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…

MIDDLE EAST NEWSMARCH 31, 2011 In Key Defection, Libyan Minister Resigns His Post By DAVID GAUTHIER-VILLARS, ALISTAIR MACDONALD and MARGARET COKER In a major diplomatic setback to Col. Moammar Gadhafi, Libya’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa resigned from his position and may announce his defection as early as Thursday, European government officials said. A British Foreign and Commonwealth office spokesman said. Mr. Koussa arrived in England from Tunisia Wednesday where he resigned his position as Libyan Foreign Minister, Reuters Libyan Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa in 2010. “He travelled here under his own free will,” the spokesman said. The U.K. is currently in discussions with Mr. Koussa, the spokesman said, declining to…

  Albert Einstein The German-born physicist Albert Einstein developed the first of his groundbreaking theories while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office in Bern. After making his name with four scientific articles published in 1905, he went on to win worldwide fame for his general theory of relativity and a Nobel Prize in 1921 for his explanation of the phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect. An outspoken pacifist who was publicly identified with the Zionist movement, Einstein emigrated from Germany to the United States when the Nazis took power before World War II. He lived and worked in Princeton, New Jersey, for the remainder of his life.…

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire   On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 145 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable–most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The tragedy brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop conditions of factories, and led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers. The Triangle factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, was located in the top three floors of the…