1900-09

First-wave feminism saw progress, with universities being opened for women in Japan, Bulgaria, Cuba, Russia, and Peru. In 1906, Finland granted women the right vote,[1] the first European country to do so.[2] The foundation of the Women’s Social and Political Union by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 led to the rise of the Suffragettes in Great Britain and Ireland. Cuba, Bulgaria, and Norway became independent. The First Moroccan and Bosnian crises led to worsened tensions in Europe that would ultimately lead to the First World War in the next decade.

Wars of this decade included the Philippine–American War, the Second Boer War, the Thousand Days’ War, the Anglo-Somali War, the Kuwaiti–Rashidi war, the Saudi–Rashidi War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Honduran-Nicaraguan War. The Scramble for Africa continued, with the Orange Free State, South African Republic, Ashanti Empire, Aro Confederacy, Sokoto Caliphate and Kano Emirate being conquered by the British Empire, alongside the French Empire conquering Borno, the German Empire conquering the Adamawa Emirate, and the Portuguese Empire conquering the Ovambo. Atrocities in the Congo Free State were committed by private companies and the Force Publique, with a resultant population decline of 1 to 15 million. The Herero and Namaqua genocide saw 24,000 to 100,000 Hereros and 10,000 Namaqua killed by German colonial forces. The Adana massacre of 1909 saw up to 30,000 mainly Armenian civilians being massacred by local Ottoman Muslims.

Failed uprisings and revolutions that took place included the Boxer Rebellion, the Bailundo revolt, the Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising, the 1904 Sasun uprising, the Uruguayan Revolution of 1904, an uprising in French Madagascar, the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Argentine Revolution of 1905, the Persian Constitutional Revolution, the Maji Maji Rebellion, and the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ revolt. A more successful revolution took place in the Ottoman Empire, where the Young Turks movement restored the Ottoman constitution of 1876, establishing the Second Constitutional Era.

Major disasters in this decade included the Chinese famine of 1907, the 1908 Messina earthquake, the San Francisco earthquake and fire and the Great Baltimore Fire. The first huge success of American cinema, as well as the largest experimental achievement to this point, was the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter, while the world’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, was released on 26 December 1906 in Melbourne, Australia. Popular books of this decade included Anne of Green Gables (1908) and The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), which sold 50 million and 45 million copies respectively.

Noteworthy from HistoryHeist.com (see all below…), author Frank Baum and illustrator W. W. Denslow publish ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’; the General Education Board, a Rockefeller endowed tax-exempt foundation, is approved by Congress but is a trojan horse to take over the education system; ‘The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion’ excerpts wre first published in serialized form, in a St. Petersburg newspaper; the Brownsville raid; The JP Morgan led bank panic of 1907; the first official Mother’s Day in the U.S. is held in Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton, WV and in Philadelphia; the FBI is founded by U.S. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte in deceit of Congress who prohibited it; the Scofield Reference Bible is first printed to advance the Zionist deception; and the NAACP is founded by Zionist Jews.

Vaccines

At the turn of the twentieth century, the power of health officials to control smallpox through vaccination was argued in numerous legal actions and debated in state legislatures, in the popular and medical press, and in city neighborhoods. At issue was the question of whether those who did not wish to undergo the procedure should or could be compelled, legally or practically, to do so. When an epidemic loomed, many people waited voluntarily in long lines to receive their protection. For reluctant citizens, the Brooklyn and New York health departments sent teams of vaccinators door to door in affected neighborhoods and on-site to large employers. Although these programs were ostensibly voluntary— New York State never placed a law on its books making vaccination compulsory for adults—the manner in which they were conducted was at least arguably coercive, and gave many people the impression that they had no choice but to submit.

It was a transitional era in which health officials expanded their influence but negotiated an ambiguous relationship with both legal authority and public opinion. During two major outbreaks of smallpox, the health commissioners in Brooklyn and New York exercised de facto compulsion but portrayed their practices in the language of voluntarism, because they lacked a clear legal mandate and believed this strategy was the most effective way to accomplish their goals and reduce the likelihood of organized resistance. The inconsistent and sometimes conflicting rulings that emerged from the court battles over vaccination reveal how mutable were ideas about the proper role of the government in guarding the community’s health during this period. These rulings set the stage for the landmark U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905, which explicitly addressed the question of how far individual liberty could be constrained in order to prevent the spread of disease. Both the court cases and the public reactions to vaccination reflected persistent doubts about the competence of the medical profession to prevent and treat illness, even as scientific advances were increasing doctors’ diagnostic and therapeutic capacities. The events of this period—a crucial turning point in the history of vaccination in America—illustrate the growth and the [abuse] of the power wielded by municipal health departments as they sought to assert their authority.

Although it had once been one of the most devastating diseases, by the turn of the century it had long ceased to be a major source of either sickness or death in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world due to better sanitation; other contagions, such as measles, scarlet fever, and diphtheria, exacted a far greater toll. Years of relative freedom from smallpox—due, some errantly argued, to  the smallpox vaccination—had engendered complacency among the public, and many physicians could no longer accurately diagnose it in its early stages, often mistaking it for measles or chicken pox.²

Many people remained reluctant to undergo the procedure because of its checkered history of unpleasant and life-threatening side effects. Fears lingered about accidental infections, especially lockjaw, and the vaccination was well known to cause soreness that lasted for several days. