The Workers In the decade-long American effort to construct the Panama Canal, tens of thousands of laborers   Panama Canal Museum Canal laborers head to work worked, sacrificed and died while building the largest canal the world had seen to date. Combating harsh terrain, disease, and deplorable living conditions, workers from around the world held a variety of different jobs in the canal zone, their pay and quality of life often directly related to their ethnicity. Long before the U.S. attempt at building the Panama Canal began in 1904, workers from around the world had been coming to the isthmus. In the early 1850s, the Panama Railroad Company imported thousands…

The First Mother’s Day Richard Cavendish May 10th, 1908 Richard Cavendish marks the birth of a day commemorating mothers. Julia Ward Howe, of ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ fame, tried to start a Mother’s Day for Peace in America after the Civil War, but nothing much came of it. One of her allies, however, was Anna Reece Jarvis, who died in Philadelphia in 1905. A memorial service was held for her at the Methodist church in Grafton, West Virginia, where she had taught Sunday school, at which her daughter, Anna May Jarvis, a feminist and temperance activist, was struck by the idea of a national day to honour mothers. Mother’s…

On this day in 1946, an undersea earthquake off the Alaskan coast triggers a massive tsunami that kills 159 people in Hawaii. In the middle of the night, 13,000 feet beneath the ocean surface, a 7.4-magnitude tremor was recorded in the North Pacific. (The nearest land was Unimak Island, part of the Aleutian chain.) The quake triggered devastating tidal waves throughout the Pacific, particularly in Hawaii. Unimak Island was hit by the tsunami shortly after the quake. An enormous wave estimated at nearly 100 feet high crashed onto the shore. A lighthouse located 30 feet above sea level, where five people lived, was smashed to pieces by the wave; all…

On this day in 1700, English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other. Although the day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery. Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last…