The 25 Moments From American History That Matter Right Now
The first successful voyage across the Pacific Ocean  from the Americas to Asia and back  occurred in 1564 and 1565. Barely two generations after Columbus' more famous voyage, European explorers faced an ocean that was roughly twice as large as the Atlantic and extremely difficult to navigate. This epic passage established a transpacific link, and no other shipping route has been more successful or lasted longer. Trade brought the continents together and created a seascape around the Pacific basin that included places like Acapulco, Manila and the coast of California. By the 18th and 19th centuries, American merchants built on these existing connections to launch their own commercial ventures into the Asia-Pacific region, a process that continues today  even as Washington engages in a trade war with China. Read more about the pivot to the Pacific here on TIME.com, In 1828, following the discovery of gold on Cherokee land, the Georgia legislature passed a law extending its jurisdiction over the Cherokee Nation and allowing state surveyors to assess and divide land occupied by Cherokee people. The land was then redistributed  with buildings intact  to white residents via a lottery system, driving Cherokee leaders and their white allies to bring suit against the U.S. government. But, when the U.S. Supreme Court found that Georgia had no authority over the Cherokee government or its populace, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the decision. Georgia's coup flouted the law of the land with tacit support from the president, setting the stage for the federal Indian Removal Act of 1830, which mandated the forced relocation of Native peoplesa cautionary tale about the refusal of a president to respect the courts and the failure of the nation's leaders to protect the rights of indigenous people. Dr. James Marion Sims, a pioneering American gynecologist, is often credited with establishing the country's first women's hospital in Manhattan in 1855  but in fact the Woman's Hospital in the State of New York was not the first such institution he opened. In 1844, Sims had his slaves build a women's hospital in Mt. Meigs, Ala. expressly for experimenting on enslaved women who suffered from a common gynecological condition caused from childbirth injuries. Sims' surgical work in Alabama  performed with the assistance of other enslaved patients, whom he trained as nurses  helped to launch his career as one of the country's most famous gynecologists. Even after Sims' death in 1883, the Mt. Meigs hospital was still being used to treat the black population there. Historical retellings of the rise of American gynecology long overlooked the field's intimate connection to American slavery. Today however, protests emerged over Sims' experimentation on enslaved women and his Central Park statue has been removed to his gravesite. On July 8th, 1853, defying Japanese restrictions on international traffic, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his steam-powered ships into Edo Tokyo Bay, heavily armed and belching smoke. Although his exercise in "gunboat diplomacy" culminated in the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa, establishing trade relations between the U.S. and Japan, Perry deserves less credit for changes in Japanese foreign policy than he has received. Other factors were already in play  he arrived amid the disintegration of the Tokugawa government and simultaneous European commercial overtures  and Perry approached Pacific diplomacy with arrogance and contempt. His insistence that the Japanese trade with the United States hinged on a belief that international commerce was a marker of civilization. He had no sense that military enforcement of this norm diminished its value, or that of the numerous American manufactures he brought as gifts. A missionary who accompanied the trip as an interpreter noted wanly that among those gifts, the six-shooters bestowed by Samuel Colt were likely to be particularly appreciated given their potential to repel foreign aggression. Read more about U.S.-Japan relations here in the TIME Vault, When Abraham Lincoln dedicated a national cemetery for the soldiers who had died at Gettysburg, four months after that central battle of the American Civil War, he was not the principal speaker. But no other speech that day has been remembered the way Lincoln's words are. He spoke of the past, of the "proposition that all men are created equal" on which the Republic was founded he spoke of the present, of the sacrifices ordinary men in blue had made to vindicate that proposition and he spoke of a future in which living Americans must continue to dedicate themselves to the "great task" of preserving that ideal forever. Nothing else anchors the challenges of our present to the intentions of our past more clearly than the Gettysburg Address. Whatever else changes in American life, that proposition does not change and holding it close is the best guarantee that democracy will endure. Read more about Ida B. Wells here on TIME.com, The 1901 Supreme Court case Downes v. Bidwell