JANUARY 4

Mary Eliza Mahoney, the first formally trained Black nurse in the United States, dies at age 80. Mahoney was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1845, the eldest of three siblings born to free Black parents who moved up north from North Carolina. Initially, Mahoney worked as a janitor at New England Hospital, which itself was a pioneering place, being only the second hospital in the US to be run by women and the first to formally train nurses. It was this inaugural nurse training program that Mahoney was accepted into in 1878. With its sixteen-hour days, the sixteen-month New England Hospital nursing program was grueling. And out of the 40 applicants, only Mahoney and two other students made it to graduation day. This achievement made Mahoney the first formally trained Black nurse in America. After her training, Mahoney decided against working as a public nurse, reasoning that she would face less discrimination working as a private nurse for rich white folk. But she also became known for trying to make nursing a more accessible profession for other Black women. She was one of the first Black members of the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada and one of the founders of the National Association for Colored Graduate Nurses. Almost poetically, her life ended where her career began: at New England Hospital, where she died from breast cancer.

JANUARY 12

“Sam ‘n’ Henry” hits the airwaves for the first time, premiering on Chicago’s WGN radio station and is the first serialized radio sitcom. In two years, the show will change its name to Amos ‘n’ Andy, and its popularity will explode, with audiences apparently going gaga for two white guys pretending to be two Black guys from the South trying to build their lives in Chicago and later Harlem, like millions of other African Americans during the Great Migration. Despite its national popularity, the show’s reception among African Americans is mixed, with a majority of Black newspapers praising the show and some “denouncing the exploitation of certain types of American blacks for [the show creators’] own gain, with a result of undermining black self-respect.”

JANUARY 12

Country music singer Ray Price is born in Texas.

JANUARY 21

D.H. Lawrence releases the novel “The Plumed Serpent” to mixed reviews. Some critics see his story of an Irish woman’s “self-annihilating plunge into the intrigues, passions, and pagan rituals of Mexico” as “proto-fascist,” “an attack on Christianity” and everything in between.

JANUARY 25

Workers from the wool factories of Passaic, New Jersey, begin a 13-month-long strike, demanding better wages, a 44-hour work week, and overtime pay in response to a recent pay cut and reduction in hours. At its height, 15,000 textile workers would join the fray, often being beaten by local police and jailed. Although the strike is largely forgotten now, possibly because the workers failed to achieve their demands, the Passaic Textile Strike of 1926 gained national and international attention and proved that the Communist Party could be competent labor organizers, as they were the ones providing the relief, legal defense, and publicity for the workers for the duration of the strike.

FEBRUARY 14

Adolf Hitler and sixty or so Nazi Party leaders convene in Bamberg, Germany, where Hitler shuts down any dissent and potential schisms between the socialist and nationalist factions in the group, reaffirms the ideology laid out in the Twenty-Five Point Programme, and cements himself as the absolute and unquestioned authority within the party.

FEBRUARY 25

Dental implant pioneer Leonard Linkow is born in Brooklyn, New York. His work in dentistry will earn him a nomination for a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, the only dentist with that honor so far.

MARCH 11

Civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy is born in Linden, Alabama. He’ll become one of the most prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, playing an active role in organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the continuation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Poor People’s Campaign following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.

MARCH 16

Sergeant Stubby, a Boston terrier mutt and a celebrated World War I veteran, dies at the age of ten. An unlikely war hero, Stubby started off as a stray dog who had wandered onto the fields of Yale University while the 102nd Infantry Regiment was there training in 1917. Stubby quickly became the regiment’s mascot, impressing them with his ability to learn drills, bugle calls, and saluting. A private named J. Robert Conroy became particularly fond of Stubby and when it was time to ship out to France, he smuggled the dog onboard the SS Minnesota. It wasn’t until they had made it to the other side of the Atlantic that Conroy’s commanding officer learned of the four-legged stowaway. The story goes that the officer consented to letting the dog stay after Stubby saluted him. In the trenches of France, Stubby was not only useful in keeping the regiment’s morale up, but also in keeping them alive. He learned to alert them to imminent mustard gas attacks, incoming enemy artillery, and would locate soldiers who were lost in no man’s land. There is even a story told of how Stubby attacked and held down a German spy until American soldiers were able to get to the scene. (As remarkable as Stubby was, I have a hard time believing a 25-pound dog bested a grown man, but multiple sources swear it’s true.) For his heroism and the injuries he sustained while in the line of duty, Stubby was awarded several medals and was the first dog to be given a rank in the U.S. military. After returning stateside in 1918, Sergeant Stubby became a celebrity, leading parades and meeting politicians. He lived out the rest of his days with Conroy until he passed away in his sleep in March 1926. Conroy got Stubby taxidermied and eventually donated him to the Smithsonian in 1956. Sergeant Stubby is on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

