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 July 13, 1985, at Wembley Stadium in London, Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially open Live Aid, a worldwide rock concert organized to raise money for the relief of famine-stricken Africans. Continued at JFK […]
On August 6, 1996, NASA and Stanford researchers announce they have found signs of Martian life in a meteorite discovered 12 years earlier in Allan Hills, Antarctica, causing a worldwide sensation. But some viewed the […]
Over 20,000 garment workers, almost all of them Asian American women, pack into Columbus Park in New York City’s Chinatown on June 24, 1982. The rally and subsequent march demonstrate the workers’ power to the […]
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