At Home: 1890 - Timeline: 1890

Time Line--1890-1920

29 Women's ballot box, Austin township, Macon County [19k]	1891	Women were first allowed to vote in Illinois school- board elections. This opened the door for women to press for other political rights.
	1893	Financial panic led to the failure of over 3,000 businesses in Illinois over the next four years, putting thousands of people out of work.
	1893	World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago celebrated the "stupendous results of American enterprise" and attracted 27 million visitors over six months. The first Ferris Wheel towered 250 feet over the midway and could carry 2,160 people at one time.
30 Ferris Wheel at Columbian Exposition [37k]	1894	Workers at Pullman Car Company went out on strike after suffering wage cutbacks. President Cleveland sent in federal troops to end strike over objections of Governor Altgeld. Subsequent defeat of union workers and severe economic depression curbed worker activism.
	1903	Wright brothers made their first powered flight in a biplane modeled after one built by Octave Chanute, a Chicago engineer.
	1903	Illinois established the 8-hour work day.
	1905	Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, was founded in Chicago. Over the next 20 years, editorials and advertisements in this paper attracted thousands of southern blacks to the North.
31 Tenement living, Chicago [35k]	1906	Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, set in Chicago's meat-packing plants, exposed terrible working conditions. It also advanced the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, which forbid the sale of prepared foods and patent medicines that were impure, misbranded, or harmful.
	1907	The Hurley Machine Co. of Chicago marketed the first electric washing machine, The Thor, patented by Alva J. Fisher of Chicago.
	1913	Congress passed the 16th Amendment creating the federal income tax.
	1917-1918	Illinois sent 351,153 men to fight in World War I. At home Illinois women helped make hospital supplies and learned to prepare wheatless and meatless meals to conserve food. Some filled agricultural and industrial jobs vacated by men at war.
32 Storeroom at Chicago Union Stock Yards [41k]	1918-1919	Influenza epidemic afflicted 2,500,000 people in Illinois and killed 22,207.
	1919	Illinois ratified the 18th Amendment, which banned the "manufacture, sale, or transport of intoxicating liquor." This effort closed 7,000 saloons in Chicago, 300 in Peoria, and 220 in Springfield.
	1919	One of the worst race riots in the country started in Chicago with the drowning of a black child in a white swimming area. The riot was fueled by white fears that blacks would try to move out of the "Black Belt" on the south side of Chicago into white communities.