MARCH 27

George Shima, the “Potato King” who was the first Japanese-American millionaire, dies in California. Originally known as Ushijima Kinji, Shima immigrated to California from Japan in 1889 as a young man after he failed his university entrance exam’s English section. At first he worked in San Francisco as a domestic servant, learning English in his spare time, but he later became a farm worker in the Sacramento Delta. In 1892, Shima, along with some friends, decided to start their own farm and purchased acres of undesirable mosquito-filled marsh land. It wasn’t until 1908, after much trial and error and debt,  when the fruits of Shima’s labor, which in this case was potatoes, began to grow in abundance. Over the next several years, Shima expanded his farm to encompass more than 28,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley and his Shima Fancy potatoes made up around 85 percent of California’s potato market. Unfortunately Shima’s growing mountain of potatoes and money couldn’t protect him from the U.S.’s xeniaphobia. A series of Alien Land Laws, both on the national and state levels, restricted Shima and other Asian Americans’ ability to buy land. On top of that, the Immigration Act of 1924 caused much of Shima’s Asian workforce to leave the U.S. and forced Shima to sell off his land. His attempts to fight the legislation as head of the National Japanese Association of America proved futile, so Shima and his family planned to return to Japan to escape the prejudice. Unfortunately, Shima suffered a stroke and died before he could leave.

APRIL 5

Silent film “For Heaven’s Sake” is released in theaters. Audiences love the comedic story of a rich man, played by Harold Lloyd, falling for a mission worker from the slums, played by Jobyna Ralston. The hourlong film earned $2.6 million, making it one of the highest-grossing films of the silent film era.

APRIL 9

Popular freak show performer Zip the Pinhead dies of bronchitis at age 83. His last words are supposedly, “Well, we fooled them for a long time, didn’t we?” Zip, whose given name was William Henry Johnson, made a spectacle —and a decent living— out of his unusually tapered head. Working with P.T. Barnum, they played up this feature by shaping Zip’s hair so it was pointed at the top, displaying him in a cage, and billing his act as “the missing link.” It has been debated whether or not Zip was truly a microcephalic, as he had the telltale tapered head, but was not reported to have any mental disabilities.

APRIL 11

Prolific botanist and horticulturalist Luther Burbank dies at age 77. Over the course of his 55-year career breeding plants, he developed more than 800 varieties of plants, including 113 varieties of plums and prunes, 10 varieties of berries, 50 varieties of lilies, the Freestone peach, the spineless cactus, and the Russet Burbank potato.

APRIL 21

Princess Elizabeth of York is born in London, England. Although not initially destined for the British throne, the abdication of her uncle King Edward VIII and the premature death of her father King George VI, results in the princess being crowned Queen Elizabeth II at age 25. She’ll go on to be the longest reigning monarch in British history.

APRIL 21

George Washington Murray, the last Black congressman to be elected in South Carolina until 1992, dies in Chicago, Illinois, at the age of 72. Born in Sumter County, South Carolina, in 1853, Murray was an enslaved person until the end of the Civil War. Despite not previously having a formal education, he attended the University of South Carolina (until they barred Black people from attending in 1877) and the State Normal Institute at Columbia. He worked as a teacher, farmer, and an inventor of agricultural machinery, and was active in the Sumter County Republican Party. In 1893, he was elected to Congress, the state’s only Black representative at the time. As a Congressman, Murray was especially interested in protecting the voting rights of Black men in the South. Ironically, it was the disenfranchisement of Black voters in his district that led to him losing his seat in the 1896 election. After his stint in Congress, Murray resumed farming and either leased or sold farmland to other Black farmers (sources tell two slightly different stories). In 1902 he was sued by two of the farmers, who claimed that he forged their signatures on a contract or that he cheated them out of land (again, the sources differ). Regardless, he was convicted and sentenced to three years of hard labor. Murray claimed that he didn’t receive a fair trial, so rather than submit to punishment, he fled South Carolina for Chicago, where he sold life insurance, worked in real estate, gave lectures, and wrote books on race relations.

APRIL 28

Author Harper Lee is born in Monroeville, Alabama. In 1960, her novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be published to great acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and becoming part of the American literary canon.