was one of several cases that decided how the United States would govern the new territories, including Puerto Rico and the Philippines, it acquired in 1898 after the Spanish American War. Many people at the time believed that, because the islands' residents were racially unfit for citizenship, the territories could never become states and thus could not be governed like other territories, which historically had all been destined for statehood. Normally the Constitution requires uniformity  the federal government can't make different tax, trade, criminal, or immigration laws for different states or territories. For the first time, Downes v. Bidwell determined that the Constitution does not necessarily follow the flag. The majority opinion famously stated that Puerto Rico was "was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense," and ruled that Congress could keep territories that would never become states, and could govern them with different laws. More than a century later, Puerto Rico's ongoing debt and infrastructure crisis, amplified in the wake of Hurricane Maria's devastation, are attributable in part to the territory's historic legal inequality. Because of cases like Downes v. Bidwell, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens who live without the full protection of the Constitution. Read more about the history of Puerto Rico here on TIME.com, Although the Meuse-Argonne campaign is little remembered today, it was the greatest U.S. military contribution to World War I and the opening act of the "American century." The 47 autumn days of brutal fighting claimed 26,277 American lives  making it the deadliest battle in the nation's history  and left nearly 100,000 doughboys wounded. This sacrifice materially contributed to the collapse of the German army. It earned Woodrow Wilson a major role in crafting the peace that followed. And it demonstrated that the U.S. which had generally avoided great power entanglements, had the will and ability to assume a major role on the world stage by using its vast military, political and economic power to secure its global interests and further the nation's worldview. But the Meuse-Argonne also highlights the fact that hard-won victories do not always lead to a just and enduring peace  a lesson that is as crucial today as it was back then. Read more about the U.S. in World War I here on TIME.com, When populist politician William Jennings Bryan faced off against attorney Clarence Darrow, it was the highlight of the Scopes trial  a case about teaching evolution in Tennessee that had captured national attention  and the capstone of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the Protestant churches. Darrow grilled Bryan on his interpretation of well-known Bible stories. Did he really believe that the whale swallowed Jonah, that Joshua made the sun stand still and that Adam and Eve were the first people? Bryan answered yes, but Darrow made him admit he didn't know how these things happened and didn't know any geology or ancient history. The big- city journalists reported that Darrow had revealed Bryan's ignorance and the absurdity of his biblical literalism. The Great Commoner died five days later, as if the defeat had killed him. The fundamentalists retreated from battle, dismissed by the rest of society, but flourished under the radar of the press, planting churches from California to Virginia. In 1979, Jerry Falwell surprised everyone by launching a powerful political movement of fundamentalists and other conservative evangelicals. Thirty-seven years later, with white evangelical voters making up more than a quarter of the electorate, the Christian right helped elect Donald Trump. Read TIME's first article to use the term "Dust Bowl" here in the TIME Vault, On July 26, 1933, six months after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Nazis in Los Angeles held their first open meeting. These predecessors of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017, prompted Jewish attorney Leon Lewis  who recognized that the government was not doing enough to stem the growth of hate  to recruit a number of World War I veterans and their wives to go undercover within every Nazi and fascist group in Los Angeles, and then report back to him. They did so until the end of World War II. Foiling a series of plots aimed at sabotage and murder, Lewis and his courageous group of spies understood that democracy requires constant vigilance. With their actions they showed that when a government fails to stem the rise of extremists bent on violence, it is up to every citizen to protect the lives of every American, no matter their race or religion. Americans can attribute increased sightings of their national bird largely to the Bald Eagle Protection Act. Congress passed the act in 1940 to check the slaughterous impact of recreational shooters, egg collectors and livestock farmers. Never before had the federal government established protection for an individual species or top predator the move set a precedent for future wildlife laws, including the Endangered Species Act ESA. Aggressive enforcement of the