard scientists obtained the first animal patent for a genetically engineered mouse with immune properties

  • The Eight-Week Cholesterol Cure, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Trump: The Art of the Deal and Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive were all bestsellers

  • Philip Morris bought Kraft for $12.9 billion

  • Scientific experiments on the Shroud of Turin indicated that it dated from the Middle Ages, not from the time of Christ’s death

  • Pulitzer Prize for history was awarded to Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963

1989

  • Television’s top programs included Roseanne, The Cosby Show, Cheers, A Different World, Dear John, The Wonder Years and Golden Girls

  • Congress passed $166 billion legislation to bail out the savings and loan industry

  • Cocaine and crack cocaine use was up 35 percent over 1985

  • Sony of Japan purchased Columbia Pictures, sparking comments of Japan invading Hollywood

  • Demonstrators at Tiananmen Square carried a Styrofoam Statue of Liberty as part of the protest against the Chinese government

  • Scientists speculated that the New World Peruvian architecture could be as old as the Egyptian pyramids

  • The movie Batman grossed $250 million, the fifth-highest in movie history

  • Field of Dreams; When Harry Met Sally; Glory; Driving Miss Daisy; Sex, Lies and Videotape; and Roger and Me premiered at movie theaters

  • Calvin Klein’s lean and refined look, with soft fabrics and little or no jewelry predominated women’s fashion

  • The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein won both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize

  • Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti banned ballplayer Pete Rose from playing baseball for life for allegedly betting on games

  • The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker, The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking were bestsellers

  • In Chicago, U.S. veterans protested at the Art Institute where the American flag was draped on the floor

  • “Wind Beneath My Wings” by Bette Midler won a Grammy Award for best song

  • Top singles for the year included “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison, “Miss You Much” by Janet Jackson, “Girl, You Know Its True” by Milli Vanilli and “Love Shack” by the B-52’s

1990

  • The Food and Drug Administration approved a low-calorie fat substitute

  • Gross national product fell after eight years of growth, while housing values plummeted and consumer confidence shrank

  • The Hubble space telescope was launched into orbit

  • First appearances included McDonald’s in Moscow; car models Infiniti, Saturn, and Lexus; gender-specific disposable diapers; caller ID systems; and the contraceptive implant Norplant

  • Census data showed that 25 percent of the population were members of a minority group, with Asians and Pacific Islanders the fastest-growing minorities

  • Dieting became a $33 billion industry

  • John J. Audubon’s book, Birds of America, sold for $3.96 million at auction

  • Television premieres included The Simpsons, Law and Order, Twin Peaks and Seinfeld

  • Women constituted 11 percent of U.S. military troops, up from three percent in 1973

  • An EPA report claimed that 3,800 people died annually from second-hand smoke

  • The timber industry of the Pacific Northwest was outraged when the northwest spotted owl was declared an endangered species

  • Dances with Wolves was named the Academy Awards’ best picture; Pretty Woman, Total Recall, Goodfellas and Home Alone were also released

  • The stock market hit a high of 2,999.75, inflation was at 5.4 percent and unemployment at 6.1 percent

  • Both President Bush and Premier Gorbachev called for Iraqi withdrawal following its invasion of Kuwait

1991

  • Allied forces attacked Iraq with 2,232 tons of explosives the first day, the largest strike in history, at the beginning of the Gulf War

  • The economy officially went into a recession for the first time since 1982

  • A record 23,300 homicides were reported nationwide

  • Arlette Schweitzer, 42, acted as surrogate mother for her daughter who was born without a uterus, giving birth to her own grandchildren—twins

  • Single parents rose 41 percent from 1980, while the number of unmarried couples living together was up 80 percent

  • One quarter of all newborns were born to single women

  • Michael Jackson signed a $1.1 billion multi-year contract with Sony

  • First-class postage increased from $0.25 to $0.29

  • The U.S. trade deficit hit an eight-year low

  • First marriage median age was 26.3 years for men and 24.1 years for women

  • Cartoon character Blondie, wife of Dagwood Bumstead, announced her need for a career

  • The U.S. Supreme Court ended forced busing, originally ordered to end racial segregation

  • Congress approved family leave, allowing up to 12 weeks for family emergencies

  • Airlines Eastern and Pan Am went into bankruptcy, with Delta taking over most Pan Am routes and becomming the leading carrier

  • The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to spur the economy

  • A single sheet of the first printing of the Declaration of Independence, bought at a flea market in the backing of a $4.00 painting, was sold for $2,420,000

  • School violence escalated, and 25 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks said they feared being attacked in school

  • Walter H. Annenberg bequeathed his $1 billion art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

  • Scarlett, Alexandra Ripley’s sequel to Gone with the Wind, sold a record 250,000 copies in one day

  • Simon LeVay’s study showed anatomical hypothalamic differences in gay and heterosexual men, lending credibility to the biological origin of sexual orientation

  • General Motors announced plans to close more than 20 plants over several years, eliminating more than 70,000 jobs

  • Motorola introduced the 7.7-ounce cellular telephone

1992

  • Unemployment topped 7.1 percent, the highest in five years

  • U.S. bombed Iraq for its failure to comply with United Nations-sponsored inspections

  • The 10 most popular television shows were 60 Minutes; Roseanne; Murphy Brown; Cheers; Home Improvement; Designing Women; Coach; Full House; Murder, She Wrote; and Unsolved Mysteries