APRIL 30

Stunt pilot Bessie Coleman, the first Black American woman and first woman of Native American ancestry to obtain a pilot’s license, plummets to her death in a plane accident in Jacksonville, Florida. At the time of the accident, Coleman was preparing for an upcoming airshow, scouting potential jumping sites from the back of the cockpit while her mechanic William Wills was at the controls. Somehow, an unsecured wrench got caught in the plane’s gears, causing it to unexpectedly flip over and plummet to the ground. Coleman wasn’t strapped into the plane and fell to her death from 3,000 feet above ground. Wills, who was strapped in, also died upon impact. Coleman was mourned by the thousands of people who admired her tenacity to become an aviator despite being rejected from every flight school she applied to in the U.S. on account of her race and gender, respected her refusal to perform at any venue that didn’t admit Black people, and supported her dream to open a school to train Black aviators.

MAY 3

At one minute to midnight on May 3, 1926, the leaders of the U.K.’s Trade Union Congress officially declared that the nation’s coal miners were on strike to protest the lower wages and longer working hours being forced on them by the coal owners. The U.K.’s coal industry had been in trouble since the end of World War I, but another round of wage cuts would have further plunged the miners and their families into poverty. A million miners were not going to accept this fate without a fight, and neither were the nearly two million workers from other industries, such as printing, dock work, iron, and steel, who joined the strike in solidarity with the miners. For nine days, the strikers had the nation at a standstill. But, suddenly, unexpectedly, bafflingly, the union leaders blinked. For reasons still not quite understood to this day, the Trade Union Congress called off the strike without any guarantees for the miners. The miners who went back to work were forced to accept the worsened working conditions. On top of that, the following year, the government passed the Trade Disputes Act of 1927, banning sympathy strikes and mass picketing. Siri, play “In the End” by Linkin Park.

MAY 11

In LaBelle, Florida, a young Black road construction worker named Henry Patterson asks a young white woman named Hattie Crawford for a drink of water from her back porch. She runs out of her house screaming. A mob of 200 locals assume that Patterson assaulted Crawford and later find him and lynch him. Only once it’s too late does Crawford admit that Patterson never laid a hand on her. News of the lynching spreads across the country, and being that this is the fourth lynching in Florida recorded in the past six weeks, embarrassed state officials take the unusual step of actually attempting to find and prosecute those responsible for this extralegal execution. Fourteen white men are arrested for murder, but once it’s time for the trial, witnesses are suddenly unwilling to testify or seemingly have forgotten what occurred. As a result, the only legal consequence from Henry Patterson’s murder is that LaBelle’s sheriff loses his job because he did not try to stave off the mob.

MAY 14

After three days of fighting, the so-called May Coup ends in Poland with military leader Josef Pilsudski’s faction taking over the government and ending an era of political and economic instability in the country. Pilsudski appoints two allies as president and prime minister and takes on the role of minister of defense himself, but Pilsudski is still seen as the most influential person in Polish politics until his death in 1935.
After three days of fighting, the so-called May Coup ends in Poland with military leader Josef Pilsudski’s faction taking over the government and ending an era of political and economic instability in the country. Pilsudski appoints two allies as president and prime minister and takes on the role of minister of defense himself, but Pilsudski is still seen as the most influential person in Polish politics until his death in 1935.

MAY 16

The year’s top film, “Aloma of the South Seas,” premieres. The silent dramady about a love pentagon that plays out on a Pacific island grosses $3 million dollars. Despite its success, the film has been lost to time, as it wasn’t preserved. There was a remake in 1941, but it completely throws the original plot to the sharks. That joke would kill if you were able to see the OG film.

MAY 19

In honor of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Mint releases a commemorative half dollar coin that features George Washington and Calvin Coolidge, the sitting president, on the coin’s front and the Liberty Bell on the back. This marks the first time a U.S. president’s portrait is portrayed on a coin during his lifetime.

MAY 26

Jazz music legend Miles Davis is born in Alton, Illinois.

JUNE 1

It’s opening day for the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, an enormous fair held in honor of the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Despite the momentous occasion and having attractions such as an 80-foot replica of the Liberty Bell covered in 26,000 lights, the six-month expo becomes “America’s Greatest Flop,” as dubbed by Variety magazine. Out of the 30 to 50 million people expected to visit the fair, only 4.6 million make it out to “the Birthplace of America,” partly because of the terrible weather Philadelphia was having at the time. During the 184 days the expo was open, it rained on 107 of those days.

JUNE 1

Actor and entertainer Andy Griffith, best known for playing Andy Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show (1960 – 1968) and Ben Matlock in Matlock (1986 – 1995) is born in Mount Airy, North Carolina.

JUNE 3

Described as “a spiritual and sexually liberated ambassador for tolerance and enlightenment,” Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg is born in Newark, New Jersey.

