The 1900s Arts and Entertainment: Chronology

1900:     February 5 The drama Sappho by Clyde Fitch premieres in New York, but is closed by the police after only twenty-nine performances due to complaints of "immorality."

1900:     April 23 Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show opens at Madison Square Garden.

1900:     April 30 Railroad engineer Casey Jones dies as he jams the brakes on his wreck-bound train, saving all his passengers. Jones soon is immortalized as an American hero when Wallace Saunders composes a popular song about him.

1901:     February 2 The opera Tosca by Giacomo Puccini debuts in New York.

1901:     February 21 Vaudeville performers organize to strike and protest against the inclusion of motion pictures on vaudeville bills.

1901:     March 13 Andrew Carnegie, the steel tycoon, donates $2.2 million to fund a New York public library system.

1901:     June 24 Painter Pablo Picasso opens his first exhibition at Galeries Vol-lard, Paris.

1901:     December 10 Sweden awards the first Nobel Prizes for achievement in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace.

1902:     April 16 Tally's Electric Theater, the first theater solely devoted to presenting motion pictures, opens in Los Angeles.

1902:     May 1 Georges Méliès premieres A Trip to the Moon, which is considered to be the first science fiction film.

1902:     December 21 Guglielmo Marconi transmits the first wireless signals across the Atlantic Ocean.

1903:     February The Ladies' Home Journal becomes the first American magazine to reach one million paid subscriptions.

1903:     May 6 Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus" (1883) is affixed to the Statue of Liberty.

1903:     September 12 African American composer Scott Joplin's ragtime opera, A Guest of Honor, begins a Midwest tour.

1904:     January 17 Russian writer Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard premieres in Moscow.

1904:     March 23 The first color newspaper photograph is published in the London Daily Illustrated Mirror.

1904:     April 30 The St. Louis World's Fair opens.

1904:     September 1 Helen Keller, who lost both her sight and hearing at age two, graduates from Radcliffe College.

1905:     May 5 The Chicago Defender, the first major black newspaper, begins publication.

1905:     June The era of the nickelodeon begins when Harry Davis's Pittsburgh movie theater offers continuous movie showings. By the end of the decade more than eight thousand nickel-admission movie theaters are in operation.

1906:     January 8 Protestors in New York City claim The Clansman, a play based upon Thomas Dixon's novel, is racist.

1906:     February Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle, a novel depicting the horrible conditions in the meat-packing industry. The work prompts the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and influences the Pure Food and Drug Act.

1906:     April 14 President Theodore Roosevelt coins the term "muckraking" when he criticizes journalists who expose corruption and abuses and miss the larger picture.

1906:     April 18 A major earthquake and fire destroy much of San Francisco.

1907:     June 10 French motion picture pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière announce they have developed a method of producing color film.

1907:     July 8 Florenz Ziegfeld's musical revue, the Ziegfeld Follies, opens in New York.

1907:     August 24 The works of American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt are displayed in New York.

1907:     December 3 Actress Mary Pickford makes her stage debut in The Warrens of Virginia.

1908:     February 11 Thomas Edison and his film-producing partners win a series of patent infringement lawsuits that keeps their competitors out of the film business. Edison claimed his competition illegally infringed on his patented motion picture camera technology.

1908:     March The Original Independent Show, organized in New York, includes works by American painters Edward Hopper, George Bellows, and Rockwell Kent.

1908:     September 6 Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot opens in New York City. The title becomes an internationally recognized description of the United States.

1909:     March 23 Former President Theodore Roosevelt leaves for a safari in Africa. He is paid fifty million dollars to publish his account of the trip.

1909:     May 1 American painter John Singer Sargent's works are hailed at the Royal Academy Art Show in London.

1909:     May 3 The first wireless press message is sent from New York to Chicago.