  • David Letterman was paid $16 million to move to CBS, opposite late-night host Jay Leno; Johnny Carson’s last night as host of The Tonight Show drew a record 55 million viewers

  • Bestsellers included Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be, H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s It Doesn’t Take a Hero, John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief and Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief

  • The Supreme Court ruled that cross-burning is protected under the First Amendment, and that prayer at public school graduations is unconstitutional

  • Royalties for Barbara and George Bush’s dog’s autobiography, Millie’s Book, earned them $890,000

  • In Kenya, Meave Leakey discovered the oldest hominid fossil to date, estimated to be 25 million years old and believed to be from the period of the ape-human divergence

  • Movie openings included Unforgiven, The Crying Game, Scent of a Woman, Malcolm X, Aladdin, Sister Act, Basic Instinct, The Last of the Mohicans, A River Runs Through It and White Men Can’t Jump

  • Rudolph Marcus won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his theory of electron-transfer reactions

  • Eric Clapton won a Grammy award for his record “Tears in Heaven” and his album, “Unplugged”

  • Poverty rose to 14.2 percent, the highest level since 1983

  • At the Olympic Summer Games in Barcelona, the U.S. basketball team included Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan

  • More than 20,000 people in California bought guns after the Los Angeles riots, which erupted when the men accused of beating Rodney King were acquitted

  • In Washington, DC, more than 500,000 people marched for abortion rights

  • New-age clear beverages, mega CD video games, The Mall of America and the Intel 486 chip made their first appearance

  • Research indicated that the level of HDL, or good cholesterol, may be more important than the overall blood cholesterol score

  • The FDA restricted the use of silicone-gel breast implants for reconstructive purposes

1993

  • A bomb blast injured hundreds in the World Trade Center bombing in New York City, and Mohammed A. Salameh was arrested for the bombing when he attempted to reclaim his $400 car rental deposit

  • Major League baseball owners announced new initiatives on minority hiring

  • Law enforcement agents raided a religious cult in Waco, Texas, igniting a storm of protests

  • U.S. pledged $1.6 billion in aid to assist in Russian reforms

  • An Oregon law permitted physician-assisted suicide

  • Michigan’s Dr. Jack Kevorkian was jailed twice for assisting patients’ suicides

  • President Bill Clinton promised “universal health coverage” comparable to that of Fortune 500 companies, designed to help the 64 million who lacked adequate coverage

  • Women received combat roles in aerial and naval warfare

  • Civil rights advocate Ruth Bader Ginsburg was named to the U.S. Supreme Court

  • Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing movie of all time

  • IBM announced an $8.9 billion restructuring, and eliminated 60,000 jobs

  • President Clinton supported easing a ban on homosexuals in the military

  • Statistics showed that one of three American workers were in their job less than a year, and almost two out of three less than five years

  • The brown Brownie uniform changed after 66 years to include pastel tops, culotte jumpers, and floral print vests

  • The inflation rate remained at 2.7 percent, the lowest in seven years

  • The U.S. began testing of the French abortion pill RU-486

  • Cosmologists discovered that stars and other observable matter occupied less than 10 percent of the universe

  • Sears & Robuck ended its mail-order catalog business

  • Thirty-year mortgages dropped to 6.7 percent, the lowest in 25 years

  • The Ford Taurus topped the Honda Accord in total car sales

  • The Pentium processor, one-pound personal digital assistant, and Mighty Max Toby Terrier all made their first appearances

1994

  • The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was established

  • Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the right leg by an assailant, under orders from figure skating rival Tonya Harding’s ex-husband

  • The Superhighway Summit was held at UCLA, the first conference to discuss the growing information superhighway

  • President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed the Kremlin Accords, stopping preprogrammed aiming of nuclear missiles toward each country’s targets, and also provided for the dismantling of the nuclear arsenal in Ukraine

  • In South Carolina, Shannon Faulkner became the first female cadet to attend The Citadel, although soon dropped out

  • Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of the 1963 murder of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers

  • Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream was stolen in Oslo

  • Aldrich Ames and his wife were charged with spying for the Soviet Union by the U.S. Department of Justice

  • In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that parodies of an original work are generally covered by the doctrine of fair use

  • Schindler’s List won seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director at the 66th Academy Awards, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg

  • The journal Nature reported the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull

  • Kurt Cobain, songwriter and front man for the band Nirvana, was found dead, apparently of a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound

  • The Red Cross estimated that hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had been killed in the Rwanda massacre

  • Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president

  • Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered outside the Simpson home in Los Angeles, California and football great O.J. Simpson was charged in the killings

  • President Clinton signed the Assault Weapons Ban, which banned the manufacture of new weapons with certain features for a period of 10 years

  • The first version of Web browser Netscape Navigator was released

1995–1996

  • The Supreme Court ruled that only a constitutional amendment can enforce term limits on Congress

  • 25 percent of Americans continued to smoke cigarettes despite health warnings

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at 5,216 and unemployment was at 5.6 percent

  • Casual Fridays were introduced at the workplace

  • After 130 years, Mississippi lawmakers ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery

  • The FBI reported another sharp decline in crime rates

  • President Bill Clinton’s approval rating surpassed 50 percent for the first time

