Topics | HISTORY

HOLIDAYS

Hanukkah

History of Hanukkah The events that inspired the Hanukkah holiday took place during a particularly turbulent phase of Jewish history. Around 200 B.C., Judea—also known as the Land of Israel—came under the control of Antiochus III, the Seleucid king of Syria, who allowed the Jews who lived there to continue practicing their religion. His son, […]

Thanksgiving 2024

Thanksgiving Day, observed in 2024 on Thursday, November 28, honors a 1621 feast between the Plymouth colonists from England and the Wampanoag people.

History of Christmas

How Did Christmas Start? The middle of winter has long been a time of celebration around the world. Centuries before the arrival of the man called Jesus, early Europeans celebrated light and birth in the darkest days of winter. Many peoples rejoiced during the winter solstice, when the worst of the winter was behind them […]

NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY

Native American History Timeline

Long before Christopher Columbus stepped foot on what would come to be known as the Americas, the expansive territory was inhabited by Native Americans. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, as more explorers sought to colonize their land, Native Americans responded in various stages, from cooperation to indignation to revolt. After siding with the French […]

American Indian Movement (AIM)

The American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in 1968, became the driving force behind the Indigenous civil rights movement.

Trail of Tears

The Trail of Tears was the deadly route Native Americans were forced to follow when they were pushed off their ancestral lands and into Oklahoma by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

COLONIAL AMERICA

The 13 Colonies

The 13 Colonies were a group of colonies of Great Britain that settled on the Atlantic coast of America in the 17th and 18th centuries. The colonies declared independence in 1776 to found the United States of America.

Salem Witch Trials

The infamous Salem witch trials were a series of prosecutions for witchcraft starting in 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts.

Jamestown Colony

English Settlement in the New World After Christopher Columbus’ historic voyage in 1492, Spain dominated the race to establish colonies in the Americas, while English efforts, such as the “lost colony” of Roanoke, met with failure. In 1606, King James I granted a charter to a new venture, the Virginia Company, to form a settlement […]

GREAT DEPRESSION

Stock Market Crash of 1929

What Caused the 1929 Stock Market Crash? During the 1920s, the U.S. stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929 after a period of wild speculation in the Roaring Twenties. By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stocks in great excess of their real value. Among the other […]

Great Depression History

The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939.

Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl refers to the drought‑stricken southern plains of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

WORLD WAR I

World War I Battles: Timeline

For four years, from 1914 to 1918, World War I raged across Europe’s western and eastern fronts after growing tensions and then the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria ignited the war. Trench warfare and the early use of tanks, submarines and airplanes meant the war’s battles were devastatingly bloody, claiming an estimated 40 […]

Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson’s Early Years Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia. (Because his mother said he arrived around midnight, some sources list Wilson’s birthday as December 29.) His father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson (1822‑1903), was a Presbyterian minister, and his mother, Janet Woodrow Wilson (1826‑1888), was a minister’s daughter and originally […]

Battle of the Somme

Battle Begins – July 1, 1916 Prior to the attack, the Allies launched a week‑long heavy artillery bombardment, using some 1.75 million shells, which aimed to cut the barbed wire guarding German’s trench defenses and destroy the enemy’s positions. On the morning of July 1, 11 divisions of the British 4th Army—many of them volunteer […]

WORLD WAR II

D‑Day

D‑Day was the name given to the June 6, 1944, invasion of the beaches at Normandy in northern France by troops from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and other countries during World War II.

Nazi Party

Nazi Party Origins In 1919, army veteran Adolf Hitler, frustrated by Germany’s defeat in World War I—which had left the nation economically depressed and politically unstable—joined a fledgling political organization called the German Workers’ Party. Founded earlier that same year by a small group of men including locksmith Anton Drexler and journalist Karl Harrer, the […]

World War II Battles: Timeline

Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 drove Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II. Over the next six years, the conflict took more lives and destroyed more land and property around the globe than any previous war.

COLD WAR

Red Scare

The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, which intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Palmer Raids

Red Scare Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, America was on high alert, fearing Communist revolutionaries on their own shores. The Sedition Act of 1918, which was an expansion of the 1917 Espionage Act, was a direct result of the paranoia. Targeting those who criticized the government, the Sedition Act set into motion an effort […]

Khmer Rouge

Pol Pot Although Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge didn’t come to power until the mid‑1970s, the roots of their takeover can be traced to the 1960s, when a communist insurgency first became active in Cambodia, which was then ruled by a monarch. Throughout the 1960s, the Khmer Rouge operated as the armed wing of […]

IMMIGRATION

U.S. Immigration Timeline

White People of ‘Good Character’ Granted Citizenship January 1776: Thomas Paine publishes a pamphlet, “Common Sense,” that argues for American independence. Most colonists consider themselves Britons, but Paine makes the case for a new American. “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted […]

Ellis Island

U.S. Immigration History When Ellis Island opened, a great change was taking place in U.S. immigration. Fewer arrivals were coming from northern and western Europe—Germany, Ireland, Britain and the Scandinavian countries—as more and more immigrants poured in from southern and eastern Europe. Among this new generation were Jews escaping from political and economic oppression in […]

Tenements

The Rise of Tenement Housing In the first half of the 19th century, many of the more affluent residents of New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood began to move further north, leaving their low‑rise masonry row houses behind. At the same time, more and more immigrants began to flow into the city, many of them […]