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The Battle of Little Bighorn occurred near the Little Bighorn River in Montana on June 25, 1876. Also known as Custer's Last Stand, the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes swiftly defeated George A. Custer and the American army. The battle was even immortalized in a painting by Sioux warrior Kicking Bear.

The Stonewall uprising began after New York City police brutally raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969. What followed was a six-day series of protests and violent clashes between the LGBTQ+ community and law enforcement. The uprising is credited with catalyzing the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States.

The Pinkertons were a private detective group established around 1850 as a way to fight organized labor. The group was eventually hired by President Abraham Lincoln for protection. In 1861, Pinkerton Kate Warne foiled an assassination attempt on Lincoln when a group planned an ambush on the President during a train journey to Washington, D.C.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, making her the first woman ever to hold the title of Supreme Court justice. She served on the court until 2006, and in 2009 Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Since her elevation to the court, four other women have become Supreme Court justices.

Built to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Panama Canal was started in 1880 by France. Some 20,000 men were lost to malaria and yellow fever during the first years of digging the canal, so by 1903, all construction was taken over by the U.S. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty, which relinquished control of the canal to Panama.

The Harlem Renaissance was a vibrant cultural and artistic movement fueled by African American communities in the 1920s. One of the most prominent figures of the movement was poet and novelist Langston Hughes. A fan of jazz music, Hughes combined his literary craft with the music he loved to create the genre of “jazz poetry,” which mimics the rhythms and language of jazz music. For Hughes, jazz was an integral part of African American life; he believed that fusing the music with a literary style historically dominated by white writers could create a uniquely African American art form.

“Washington Crossing the Delaware” by German artist ​​Emanuel Leutze portrays the daring nighttime surprise attack from George Washington and his troops on Hessian forces on December 25, 1776, in Trenton, New Jersey. The 1851 oil painting wasn’t Leutze’s first attempt at capturing the attack — the artist painted an original version in 1849, but it was destroyed during an Allied bombing raid during WWII.

The Apollo 11 mission launched on July 16, 1969, from Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral), Florida, with one primary objective: to put a man on the moon. The astronauts aboard — Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin — were also tasked with collecting lunar samples, conducting various experiments, and deploying a television camera. Eight days after launch, the astronauts safely descended to Earth, landing in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed during the Paris Peace Conference on June 28, 1919. The agreement’s main negotiators were U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, Great Britain’s David Lloyd George, France’s Georges Clemenceau, and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando. It resulted in assigning Germany the responsibility for causing World War I, requiring the country to pay massive damages.

In 1606, 104 men left England to start the future settlement of Jamestown. The site was selected because it was surrounded by water and could be easily defended from the Spanish. However, Jamestown took heavy losses from disease, and by 1610, the settlement was deserted. Jamestown eventually recovered and became the capital of the colony in 1624.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was designed by architecture student Maya Lin in 1982. The memorial has three distinct parts: the Three Soldiers statue, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. The famous bronze statue depicts three combat soldiers gazing toward the Memorial Wall, which lists more than 58,000 names.

The Constitution, which was ratified in 1787, was initially opposed by a political group known as Anti-Federalists. The opposition, which feared putting too much power in the hands of a centralized government, was assuaged with a set of 10 amendments known as the Bill of Rights. These laws established and protected a series of rights and liberties that the newly empowered federal government would not be allowed to infringe upon.

The U.S. stock market crashed in October 1929, with the biggest trading day of the crash coming on Tuesday, October 29, now known as “Black Tuesday.” That day, around 16 million shares changed hands at the New York Stock Exchange, with billions of dollars lost. London markets had previously crashed in September, and the ripple effect began in the U.S. when the Dow Jones crashed on Thursday, October 24, which is also commonly referred to as “Black Thursday.”

All 13 of the original colonies became U.S. states between 1787 and 1790, beginning with Delaware and ending with Rhode Island. In 1790, Vermont became the first state to join the U.S. that wasn’t an original colony. It was followed by Kentucky in 1792 and Tennessee in 1796.

On December 16, 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty — disguised in Native American garb — dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The revolutionaries, armed with tomahawks, chopped gashes into the chests of tea to “thoroughly… expose them to the effects of the water.” The tea is estimated to have cost around $1 million in today’s dollars.

Issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation declared that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states were to be set free. However, the proclamation didn’t fully end slavery in the United States. Border states such as Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware still allowed the practice until the end of the Civil War in 1865.