1886: The Statue of Liberty is dedicated. A gift from France to the United States, the statue was designed to symbolize freedom, with the statue stepping on chains and shackles to commemorate the end of slavery following the Civil War. A plaque at the lower level features Emma Lazarus’ famous poem “The New Colossus:” “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
Above, Gaétan Dugas; Glen Murray; Paul Pelosi; and the Statue of Liberty.
1919: Alcohol is officially banned when Congress passes the Volstead Act, which sets penalties and definitions to back up The Eighteenth Amendment, a constitutional ban on alcohol ratified earlier in the year. The ban was intended to help reduce crime, but organized crime will skyrocket over the 1920s.
1958: Mary Roebling becomes the first female board member of the New York Stock Exchange. She was already the first woman to lead a major bank in the United States, and will go on to serve in a number of private and public positions in finance and government, including as a civilian aide to the Army.
1974: Women and Black Americans receive protection from discrimination by creditors and lenders when The Equal Credit Opportunity Act is signed by President Gerald Ford. “… women are still too often treated as second-class citizens in the credit world,” Ford says afterwards. Prior to the Act, women had to have male co-signers on credit applications. and Blacks were often barred for loans at all or charged higher interest rates overall.
1981: Love, Sidney premieres, the first show with a gay character as a central character. Starring Tony Randall, the show received complaints from organizations like Moral Majority for its positive portrayal of a gay person.
1998: Glen Murray is elected Mayor of Winnipeg, Canada, becoming the first openly gay mayor of a North American city. A longtime community activist, Murray previously co-led a campaign to include sexual orientation in the Manitoba Human Rights Code, was active in HIV/AIDS outreach and prevention, and helped open an HIV clinic.
2009:The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act adds “perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability” to hate crime law protections. U.S. President Barack Obama signed the act, named after 21-year-old gay college student Matthew Shepard and 49-year-old worker James Byrd Jr., boh of whom were murdered in 1998. The act also removed a provision of hate crime laws that required the victim to be engaged in a federally protected activity.
2016: Scientists clear the name of Gaétan Dugas, French-Canadien flight attendant who had been blamed since the 1980s for bringing HIV to the United States. The journal Nature publishes news about the study, which builds on a study from 2007 that identified the HIV virus in the United States at least a decade before Dugas was accidentally labelled “Patient Zero” when a lab assistant mistook the phrase “Patient O” (intended to refer to Dugas status as “out of country.”
2022: The husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is attacked in the couple’s San Francisco home. Paul Pelosi received head injuries in the attack, for which David DePape is sentenced to life in prison. The investigation revealed DePape had also planned to attack other Democratic party leaders.