Bald Eagle Protection Act, along with listing the bald eagle under the ESA and banning the use of DDT, reversed a population collapse in the lower 48 states after pesticides and habitat loss had reduced breeding pairs to 487 in 1963. With ESA de-listing in 2007 and the Department of the Interior downgrading bird protection this year, the historic act remains the principal legal safeguard for this exclusively North American bird, now thriving nationwide with numbers above 40,000. When President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, he acknowledged that racial segregation hampered the U.S.'s military readiness and damaged its standing in the world. The order, which declared, "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin," started the slow process of integrating the military at a time when every other national institution save Major League Baseball remained rigidly segregated. Truman also repaid the patriotism African Americans had demonstrated in World War II despite the segregated conditions under which they trained and fought. Blacks had supported the war effort overwhelmingly, but on their own terms. They rallied around the concept of a "Double Victory," aiming to defeat Nazism overseas and racism at home. Having helped to defeat Hitler, they now had a president on the record saying that Jim Crow had to go. Mass movements for civil rights have ebbed and flowed in the years since, but Truman's actions proved how much of a difference having a supporter of civil rights for all Americans in the White House could make. Read more about Ella Baker here on TIME.com, After more than a decade leading the South's Civil Rights Movement, by 1966 Martin Luther King Jr. had turned his sights toward contesting racial inequality in the North. King saw that millions of black Southerners who had migrated to northern cities like Chicago in search of opportunity had found "not a land of plenty but a lot replete with poverty." His Chicago Freedom Movement most pointedly challenged discriminatory housing practices that reinforced racial segregation and black poverty. White resistance to the movement's nonviolent protests was virulent, and King was struck in the head with a rock during one such march. "I can say that I had never seen, even in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as in Chicago," he later reflected. The Chicago Freedom Movement fizzled later that year, and the Fair Housing Act passed in the wake of King's 1968 assassination largely failed to accomplish the movement's lofty goals, but it threw into sharp relief the extent to which deeply entrenched racial inequalities and animosities were a national problem, not a Southern one.", Read more about the attack on King here on TIME.com, In a rare instance when minority militancy raced past the realm of rhetoric and toward actual violence, armed Mexican Americans stormed a courthouse in the tiny town of Tierra Amarilla, N.M. Led by a charismatic ex-preacher named Reies Lpez Tijerina, the assailants shot two people and kidnapped two others. They took these extreme actions to bring attention to a piece of U.S. history unfamiliar to most Americans then and now after the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848 moved the border, Mexican citizens who suddenly found themselves living in the new American Southwest confronted massive land dispossession at the hands of the government and individual Americans. Tijerina's group was determined to recover their ancestors' property  and, though they failed to gain a single acre, their courthouse raid exposed, in Tijerina's words, a "crime that was stinking up the pages of New Mexican history." Today, at a time of intense immigration debates, the raid also serves to remind Americans that the long history of Spanish-speaking people in the region predates the founding of the nation. Read more about Tierra Amarilla here in the TIME Vault, There was no guarantee that the ailing Mao Zedong would meet with Richard Nixon when the U.S. president arrived in Beijing on Feb. 21, 1972. The invitation came suddenly, and after Nixon rushed off with a minimal entourage, those left behind were struck by the thought Had the enemy just captured the president? Far from it. The planet-shaking photographs of the Red Chinese dictator, gripping the hand of the arch anti-Communist, fulfilled a vision that Nixon put to paper years before, of a day when the tiger economies of Asia would join Europe and America in a new, peaceful computer age  but only if mighty China, freed from seething isolation, came along. The first step was that handshake. Mao offered "I like rightists." Answered Nixon "Those on the right can do what those on the left talk about." Only Nixon could go to China. It was, like he said, a trip that changed the world. As New York City faced near-bankruptcy in the mid-1970s, teacher layoffs caused class sizes to shoot up to 45 or 50 students per class and school staffs were reduced to a minimum. In response, the city's public school teachers went on strike. The move was greeted with great support by many families, who joined teachers on the picket