On October 8, 2004, Kenyan environmental justice organizer Wangari Maathai receives a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her “contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace,” becoming the first African woman to win the award.
Maathai was born to peasant farmers in 1940, and grew up in a rural community in Kenya. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States before returning in 1966 to a newly independent Kenya, where she then became the first woman in east and central Africa to earn a doctorate degree. In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organization focused on reducing poverty and preserving the natural environment.
On March 16, 1968, a platoon of American soldiers brutally kills as many as 500 unarmed civilians at My Lai, one of a cluster of small villages located near the northern coast of South Vietnam. […]
On July 4, 1965, more than two dozen LGBTQ activists demonstrate in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia in one of the earliest gay rights demonstrations in the United States. The “Reminder” demonstration, held annually through […]
The Soviet Union inaugurates the “Space Age” with its launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for “satellite,” was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from […]
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