JUNE 9

“States violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment when they exclude people on the basis of race or color from serving as grand jurors.” That is what lawyer Wilford Horace Smith successfully argued to the Supreme Court in Carter v. Texas in 1900, making him, along with co-consul Emanuel Hewlett, the first Black lawyers to win a case in front of the Supreme Court. Smith, who died on June 9, 1926, spent his career using litigation to reclaim the voting rights and civil liberties for Black people that the states tried to deny them post-Reconstruction. 

JUNE 16

Twelve-thousand fur workers in New York City’s Garment District return to work following a long, bloody seventeen-week strike that cost the fur industry an estimated 29 million dollars. The victorious Fur Workers Union, led by Ben Gold, received its demand for a 40-hour work week, a ten-percent wage increase, an end to subcontracting, and no new apprentices for two years. But because all bosses are bastards, the workers would be out on the picket line again a few years later to hold on to these gains.

JUNE 23

The very first Scholastic Aptitude Test is administered to 8,040 students across 353 locations in the U.S. With its 315 multiple-choice questions and 97-minute time limit, the original SAT, which was developed by psychology professor and eugenicist Carl Campbell Brigham, bore little resemblance to the test that tortures today’s collegebound hopefuls. The OG test was divided into nine sections — Definitions, Arithmetical Problems, Classification, Artificial Language, Antonyms, Number Series, Analogies, Logical Inference, and Paragraph Reading — that together were meant to gage students’ ability to reason and give colleges an uniform way to evaluate their applicants.

JUNE 28

Entertainer Mel Brooks is born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, as Melvin Kaminsky. The future EGOT winner will create sidesplitting comedies such as The Producers (1967), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), and Spaceballs (1987).

AUGUST 6

What would you do for a new car? Would you set a world record for swimming the British Channel? For Gertrude Ederle, a 20-year-old from New York City, the prospect of receiving a red roadster from her dad helped motivate her to become the first woman to successfully swim across the English Channel, completing the feat in fourteen hours and 31 minutes. Ederle, who had been swimming from a young age and had earned two bronze medals and a gold at the 1924 Olympics, blew all the previous men’s records out of the water by nearly two hours. Her record would stand for the next 35 years.

AUGUST 23

Remember our pal Theodoros Pangalos, the military general who declared himself dictator of Greece back in January? Let’s check up on him. In a little over eight months, he’s managed to suspend Parliament, suppress the press, get into a shooting war with Bulgaria, and institute a 30-inch rule regarding the hem of women’s skirts, along with other political and economic faux pas that have brought his fellow compatriots to the end of their rope and have moved them to dispose of their inept leader.

SEPTEMBER 11

Mussolini survives yet another attempt on his life. This time, an anarchist named Gino Lucetti threw a hand grenade at Mussolini’s car as he was driving by. The bomb hit the car’s windshield but only detonated once it rolled onto the road. The explosion injured eight people, none of them being Mussolini.

SEPTEMBER 18

Miami, Florida, experiences “the Big Blow,” otherwise known as the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. The Category Four hurricane with winds reaching up to 128 miles per hour completely devastated the fledgling, unprepared city, leaving 372 people dead, 6,000 people injured, and 800 people missing. In addition to the casualties, there was massive property damage, with 4,725 homes destroyed, leaving 25,000 people without shelter. Miami, and Florida as a whole, has never been a stranger to hurricanes, but this storm was particularly devastating because there were minimal warning signs, neither technologic nor meteologic, and because Miami, being the midst of a real estate boom at the time, had thousands of newcomers move into the area, most of whom were unfamiliar with dealing with a storm of this nature. There were several horrific tales of people going out into the open thinking the storm was over, not releasing that they were only in the eye of the hurricane and the worst was yet to come. In the aftermath of the hurricane, Miami’s real estate bubble bursts and it enters an economic depression. 

SEPTEMBER 20

If Al Capone had played the lotto on this day and won the jackpot, it wouldn’t be surprising. The Chicago Outfit gang leader left the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois, unharmed, after an ambush orchestrated by a rival gang led by Hymie Weiss. Reports estimate that 1,000 bullets were fired into the building, which served as Capone’s headquarters at the time. They all missed their intended target, not because Capone was bulletproof, but because he escaped out of the back of the hotel after possibly being warned about the attack. 
If Al Capone had played the lotto on this day and won the jackpot, it wouldn’t be surprising. The Chicago Outfit gang leader left the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois, unharmed, after an ambush orchestrated by a rival gang led by Hymie Weiss. Reports estimate that 1,000 bullets were fired into the building, which served as Capone’s headquarters at the time. They all missed their intended target, not because Capone was bulletproof, but because he escaped out of the back of the hotel after possibly being warned about the attack. 

