Test Your Timeline: Which Historical Event Came First?

Activist Anna Jarvis created Mother’s Day in 1908 in commemoration of her own late mother, and President Woodrow Wilson made it an official national holiday in 1914. Father’s Day was celebrated for the first time in 1910 in Washington state, but it didn’t become a recognized federal holiday until 1972, during Richard Nixon’s term in office.

Quantum theory was born in 1900, when German scientist Max Planck published his study on a “blackbody” substance. In 1918, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his studies on blackbody radiation. In 1905, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity describing ideas about light, time, and energy that proved fundamental to modern physics.

Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged with committing robbery and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920, and their controversial trial was one of the first to be dubbed the “Trial of the Century.” Brown v. Board of Education, on the other hand, took place between 1952 and 1954, and resulted in the historic decision finding racial segregation in schools unconstitutional.

In 1949, the National Basketball League merged with the Basketball Association of America to create the NBA, the National Basketball Association. The NBA is the youngest of America’s four major sports leagues: Major League Baseball was founded in 1901 (known previously as the National League), the National Hockey League was formed in 1917 (in Canada), and the National Football League was founded in 1920. The Super Bowl era began in 1967, after the NFL absorbed the AFL.

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969 drew half a million people to upstate New York — to a dairy farm located in the town of Bethel (not Woodstock). Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead are just a few of the now-legendary performers who appeared. The first Glastonbury Festival was held a few years later in 1971. It was free to the public, and featured a star-studded lineup of artists including Joan Baez and David Bowie.

Pluto was officially discovered by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, nearly a century after the discovery of Neptune. In 1846, astronomer John Couch Adams became the first person to predict the position of a planet beyond Uranus, correctly locating Neptune based on mathematics. Others, including Galileo Galilei, saw what was Neptune through a telescope as early as 1612, but did not recognize it as a planet.

On March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the telephone. He made the first-ever official phone call several days later. The invention of radio came more than a decade later, when Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi sent a wireless message using Morse code in 1897. Marconi filed a patent for his invention in 1896 and conducted several demonstrations of the technology in the following year.

Engineer Joseph Strauss revealed his design for San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in 1922, and it was immediately criticized by the press and doubted by architects. Strauss forged ahead, though, and the iconic bridge opened on May 27, 1937. Construction on the Gateway Arch in St. Louis began in 1963, and was completed in 1965.

In June 1903, Henry Ford and a dozen of his associates invested $28,000 dollars to create the Ford Motor Company, which sold its first car a month later. In 1919, Ford, along with his son, Edsel Ford, and Henry’s wife, Clara Bryant Ford, acquired all ownership shares in the company for just under $106 million. NBC, the National Broadcasting Company, is the oldest broadcasting company in the United States, formed in 1926.

“The Great Gatsby” was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel, published in 1925, after 1920’s “This Side of Paradise” and 1922’s “The Beautiful and Damned.” Though “Gatsby” is considered Fitzgerald’s most impactful book, it was not commercially successful at first. During Fitzgerald’s lifetime, it went through only two printings of 20,000 books. J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” was published in serial form from 1945 to 1946 before being released as a novel in 1951.

The Volstead Act, aka the National Prohibition Act, marked the beginning of the Prohibition era when it was passed in 1919. President Woodrow Wilson actually vetoed the bill, but his veto was overridden by the Senate. The Volstead Act made it illegal to “manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish, or possess” beverages with over 2.5% alcohol. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, amid the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

The Titanic and the Hindenburg were two of the most significant transit disasters of the 20th century, occurring on April 12, 1914, and May 6, 1937, respectively. The Titanic struck an iceberg and sank near Newfoundland, Canada, on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City. The Hindenburg was a German airship that crashed and caught fire while attempting to dock in Manchester Township, New Jersey.

In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt gave one of his most frequently quoted speeches. The President praised people who have the courage to go out and fight battles, saying, “It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech, meanwhile, was given to the U.N. General Assembly on December 8, 1953. The speech was intended to balance fear over the threat of nuclear war with the promise of peaceful uses for nuclear energy.

In 1947, a local rancher discovered wreckage from a flying object 75 miles north of Roswell, New Mexico, and reported it to a sheriff, who reported it to a colonel of the Roswell Army Air Field investigation. The Roswell UFO incident became public when the U.S. Air Force published a press release declaring the recovery of a “flying disc.” The Cold War was just beginning at the time, and it heated up several years later in 1950, when Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a list of 205 communists employed in the U.S. Department of State. It led to a flurry of paranoia-fueled accusations and investigations now known as “McCarthyism.”

The Great Depression began in 1929 with a series of financial crises, most notably the stock market crash of 1929, which hit Wall Street on October 29, known as “Black Tuesday.” The largest economic downturn in U.S. history finally came to an end amid the Second World War, which the United States entered in December 1941. Mobilizing of the workforce in support of the war effort played a major role in accelerating economic recovery in the U.S. and beyond.