  • About 55 percent of women provided half or more of household income

  • The Centers for Disease Control reported a leveling-off of teen sexual activity, and that 52.8 percent used condoms

  • New York became the 38th state to reinstate capital punishment

  • Ford sold more trucks than cars, as demand for light trucks, minivans and sports utility vehicles, increased in urban and rural areas

  • Mars released a blue M&M candy for the first time

  • The 25th anniversary of Earth Day was celebrated

  • Dow Corning declared bankruptcy after failure of its silicone breast device

  • The U.S. banned the manufacture of freon because of its effect on the ozone layer

  • Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein decreed economic austerity measures to cope with soaring inflation and widespread shortages caused by U.N. sanctions

  • President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, engaged in sexual encounters at the White House

  • The U.S. Army disclosed that it had 30,000 tons of chemical weapons stored in Utah, Alabama, Maryland, Kentucky, Indiana, Arkansas, Colorado and Oregon

  • Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine followers were handed long prison sentences for plotting to blow up New York-area landmarks

  • France detonated its sixth and most powerful nuclear bomb

  • New protease-blocking drugs were shown to be effective in combating AIDS

  • Congress voted overwhelmingly to rewrite the 61-year-old Communications Act, freeing the television, telephone and home computer industries to jump into each other’s fields

  • World chess champion Garry Kasparov beat IBM supercomputer “Deep Blue,” winning a six-game match in Philadelphia

  • The Space Telescope Science Institute announced that photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed the existence of a “black hole” equal to the mass of two billion suns

  • Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill won best rock album and album of the year at the Grammy Awards

  • Dr. Jack Kevorkian was acquitted of assisted suicide for helping two suffering patients kill themselves

  • Liggett became the first tobacco company to acknowledge that cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer

  • The first of the Nixon White House tapes concerning Watergate were released

  • Nevada’s governor designated a 98-mile stretch of Route 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway

  • The Senate passed an immigration bill to tighten border controls, make it tougher for illegal immigrants to get U.S. jobs, and curtail legal immigrants’ access to social services

  • Guatemala’s leftist guerrillas and the government signed an accord to end 35 years of civil war

  • The federal government set aside 3.9 million acres in California, Oregon and Washington state for the endangered marbled murrelet

1997

  • Despite a one-day plunge of 554 points, the stock market soared, up 20 percent for the third straight year, and job creation continued

  • Princess Diana’s death generated more press coverage than any event in the century as millions watched her televised funeral

  • Controversy erupted over allegations that large contributors were invited by President Bill Clinton to stay overnight in the White House Lincoln Bedroom

  • Oprah Winfrey launched a highly successful book club on her television program to encourage reading

  • The price of personal computers (Compaq, Hewlett Packard, IBM) fell below $1,000

  • Jerry Seinfeld announced the last season for his television show, Seinfeld, despite a $5 million-per-episode offer to continue

  • Violent crime in NYC dropped by 38 percent; the 981 homicides was the lowest since 1968

  • Microsoft came under antitrust scrutiny for insisting that its Internet browser was intrinsic to its Windows 95 product

  • The newest Barbie doll featured a larger waistline, smaller breasts, more modest clothing, and a friend in a wheelchair

  • The leading tobacco companies made a $368 billion settlement with the states to settle smoking death claims

  • Scottish researchers announced the cloning of an adult mammal, a sheep named Dolly

  • Severe asthma, common in poor urban areas, was linked to cockroaches

  • President Clinton gained line-item veto power for the first time

  • Affirmative Action programs, designed to aid minorities, came under attack

  • Digital cameras, DVD players, voice recognition software, and prosthetic knee joints all made their first appearances

1998

  • The Dow Jones reached 9,374, and inflation was at 1.6 percent

  • The undergraduate tuition at Harvard reached $22,802

  • President Bill Clinton was impeached

  • Gotham: A History of New York to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows won the Pulitzer Prize for U.S. History

  • Welfare recipients dropped below four percent, the lowest in 25 years, and unemployment, interest rates, murders, juvenile arrests, births to unwed mothers, infant mortality, and gas prices also fell to 25 to 35 year lows

  • Government-measured rates of obesity targeted 50 percent of the population

  • Biotechnological stocks showed long anticipated potential, increasing 44 percent

  • Major efforts were begun to avert the potential catastrophic “Y2K” blackout when computers may misread the year 2000 as 1900

  • The South Carolina legislature approved a constitutional amendment to remove 103-year-old language that made marriages between blacks and whites illegal

  • The IRS Reform Bill shifted the burden of proof from the taxpayer to the IRS

  • 17 major newspapers called for President Bill Clinton’s resignation after he admitted a sexual relationship with a White House intern

  • Titanic was the highest grossing film in history at $850 million

  • Tobacco companies made a $260 billion settlement with states for smoking-related illnesses

1999

  • The U.S. claimed 274 of the world’s 590 billionaires worldwide

  • Of the original 30 companies in the 1896 Dow Jones Industrial Index, only General Electric survived the Great Depression, two world wars and the terms of 20 U.S. presidents

  • Worth magazine declared Jupiter Island, Florida, the most expensive town in the country, whose median home price was $3.9 million

  • The average American woman was 5’4”, weighed 142 pounds and was a size 12

  • The top one percent of earners in America had an average net worth of $5.5 million

  • The annual reunion of Thomas Jefferson’s descendents included the descendents of those who claimed their parents were Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings

