History.com Editors

On December 17, 2010 26-year-old street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolates in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. His dramatic action is considered the start of the Arab Spring, a period of pro-democracy uprisings that reverberated through North Africa and the Middle East.    Mohamed ...read more

On March 18, 1889, Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte becomes the first Native American woman to graduate from medical school. She was top of her class at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania.  As an eight-year-old on Nebraska’s Omaha Reservation, La Flesche experienced a ...read more

Future entrepreneur, philanthropist and self-made millionaire Madam C.J. Walker is born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 in Delta, Louisiana.  Walker's parents, sharecroppers who had been enslaved, died when she was seven. Walker eventually left Louisiana and spent her ...read more

The podcast Serial, a spinoff of the long-running radio program This American Life, debuts on October 3, 2014, and quickly becomes a smash hit.  Producer Sarah Koenig conceived of the show after she was approached by the attorney Rabia Chaudry, who asked Koenig to investigate the ...read more

The term “global warming” appears for the first time in print on August 8, 1975, with the publication of Wallace Smith Broecker's paper “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” in the journal Science.  Five years earlier, in 1970, Broecker, a ...read more

Early on the morning of July 14, 1970, the Young Lords, a predominantly Puerto Rican group of community activists in New York City, storm Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and barricade themselves inside. The Young Lords claimed the hospital as their own, placing a Puerto Rican ...read more

On August 23, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fully approves the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for people aged 16 and older, following a manufacturing review and analysis of the company’s expanded clinical trial, which included approximately 44,000 participants ...read more

With over 13 million votes cast, California voters approve Proposition 8 on November 4, 2008, amending the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Only months earlier, in May 2008, the California Supreme Court had deemed the state’s ban on same-sex marriage ...read more

On October 8, 2004, Kenyan environmental justice organizer Wangari Maathai receives a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her “contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace," becoming the first African woman to win the award.  Maathai was born to peasant farmers in ...read more

In Prague on August 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union votes to demote Pluto from the ninth planet from the Sun to one of dozens of known dwarf planets. The vote followed a week of debate by the IAU, who voted on multiple proposals including one that kept not just ...read more

An Israeli-owned bulldozer kills 23-year-old American woman Rachel Corrie on March 16, 2003, as she protests a demolition campaign that destroyed over a thousand homes in the Gaza Strip. Following the death of their daughter, Corrie’s parents filed a civil lawsuit against the ...read more

On May 29, 2014, Laverne Cox, the transgender actor and advocate best known for her Emmy-winning performance on Orange Is the New Black, appears on the cover of TIME magazine's June 14 issue for their story "The Transgender Tipping Point." The moment is widely cited as a turning ...read more

On June 25, 1978, activists hoist a vibrant rainbow flag in the midst of the festivities for San Francisco’s Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day parade. According to its creator, Gilbert Baker, the crowd immediately recognized the flat’s significance: “It completely astounded me that ...read more

On September 13, 1963, Texas-born entrepreneur Mary Kay Ash launches a cosmetic company in Dallas with her $5,000 life savings and the help of her 20-year-old son Richard Rogers. Mary Kay Inc. would become a cosmetic empire with revenue of more than $3.5 billion and salespeople ...read more

On September 20, 2011, the federal government repeals “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a law that had allowed gay people to serve in the U.S. armed forces only if they kept their sexual orientation a secret. “As of today, patriotic Americans in uniform will no longer have to lie about ...read more

On March 11, 1973, the first formal meeting of “Parents of Gays,” co-founded by the parents of a gay son, is held in a church in Greenwich Village in New York. In 1982, it became a national organization called “Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays,” or PFLAG—the ...read more

On May 30, 1942, Fred Korematsu is arrested in San Leandro, California for resisting internment under President Franklin Roosevelt’s controversial Executive Order 9066, which called for the incarceration of nearly all Japanese Americans in the United States in the wake of Japan’s ...read more

On May 10, 2002, Robert Hanssen, a former FBI agent who intermittently sold state secrets to Russia over the course of two decades, receives his sentencing for espionage: life in prison without the possibility of parole. "I apologize for my behavior. I am shamed by it," said ...read more

On September 12, 2009, thousands of protesters participate in the “Taxpayer March on Washington,” one of the earliest and biggest Tea Party movement events. Marchers in the nation’s capital clogged streets near the Capitol, railing against President Barack Obama’s healthcare ...read more