SEPTEMBER 25

The member states of the League of Nations sign the International Slavery Convention with the goal of abolishing slavery in all forms and supressing the slave trade. This treaty marks the first internationally agreed upon definition of slavery which is still in use today. Peep the exemptions Britain and Spain added for themselves before signing though. Also peep the United States’ exemption for using slavery as a punishment for crime when it signed the treaty later in 1929. 

OCTOBER 18

The “father of rock and roll” Chuck Berry is born in St. Louis, Missouri. In the 1950s, he’ll rise to fame for his two-string guitar licks, showmanship, and songwriting that will connect particularly with the teenagers of the period.

OCTOBER 20

While travelling from Wisconsin to Minnesota, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress Olgivanna Hinzenberg are arrested for violating the Mann Act, a 1910 federal law that makes it illegal to transport a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.” The charges are later dropped, as the law is intended to target prostitution, rather than mere adultery, which Wright’s extensive experience with had been duly noted by the press over the previous couple of decades.

OCTOBER 22

Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel “The Sun Also Rises” is published. Based on Hemingway’s time in Europe during the 1920s, the novel, through its protagonist Jake, dishes on the debaucherous exploits of a group of American and British expats in Paris and in Spain. Their actions in the novel make it one of the quintessential works defining “the lost generation.”

NOVEMBER 3

Superstar sharpshooter Annie Oakley dies in Ohio at age 66. Her impressive marksmanship got her and her family out of poverty and made her internationally famous. From 1882 onward, she astonished audiences with her ability to split cards on their edges, snuff candles, and shoot corks off of bottles, rarely ever missing a shot, and earning her the nickname “Little Sure Shot” from Lakota leader Sitting Bull. After retiring from the vaudeville circuit in 1913, Oakley, who was born Phoebe Ann Moses (or Mosey) in 1860, spent her twilight years giving shooting lessons to thousands of women and performing at charity events. After her death in early November 1926, her husband of 50 years and manager, Frank Butler, became so distraught that he stopped eating and himself died before the end of the month.

NOVEMBER 5

“The Flying Ace,” a silent film with an all-Black cast, premieres in theaters. Produced by the Norman Film Manufacturing Company, a production company based in Jacksonville, Florida, that was devoted to creating films that portrayed Black people in nonstereotypical roles, “The Flying Ace” tells the story of a World World I fighter pilot returning home and resuming his career as a railroad detective. Set aside the fact that the U.S. military didn’t allow for Black pilots until 1940. Uniquely, there’s also a Black female pilot character in the film, based off of Bessie Coleman, who never got to see the film, as she died earlier in the year.

NOVEMBER 13

The character of Mary Poppins first appears in P.L. Travers’ short story “Mary Poppins and the Match-man,” where the two characters go on a fanciful date on Mary’s day off.

NOVEMBER 27

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is back again this month with another installment in his Sherlock Holmes detective stories, this time releasing “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane” in Liberty magazine, which is another rare story narrated by Holmes himself.

DECEMBER 3

British author Agatha Christie’s life briefly mirrors one of her mystery novels when she disappears from her home in Berkshire following an argument with her philandering husband. The next day her car is found abandoned with her driver’s license and clothes still in it, but Christie herself is gone. Police and press embark on a nationwide manhunt to find “the Queen of Crime,” with the authorities even enlisting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to channel his inner Sherlock Holmes. (Unhelpfully, instead of using deduction, he holds a seance.) Nearly two weeks into the search, the staff of the Swan Hydroponic Hotel recognizes Christie, who had been staying there under the name Theresa Neale. Bizarrely, Neale is the surname of her husband’s mistress. Even more bizarrely, Christie claims to not remember who she is and what has happened to her. At the time, the press wrote this episode off as a possible publicity stunt. But according to a later Daily Mail interview with Christie, the betrayal of her husband and the recent death of her mother had caused her to enter a “fugue state.”

DECEMBER 11

Blues singer Big Mama Thorton is born Willie Mae Thorton in Ariton, Alabama. She will become known for her outsized voice and presence, but despite her success, two of her biggest hits, “Hound Dog” and “Ball ‘n’ Chain,” will be usurped by Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin, respectively, without crediting or compensating her.

DECEMBER 11

Adolf Hitler continues to outline his political views in the second volume of Mein Kampf, the first volume being published the year prior. 

DECEMBER 18

Christmas comes early for Sherlock Holmes fans: Liberty magazine publishes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman.”