  • NATO’s mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade caused further deterioration of U.S. and Chinese relations

  • A series of fatal shootings at high schools across the country revived the gun-control debate and prompted many to call for mandatory background checks for gun purchases

  • AIDS-related deaths fell nearly 50 percent

  • The Modern Library’s “100 Best Novels of the Century” list included Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Lolita, Brave New World, The Sound and the Fury and Catch-22

  • Viagra, for male erectile dysfunction, sold at a record rate of $10 a pill

  • China announced that it had developed on its own the ability to make neutron bombs and miniature atomic weapons

2000

  • Millennium celebrations were held throughout the world despite fears of major computer failures from the "Y2K" bug, fears that proved largely unwarranted

  • America Online was bought out by Time Warner for $162 billion in the largest-ever corporate merger

  • Charles Schulz, creator of the comic strip Peanuts, died at the age of 77

  • President Bill Clinton proposed a $2 billion program to bring Internet access to low-income houses

  • The Russian submarine K-141 Kursk sank in the Barents Sea, killing the 118 sailors on board

  • The U.S. Supreme Court gave police broad authority to stop and question people who run from a police officer

  • The International Whaling Commission turned down requests from Japan and Norway to allow expanded whaling

  • The Millennium Summit among world leaders was held at the United Nations

  • President Bill Clinton created the Giant Sequoia National Monument to protect 328,000 California acres of trees from timber harvesting

  • Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by tying its Internet browser to its operating system

  • George W. Bush was declared the winner of the presidential race in a highly controversial election against Al Gore

  • The female-oriented television cable channel Oxygen made its debut

  • Carlos Santana won eight Grammy awards, including Album of the Year for Supernatural

2001

  • U.S. golf courses increased from 13,353 in 1986 to 17,701

  • Unmarried couples heading U.S. households increased from 3.2 million in 1990 to 5.5 million in 2000

  • Typical set of childhood vaccinations cost $385, up from $10 in 1971

  • Education reform was approved, requiring annual standardized tests in grades three through eight by 2005-6

  • Former President Jimmy Carter was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize

  • The War Against Terrorism legislation, authorizing the president to use force against those who perpetrated or assisted in the September 11 attacks, passed the House and Senate without objection

  • A letter containing the dangerous infection anthrax was mailed to Senator Tom Daschle’s office, after which the Senate Office Building was closed for three months

  • Unemployment stood at nearly six percent, up from 3.9 percent a year earlier

  • The USA PATRIOT Act expanded the powers of the police to wiretap telephones, monitor Internet and e-mail use, and search the homes of suspected terrorists

  • President George W. Bush said during his 2002 State of the Union address: "States like those (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, aiming to threaten the peace of the world"

  • Enron, a $50 billion energy-trading company, became the largest U.S. company to file for bankruptcy

  • The Dow-Jones Industrial Average reached a high of 11,337, and a low of 8,235

  • The much-anticipated movie version of the book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone grossed $150 million in five days

  • China was formally granted permanent normal trade status, reversing a 20-year policy of requiring an annual review for the country to expand its human rights activities

  • U.S. forces continued to search for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden

  • The United States withdrew from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, thereby allowing the military to test and deploy missile-defense systems without restraints

2003

  • Surveys indicated that 80 percent of Americans were unwilling to sacrifice taste for more healthy foods

  • Iraq’s oil ministry, which produced 3.5 million barrels of oil a day only five years ago, produced only five percent of that number

  • School districts dominated by blacks and Hispanics spent $902 less per student on average than mostly white school districts

  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix sold 5 million copies in the first week of publication

  • Surveys showed that 40 percent of all U.S. e-mail was spam

  • Thanks in part to file swapping, the sale of CDs was down 20 percent from the year 2000

  • Surveys indicated that 83 percent of children believed they would go to college, 68 percent thought they would get married, and 12 percent thought they would join the armed forces

  • Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas, killing all seven astronauts on board

  • More than 10 million people in over 600 cities worldwide protested the planned invasion of Iraq by the United States

  • An American businessman was admitted to the Vietnam France Hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam, with the first identified case of the SARS epidemic, and both patient and doctor died of the disease

  • The journal Nature reported that 350,000-year-old upright-walking human footprints had been found in Italy

  • The Iraq War began with the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and U.S. forces quickly seized control of Baghdad, ending the regime of Saddam Hussein

  • Syracuse (New York) won the college basketball National Championship

  • The Human Genome Project was completed, with 99 percent of the human genome sequenced to 99.99 percent accuracy

  • Pen Hadow became the first person to walk alone, without outside help, from Canada to the North Pole

  • Eric Rudolph, the suspect in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in 1996, was captured in Murphy, North Carolina

  • Martha Stewart and her broker were indicted for using privileged investment information and then obstructing a federal investigation, causing Stewart to resign as chairperson and chief executive officer of Martha Stewart Living

  • The Spirit of Butts Farm completed the first flight across the Atlantic by a computer-controlled model aircraft; the flight set two world records for a model aircraft-for duration (38 hours, 53 minutes) and for non-stop distance (1,883 statute miles)

  • The Concorde made its last scheduled commercial flight

  • The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Affirmative Action in university admissions and declared sodomy laws unconstitutional

  • Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma approved a new constitution re-designating the tribe "Cherokee Nation" without "of Oklahoma" and specifically disenfranchising the Cherokee Freedmen