On August 6, 1996, NASA and Stanford researchers announce they have found signs of Martian life in a meteorite discovered 12 years earlier in Allan Hills, Antarctica, causing a worldwide sensation. But some viewed the announcement skeptically, and the Martian life connection was ...read more

On July 15, 1978, the “Longest Walk”—a 2,800-mile trek for Native American justice that had started with several hundred marchers in California—ends in Washington, D.C., accompanied by thousands of supporters. The intent of the event was to call attention to issues affecting ...read more

On June 24, 1973, an arson fire at the UpStairs Lounge, a popular gathering spot for New Orleans' LGBT community in the French Quarter, results in 32 deaths and at least 15 injuries. At the time, it was the deadliest known attack at a gay club in American history. The fire's ...read more

On July 4, 1965, more than two dozen LGBTQ activists demonstrate in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia in one of the earliest gay rights demonstrations in the United States. The “Reminder” demonstration, held annually through 1969, drew scant mainstream media coverage at ...read more

On November 28, 1973, approximately 2,000 Detroit auto workers, led by Arab Americans, walk off their jobs at Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant, demanding that the leadership of their union, the United Auto Workers (UAW), divest from Israel. The strike, which was organized by the ...read more

On January 3, 1959, George A. Kasem takes office in the U.S. House of Representatives for California’s 25th District, making history as the first Arab American Congressperson. Kasem, who is of Lebanese descent, was born in Oklahoma and raised in Los Angeles. He ran as a ...read more

On January 3, 1973, James Abourezk, a Congressperson representing South Dakota’s 2nd District, takes office in his newly elected role in the U.S. Senate, once again representing his home state. Abourezk, who is of Lebanese descent, was the first Arab American to ever serve in the ...read more

On September 23, 1923, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, a Romantic book of prose poetry centered on a prophet who shares wisdom about family, work, death, love and freedom, is published. It sold about 1,200 copies in its first year with little fanfare, but gradually gained readers by ...read more

Deeply in debt and relegated to a shabby theater, the musical Shuffle Along debuts at the Sixty-Third Street Music Hall on May 23, 1921. The odds are stacked against the revue-style show, written and performed by African Americans, but it will run for over a year, making it the ...read more

On the afternoon of June 29, 1969, a crowd consisting mostly of Black people from the nearby area packs Harlem’s Mt. Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). Over the course of this afternoon and the next five Sunday afternoons, Black performers from many different genres and eras ...read more

On November 25, 1960, a car carrying three Dominican political dissidents, the Mirabal sisters, is stopped as they travel to visit a prison where two of their husbands are being held. Members of the Dominican Republic’s secret police, including the alleged “right-hand man” of ...read more

Early in the morning on June 24, 2021, 98 people die when a 12-story, beachfront condominium building collapses in Surfside, Florida, near Miami. The disaster is one of the worst of its kind in U.S. history. Responders pulled dozens of survivors from the 40-year-old Champlain ...read more

On May 2, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, more than 1,000 Black school children march through the city in a demonstration against segregation. The goal of the non-violent demonstration, which became known as the "Children’s Crusade" and "Children’s March," was to provoke the city’s ...read more

On June 1, 2008, a massive, early morning fire at the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park and studio backlot in Universal City, California destroys a trove of irreplaceable recordings by some of the greatest musical artists in American history, thousands of archived digital ...read more

On February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four Black college students spark a nationwide civil rights movement by refusing to leave a “whites-only” lunch counter at a popular retail store after they are denied service. The North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State ...read more

On February 1, 2002, 38-year-old American journalist Daniel Pearl, the Southeast Asia bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, is murdered by a terror group in Pakistan. Weeks later, a videotape of Pearl’s beheading was released, shocking millions and underscoring the threat of ...read more

Plainclothes officers of the New York Police Department’s Street Crime Unit fire 41 shots at unarmed Amadou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, killing him on the steps of his apartment building shortly after midnight on February 4, 1999. Diallo’s killing sparked a public outcry ...read more

Kamala Harris makes history when she is sworn in as the 49th U.S. vice president on January 20, 2021, becoming the first woman, the first Black American and the first Asian American to occupy the office. When Harris was chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate in August 2020, the ...read more