1865—End of the Civil War

1867-68—Policy of “small reservations” for Indians adopted.

1869—Transcontinental railroad completed at Promontory Point, Utah

             Blacks granted the right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment

1870—Population:  38,000,000

1873—Nation enters financial depression.

1876—Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone.

            Custer’s Last Stand

1877—Compromise ends military intervention in the South and end of Reconstruction

1879—Thomas Edison invents the incandescent lamp.

1880—Population:  49,300,000

1881—James Garfield assassinated

1890—Population:  62,000,000

1893—Hawaii becomes territory

1896—Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson establishes the concept of

            Separate but Equal facilities for races

1898—War with Spain; acquire Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Philippines

1901—McKinley assassinated

1903—Ford Motor Company formed; Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk

1905—Blacks call for equality and integration

1910—NAACP and NCAA founded

1915—D. W. Griffith produces the first movie spectacular, The Birth of a Nation

1917-18—World War I

1919—Volsted Act—Prohibition; repealed 1933

1920—Woman suffrage

1921—Congress limits immigration

1925—Scopes trial—Darwin vs. creationism

1927—Lindbergh’s flight

1929—Great Crash on Wall Street; beginning of Depression

1930s—National child labor laws

1930s—Drought, Depression, and wind storms destroy rural economy

1938—Minimum wage set at 40¢ hour

1939—WWII begins in Europe

1941—Dec. 7 (declared Dec. 8), U. S. enters WWII

1945—May, end of WWII in Europe

1945—August, atomic bomb on Japan; end of WWII in Asia

1949—Soviet Union tests atomic bomb

1950-53—Korean War

1950-54—House un-American Activities committees—McCarthy

1954—Brown vs. Board of Education at Topeka ends school desegregation

1955—Jonas Salk develops polio vaccine

1957—Sputnik

1959—Castro triumphs in Cuba

1961—Yuri Gagarin first person in space; Shepherd, first American.

1963—Kennedy assassinated

1965—Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

1959-1973—Vietnam War

1964—Civil Rights Act

1968—Chicago demonstrations during Democratic Convention

1972—Nixon visits China

1974—Nixon resigns.

1980—One million black college students

1981—Sandra Day O’Connor becomes first woman on Supreme Court

1991—Gulf War

1992-2000—Greatest economic boom in history