  • The Florida Marlins defeated the New York Yankees to win their second World Series title

2004

  • Pakistani scientists admitted giving Libya, Iran and North Korea the technology to build nuclear weapons

  • The U.S. required international travelers to be fingerprinted and photographed before entering the country

  • President George W. Bush proposed a plan the would allow illegal immigrants working in the United States to apply for temporary guest worker status and increase the number of green cards granted each year

  • Paul O’Neill, former treasury secretary, told TV news program 60 Minutes that the Bush administration had been planning an attack against Iraq since the first days of Bush’s presidency

  • Two NASA Rovers landed on Mars and sent back spectacular images of the planet

  • The Salvation Army reported that Joan Kroc, heir to the McDonald’s fortune, had left the nonprofit entity $1.5 billion

  • A computer worm, called MyDoom or Novarg, spread through Internet servers, infecting one in 12 e-mail messages

  • Terrorists exploded at least 10 bombs on four commuter trains in Madrid, Spain, during rush hour, killing 202 people and wounding 1,400

  • The California Supreme Court ordered San Francisco to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples

  • NASA reported the discovery of a distant object in our solar system that closely resembled a planet

  • The Bush administration admitted that it failed to give the commission investigating the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks thousands of pages of national security papers

  • President Bush said in a national broadcast that to abandon Iraq would fuel anti-American sentiment around the world

  • Several hundred thousand demonstrators gathered in Washington, DC, to protest the Bush administration’s policy on reproductive rights

  • The popular search engine Google went public

  • A federal judge in San Francisco said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act was unconstitutional because it lacked a medical exception to save a woman’s life, and placed an unnecessary burden on women who sought abortions

  • United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said the war in Iraq was illegal and violated the U.N. charter

  • The International Committee of the Red Cross found that military personnel used physical and psychological abuse at the Guantanamo prison in Cuba that was "tantamount to torture"

2005

  • Deep Impact was launched from Cape Canaveral by a Delta 2 rocket

  • The Huygens probe landed on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn

  • George W. Bush was inaugurated in Washington, DC, for his second term as the forty-third president of the United States

  • The Kyoto Protocol went into effect, without the support of the U.S. and Australia

  • The People’s Republic of China ratified an anti-secession law, aimed at preventing Taiwan from declaring independence

  • Pope John Paul II died, prompting over four million mourners to travel to the Vatican

  • The first thirteenth root calculation of a 200-digit number was computed mentally by Frenchman Alexis Lemaire

  • Demonstrators marched through Baghdad denouncing the U.S. occupation of Iraq, two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and rallied in the square where his statue had been toppled in 2003

  • Pope Benedict XVI succeeded Pope John Paul II, becoming the 265th pope

  • The Superjumbo jet aircraft Airbus A380 made its first flight from Toulouse

  • The Provisional IRA issued a statement formally ordering an end to the armed campaign it had pursued since 1969, and ordering all its units to dump their arms

  • The largest UN World Summit in history was held in New York City

  • Cartoons that included depictions of Muhammad printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten triggered Islamic protests and death threats

  • The second Chinese spacecraft, Shenzhou 6, was launched, carrying Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng for five days in orbit

  • Scientists announced that they had created mice with small amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of neurological disorders

  • Another second was added, 23:59:60, called a leap second, to end the year 2005; the last time this occurred was on June 30, 1998

2006-2007

  • NASA’s Stardust mission successfully returned dust from a comet

  • United Airlines emerged from bankruptcy after 4 years, the longest such filing in history

  • In Super Bowl XL, the Pittsburgh Steelers defeated the Seattle Seahawks 21-10

  • The Blu-ray Disc format was released in the United States

  • Massive antiwar demonstrations, including a march down NYC’s Broadway marked the third year of war in Iraq

  • Warren Buffett donated more than $30 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

  • The Military Commissions Act of 2006 was passed, suspending habeas corpus for "enemy combatants"

  • A Pew Research Center survey revealed that 81 percent of Americans believed it was "common behavior" for lobbyists to bribe members of Congress

  • More than a million immigrants, primarily Hispanic, staged marches in over 100 cities, calling for immigration reform

  • Liquids and gels were banned from checked and carry-on airplane baggage after London Police made 21 arrests in connection with an apparent terrorist plot to blow up planes traveling from the United Kingdom to the United States

  • The International Astronomical Union defined "planet," demoting Pluto to the status of "dwarf planet" more than 70 years after its discovery

  • Two stolen Edvard Munch paintings, The Scream and Madonna, were recovered in a police raid in Oslo, Norway

  • President George W. Bush used the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks to emphasize the link between Iraq and winning the broader war on terrorism, asserting that "if we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities"

  • Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion

  • Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest became the fastest film in Hollywood history to reach the billion-dollar mark worldwide in box office receipts

  • Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging after an Iraqi

  • court found him guilty of crimes against humanity

  • Massachusetts enacted Universal Health Coverage, requiring all residents to have either public or private insurance

  • PlayStation 3 and Wii were released in North America

  • Smoking was banned in all Ohio bars, restaurants, workplaces and other public places

  • The Ronettes, Patti Smith, and Van Halen were all inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

  • Elton John played Madison Square Garden for the sixtieth time to celebrate his sixtieth birthday, joined by Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, and former President Bill Clinton