lines. The strike lasted just one week it ended in frustration, and many of the issues it raised went unresolved. This strike was reminiscent of those we've seen of teachers in "red states" this past spring  people suffering from the low respect and low funding given to public educators and education in our country. Then and now, they are a legacy, in a way, of the politics of austerity and skepticism toward government that New York's fiscal crisis helped to inaugurate. During the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to rising unemployment and inflation, the number of parents receiving welfare had ballooned. It was in this context that in 1976 Ronald Reagan introduced the "welfare queen" into the national lexicon. At almost every stop in his unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Reagan told crowds about a Chicago woman who got rich off her "80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards." Although his tellings were inconsistent and exaggerated, the story was based on the highly unusual case of Linda Taylor. She was hardly an average welfare recipient  she also posed as a voodoo practitioner and has been linked to a notorious kidnapping  but pundits nonetheless used her story to disparage all woman on public assistance and advance racist stereotypes about black mothers. Sensationalized claims of rampant fraud became a principle rationale for ending welfare and weakening the social safety net. While we hear less about the "welfare queen" these days, exaggerated stories of the abuse of social welfare programs continue to be used to rationalize cuts to social services. On Jan. 6, 1976, eight Native Hawaiian activists and one Native American ally defied the orders of the U.S. military by stepping off boats and onto the Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe. Beginning during World War II, American forces had used the island for bombing practice, threatening its ecosystem and obliterating sacred sites  a continuation of the history that dated back to the illegal American annexation of the independent nation of Hawaii in 1898. Landing on Kahoolawe was forbidden. But, in the early 1970s, Native Hawaiians were engaging in a wave of activism to defend Hawaiian culture, language and sovereignty. More than 50 people headed to Kahoolawe in small boats. Most were intercepted or diverted. Two people died at sea. The nine who made it Walter Ritte, Emmett Aluli, Kimo Aluli, George Helm, Gail Kawaipuna Prejean, Stephen K. Morse, Ellen Miles and Ian Lind, as well as Karla Villalba of the Muckleshoot Nation of Washington State were arrested. The landing at Kahoolawe inspired Hawaiians with the call to aloha ina  to love and defend Hawaiian land and the Hawaiian nation. That dramatic moment signaled a new stage in the contemporary Indian and Hawaiian response to U.S. occupation, one that still connects today to Indigenous movements worldwide. The Supreme Court's opinion in Diamond v. Chakrabarty concerned Ananda Chakrabarty, a scientist who sought a patent for a genetically modified bacterium that he had developed at General Electric. The bacterium had the capacity to digest crude petroleum products, so it was especially promising as a potential solution to oceanic oil spills. The Court ruled that the bacterium counts as a "manufacture" or "composition of matter" in American patent law, and that the fact that it is alive does not preclude its patent-eligibility. It also explained, citing the Congressional record, that patent law protects "anything under the sun that is made by man." This ruling enabled inventors at private and public institutions alike to obtain patents for genetically modified organisms  from plants and animals for laboratory research, to many foods available in supermarkets today. It also encouraged biotechnology firms to rely very heavily on patent law, especially given the high research costs involved in developing new organisms that can reproduce on their own, and paved the way for the genetically modified world in which we live today. We cannot forget what Anita Hill faced when she spoke up at the Senate judiciary hearings on the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Hill was one African-American lawyer facing an all-white, all-male Senate committee gathered to hear testimony on Thomas' character, including Hill's claims of sexual harassment as his employee at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ultimately, Thomas was confirmed and Hill encountered public scrutiny as her credibility and veracity were questioned well after the hearing. Still, Hill's brave testimony garnered a strong feminist mobilization and helped lead to the enactment of workplace and government policies on sexual harassment that would enable victims to seek justice. In 2018, we bear witness to the reach and ramifications of the MeToo movement, which began with another black woman,Tarana Burke, and has continued the difficult work of reshaping relations between men and women  and exposing the wrongdoings of powerful men, including those in Washington's halls of power. Read more about Anita Hill here on TIME.com