Topics ‑ History.com

HOLIDAYS

History of Easter

A look at the origins of the holiest day on the Christian calender.

The religious festival Eid al‑Fitr, or the “Festival of Breaking the Fast,” is one of two major holidays celebrated by Muslims around the world. In the United States, Eid al‑Fitr 2022 begins on the evening of Sunday, May 1 and ends on the evening of Monday, May 2. Also known as the “Lesser Eid,” Eid al‑Fitr commemorates […]

Earth Day 2023

Earth Day History By the early 1960s, Americans were becoming aware of the effects of pollution on the environment. Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller Silent Spring raised the specter of the dangerous effects of pesticides on the American countryside. Later in the decade, a 1969 fire on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River shed light on the problem of […]

21st CENTURY

Arab American Heritage Month 2023

Arab Immigration to the United States In the late 1800s, Arab immigration to the United States began, according to the Migration Policy Institute, with Arab Christians fleeing the Ottoman Empire—what’s now Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel—from religious persecution and conscription, as well as economic reasons. The U.S. Department of State reports that the immigrants mostly […]

Boston Marathon Bombing

Personal tragedy brought Carlos Arredondo, “the man in the cowboy hat,” to the finish line that day, but his spontaneous act of heroism helped save a life and change the course of the investigation into the attack.

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Irish Republican Army: Timeline

Bloody Sunday Leads to New IRA Recruits; Lord Mountbatten Is Assassinated Dec. 28, 1969: Aiming to protect the Catholic minority from discrimination from loyalist militants and the Protestant‑Majority police force, the Provisional Army Council, officially splinters off from the IRA. The Provisional IRA soon becomes known as simply the IRA, while the other faction, known as […]

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

What Caused the Great Depression? Throughout the 1920s, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, a period dubbed “the Roaring Twenties.” The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in New York City, was the scene of reckless speculation, where […]

Dust Bowl

Families were driven out of the once fertile great plains by massive dust clouds–one that rose to 10,000 feet and reached as far as New York City.

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ASIAN HISTORY

Korean War

North vs. South Korea “If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location in the world to fight this damnable war,” U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893‑1971) once said, “the unanimous choice would have been Korea.” The peninsula had landed in America’s lap almost by accident. […]

North Korea

38TH PARALLEL In 1910, Japan formally annexed the Korean Peninsula, which it had occupied five years earlier following the Russo‑Japanese War. Over the next 35 years of colonial rule, the country modernized and industrialized significantly, but many Koreans suffered brutal repression at the hands of Japan’s military regime. During World War II, Japan sent many […]

South Korea

HISTORY OF KOREA Around A.D. 668, several competing kingdoms were unified into a single dominion on the Korean Peninsula. Successive regimes maintained Korean political and cultural independence for more than a thousand years; the last of these ruling kingdoms would be the Choson Dynasty (1392‑1910). After surviving invasions by Japan at the end of the […]

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

Find out what happened when poor health sidelined Woodrow Wilson for several years of his presidency.

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Battle of the Somme

After two years of trench warfare, the Allies attempt to break through German lines on the Western Front. The ensuing battle will last for months and result in more than one million casualties.

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WORLD WAR II

The Holocaust

Historical Anti‑Semitism Anti‑Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine. […]

American Response to the Holocaust

American Restrictions on Immigration America’s traditional policy of open immigration had ended when Congress enacted restrictive immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924. The quota system allowed only 25,957 Germans to enter the country every year. After the stock market crash of 1929, rising unemployment caused restrictionist sentiment to grow, and President Herbert Hoover ordered vigorous […]

World War II Battles: Timeline

With Adolf Hitler leading a German invasion of Poland in 1939, World War II was launched, a deadly global conflict waged across Europe and the Pacific until 1945. Bloody battles raged between the Allied powers, which included Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States, along with other nations, and the Axis, notably Germany […]

COLD WAR

Red Scare

First Red Scare: 1917‑1920 The first Red Scare occurred in the wake of World War I. The Russian Revolution of 1917 saw the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, topple the Romanov dynasty, kicking off the rise of the communist party and inspiring international fear of Bolsheviks and anarchists. In the United States, labor strikes were […]

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

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 […]

U.S. Immigration Before 1965

For over 60 years, Ellis Island was the gateway for millions of Americans to the United States. Explore the legacy of this symbol of American immigration.

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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 […]