  • Live Earth, a worldwide series of concerts to initiate action against global warming, took place

  • Led Zeppelin reunited for their first show in 25 years

  • Celine Dion made the final performance of her five-year engagement at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas

  • The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement adopted the Red Crystal as a non-religious emblem for use in its overseas operations

  • A 2,100-year-old melon was discovered by archaeologists in western Japan

  • The final book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released and sold over 11 million copies in the first 24 hours, becoming the fastest-selling book in history

  • Track and field star Marion Jones surrendered the five Olympic medals she won in the 2000 Sydney Games after admitting to doping

  • Beyoncé launched The Beyoncé Experience in Tokyo, Japan

  • Russian President Vladimir Putin was named Time magazine’s 2007 Person of the Year

  • The Picasso painting Portrait of Suzanne Bloch, and Candido Portinari’s O Lavrador de Café were stolen from the São Paulo Museum of Art

2008

  • Americans elected Barack Obama as the first African American U.S. President

  • An economic recession —known as the Great Recession—began that rivaled the Great Depression of the 1930s, caused in large part by banks pushing securities backed by high-interest loans to homebuyers

  • President George W. Bush signed a $700 billion bill on October 3 to bail out banks and stem the financial crisis

  • Television shows winning an Emmy award included NBC’s 30 Rock, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and the first season of AMC’s drama, Mad Men

  • Seth MacFarlane signed a $100 million deal with the Fox television network to keep Family Guy and American Dad on the air until 2012, making MacFarlane the world’s highest paid television writer

  • Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village won the 2008 Newbery Medal for children’s literature

  • Bernard Madoff was arrested and charged with securities fraud in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme

  • California became the second state to legalize same-sex marriage after the state’s own Supreme Court ruled a previous ban unconstitutional; the first state was Massachusetts, in 2004

  • Slumdog Millionaire, a movie about a young man from the slums of Mumbai, India, won the Academy Award for best film, and a total of eight Oscars

  • Australian actor and director Heath Ledger died from an accidental overdose at age 28, a few months after finishing filming for The Dark Knight for which he was posthumously awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor

  • The British alternative rock band Coldplay won the Grammy award for Song of the Year for "Viva la Vida," Spanish for either "long live life" or "live the life"

  • Pope Benedict XVI visited the United States

  • Bill Gates stepped down as chairman of Microsoft Corporation to work full-time for the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

  • Toshiba recalled its HD DVD video formatting, ending its format war with Sony’s Blu-Ray Disc

  • Gold prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit $1,000 an ounce

  • Greg Maddux pitched his 5,000th career inning against the San Francisco Giants on September 19

  • The New York Yankees played their final home game at Yankee Stadium against the Baltimore Orioles; they started the next season in a new stadium built across the street

  • The Detroit Lions finished the football season 0-16, the first time in National Football League history that a team went winless in a 16-game season

2009

  • Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States in front of a crowd of over one million

  • Michael Jackson died of a physician administered drug overdose, which brought a worldwide outpouring of grief

  • US Airways Flight 1549 lost power in both engines shortly after takeoff from La Guardia, forcing the pilot to land in New York’s Hudson River; all 155 passengers and crew were rescued with no casualties

  • President Obama signed executive orders to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp within one year and to prohibit torture in terrorism interrogations

  • President Obama ordered the deployment of 17,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan

  • When insurance giant AIG reported nearly $62 billion in losses during the fourth quarter, the government gave it $30 billion more in aid; AIG later announced $450 million in executive bonuses, despite its central role in the global financial meltdown and receiving billions in government bailouts

  • NASA launched Kepler Mission, a space photometer which searches for planets in the MilkyWay that could be similar to Earth and habitable by humans

  • President Obama overturned a Bush-era policy that limited federal funding for embryonic stem cell research

  • Governor John Lynch signed a bill allowing same-sex marriage in New Hampshire, the sixth state in the union to do so

  • President Obama announced vehicle emissions and mileage requirements under which vehicles would use 30 percent less fuel and emit one-third less carbon dioxide by 2016

  • The Senate passed a bill to impose new regulations on the credit card industry, curbing fees and interest hikes and requiring more transparent disclosure of account terms

  • Physician George Tiller, known for giving late-term abortions, was murdered during a Sunday service at his church in Wichita, Kansas

  • The Great Recession officially ended

  • Analog television broadcasts ended in the United States as the Federal Communications Commission required all full-power stations to send their signals digitally

  • After an eight-month recount battle, former comedian Al Franken was sworn in as the junior senator of Minnesota, giving Democrats a majority of 60 seats

  • Microsoft released Windows 7

  • North Korean leader Kim Jong-il pardoned two American journalists, who were imprisoned for illegal entry, after former President Clinton met with Kim in North Korea

  • Sonia Sotomayor became the third woman and the first Latina to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court

  • The Justice Department announced the largest health care fraud settlement in history, $2.3 billion, involving Pfizer

  • An 8.3-magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami near the Samoan Islands, destroying many communities and harbors in Samoa and American Samoa, and killing at least 189

  • President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize

  • President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, extending federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability

  • The New York Yankees defeated the Philadelphia Phillies to win their 27th World Championship

2010

  • The Eureka earthquake shook the north coast of California, causing $43 million in losses and 35 injuries

  • Google announced it was the target of a cyberattack from China

  • A special election was held in Massachusetts in which Republican Scott Brown replaced the late US Senator Ted Kennedy

  • The Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs opened a worshiping site for earth-centered religions on its campus promoting religious tolerance

  • The Tea Party movement hosted its first convention in Nashville, Tennessee

  • In Super Bowl XLIV the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts 31-17

  • President Obama established the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform

  • The US Navy officially announced that it would end its ban on women in submarines

  • A SeaWorld employee in Orlando, Florida, was killed by a killer whale during a live performance

  • The District of Columbia’s same-sex marriage law went into effect

  • At the 82nd Academy Awards, The Hurt Locker won six Oscars including the first Best Director award for a woman, Kathryn Bigelow

  • NASA announced that 2010 would likely become the warmest year on record due to global warming

  • President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law aiming to insure 95 percent of Americans

  • An explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 workers and sank the rig, initiating a massive offshore oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, considered the largest environmental disaster in US history

  • The Dodd-FrankWall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was signed into law by President Obama

  • Former US Solicitor General Elena Kagan was sworn in as Justice of the Supreme Court

  • The last US combat troops left Iraq

  • President Obama confirmed that two packages sent to the U.S. from Yemen were filled with explosives

  • The San Francisco Giants defeated the Texas Rangers to win their first World Series in 56 years

  • The Federal Reserve announced it would buy $600 billion in bonds to encourage economic growth

  • The San Francisco Board of Supervisors banned McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, citing obesity concerns

  • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange began releasing confidential U.S. diplomatic documents

  • General Motors introduced the first Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid electric vehicle

  • President Obama signed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal into law

  • The Federal Communications Commission passed new net neutrality laws

2011

  • Southern Sudan held a referendum on independence, paving the way for the creation of the new state

  • An estimated two billion people watched the wedding of Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey in London

  • Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of the militant group Al-Qaeda, was killed during an American military operation in Pakistan

  • The Green Bay Packers’ 31-25 defeat of the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XLV attracted 111 million viewers, making the Fox broadcast the most watched program in American TV history

  • Sony, IMAX, and Discovery Communications launched 3net, a new 3D TV channel

  • The world’s first artificial organ transplant was completed, using an artificial windpipe coated with stem cells

  • Space Shuttle Atlantis landed successfully at Kennedy Space Center, concluding NASA’s space shuttle program

  • NASA announced that its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured photographic evidence of possible liquid water on Mars during warm seasons

  • Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides grossed $1,043,871,802 to become the eighth film to have surpassed the billion dollar mark

  • ABC cancelled of two of its long-running daytime dramas—All My Children, after 41 years, and One Life to Live, after 43 years

  • Cellular phone company Verizon Wireless announced it would phase out its famous "Can You Hear Me Now?" campaign, which began in 2002

  • The global population reached seven billion people

2012

  • Utah banned discounts/specials on alcoholic drinks, essentially outlawing Happy Hour

  • San Francisco raised the minimum wage to over $10 per hour, making it the highest in the country

  • Photography pioneer Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection, no longer able to compete in the digital age

  • Approximately 111.3 million viewers (one-third of the U.S. population) watched the Super Bowl

  • The Kellogg Company purchased snack maker Pringles from Procter & Gamble for $2 .7 billion

  • The 84th Academy Awards saw The Artist win Best Picture—the first silent film to win that award since Wings in 1927

  • The shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, black 17-yearold, by George Zimmerman in Florida, ignited nationwide discussion of the role of race in America.

  • Encyclopædia Britannica announced the end of its print editions, continuing online only

  • The United States, Japan, and the European Union filed a case against China at the WTO regarding export restrictions on rare earth metals

  • American golfer Bubba Watson won the U.S. Masters, defeating Louis Oosthuizen of South Africa in a playoff

  • The Guggenheim Partners purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers for $2.1 billion, the most ever paid for a professional sports franchise

  • Licenses for autonomous cars in the U.S. were granted in Nevada to Google

  • Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta was convicted of three counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy related to insider trading in 2011

  • Connecticut repealed the death penalty

  • Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of 15 major world banks

  • NBCUniversal bought full control of the U.S. news website MSNBC.com and rebranded it as NBCNews.com

  • U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps won his 19th career Olympic gold metal, with a win in the 4 x 200-meter freestyle relay

  • American scientists Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discoveries of the inner workings of G protein-coupled receptors

  • Felix Baumgartner broke the world human ascent by balloon record, AIG announced it would pay $450 million in bonuses to top executives, despite its central role in the global financial meltdown and receiving a $173 billion government bailout; a massive public outcry followed before space diving out of the Red Bull Stratos helium-filled balloon over Roswell, New Mexico

  • The Walt Disney Company purchased Lucasfilm Ltd. from George Lucas for $4.05 billion, a deal that included rights to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises

  • Washington became the first state to legalize marijuana

  • Hostess, which includes such brands as Twinkies, announced it would file for bankruptcy, liquidate its assets, and lay off 18,500 workers

2014

  • The Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa infected over 21,000 people and killed at least 8,000

  • Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand with 239 people on board, presumably crashing into the Indian Ocean

  • Malala Yousafzai, a 17-year-old Muslim from Pakistan, became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing the prize with Kailash Satyarthi, a Hindu from India, for their struggle against the repression of girls and women

  • The Disney movie soundtrack Frozen was the most popular U.S. album for 13 weeks

  • Colorado allowed the sale of recreational marijuana from legally licensed businesses.

  • 12 Years a Slave won the Oscar for Best Picture, grossing just under $188 million

  • Transformers: Age of Extinction was the top grossing movie, drawing more than $1 billion in box office receipts

  • The XXII Olympic Winter Games were held in Sochi, Russia

  • Belgium became the first country in the world to make euthanasia legal for terminally ill patients of any age

  • Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and began a covert military offensive against the Ukraine

  • American science educator "Bill Nye, the Science Guy" defended evolution in the classroom in a debate with creationist Ken Ham

  • "Happy" by Pharrell Williams was the No. 1 song on the pop charts for 10 consecutive weeks

  • President Obama announced the resumption of normal relations between the United States and Cuba

  • "Black Jeopardy!" became one of Saturday Night Live’s most popular skits with cast member Kenan Thompson as game show host “Alex Treblack”

  • Sony Pictures canceled its planned release of The Interview after threats from North Korea against the Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg comedy that depicts the assassination of North Korea’s dictator; criticism against Sony led the studio to release the film on video on demand

2015

  • The Federal Communications Commission published its rule on net neutrality regulations

  • NASA’s Messenger spacecraft concluded its four-year orbital mission over Mercury

  • Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency in Baltimore when protests against the death of Freddie Gray in police custody turned violent

  • Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing

  • Cuba was officially removed from the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list

  • Former Olympian Bruce Jenner became the first transgender person to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine

  • Rachel Dolezal resigned as president of the NAACP Spokane, Washington amid allegations that she claimed to be black but was actually white

  • In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld subsidies for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) nationwide

  • The Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage

  • BP (British Petroleum) agreed to pay the Department of Justice an $18.7 billion settlement in reparation for the 2010 oil spill that dumped over 125 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico

  • The South Carolina State House removed the Confederate battle flag from its grounds after weeks of protest, and placed it in a museum

  • Birdman won four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director

  • Iran and a coalition including the U.S. came to an agreement in which UN sanctions against Iran would be lifted in exchange for reduction of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium

  • President Obama announced the Clean Power Plan which included the first-ever Environmental Protection Agency standards on carbon pollution from U.S. power plants

  • Kim Davis, a clerk for Rowan County, Kentucky, was found in contempt of court and jailed for five days for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples

  • NASA announced strong evidence that liquid water flows on Mars during the summer months, increasing the chance of sustainable life on the planet

  • President Obama ordered up to 50 U.S. special operations ground troops to be deployed in Syria to fight Islamic State militants

  • Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that all combat roles in the military must be opened to women

  • An arrest warrant was issued for comedian Bill Cosby for the alleged drugging and sexual assault of an employee at Temple University in 2004, following dozens of similar allegations

2017

  • Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States

  • The Women’s March in Washington DC comprised nearly three million, in response to the inauguration of Donald Trump, making it the biggest protest in U.S. history

  • President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the US from the controversial trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

  • The Trump administration froze all new research grants and contracts for the Environmental Protection Agency and temporarily barred its employees from posting press releases or updates to the agency’s social media accounts

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average reached an all-time high of 20,000 points

  • President Trump signed an executive order banning the entry of refugees of the Syrian civil war into the United States indefinitely, and all nationals of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen to the US for 90 days

  • Neil Gorsuch filled the vacant seat on the Supreme Court left by the sudden death of Antonin Scalia

  • President Trump signed an executive order to review and eventually scale back the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act put in place after the Great Recession

  • In Super Bowl LI, the New England Patriots defeated the Atlanta Falcons 34-28

  • Police forcibly evicted all remaining Dakota Access Pipeline protesters, arresting 33

  • Moonlight won Best Picture at the 89th Academy Awards

  • Rock and roll pioneer Chuck Berry died at the age of 90

  • President Trump signed the Energy Independence Executive Order, intended to boost coal and other fossil fuel production

  • The U.S. Justice Department named former FBI chief Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and possible collusion between President Trump’s campaign and Moscow

  • The first gene editing of human embryos in the U.S. took place using CRISPR

  • A third attempt to repeal Obamacare failed after it was voted down by 51 votes to 49

  • Violent clashes broke out at a Unite the Right rally, where 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and many others injured when a neo-Nazi intentionally ploughed his car into a group of people

  • The first total solar eclipse of the 21st century took place in the U.S.

  • Hurricane Harvey, a category 4 tropical cyclone, made landfall in Texas

  • A directive was signed by President Trump banning transgender military recruits

  • North Korea fired a ballistic missile over northern Japan

  • The Trump administration announced that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy, set by the Obama administration, would end

  • Millions of homes were left without power as the center of Hurricane Irma hit mainland Florida

  • Hurricane Maria struck the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, leaving the island devastated

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
, . "Historical Snapshots." Opinions Throughout History – National Security vs. Civil and Privacy Rights, edited by Micah L. Issitt, Salem Press, 2018. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=OP1NS_0037.
APA 7th
, . (2018). Historical Snapshots. In M. L. Issitt (Ed.), Opinions Throughout History – National Security vs. Civil and Privacy Rights. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
,. "Historical Snapshots." Edited by Micah L. Issitt. Opinions Throughout History – National Security vs. Civil and Privacy Rights. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2018. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.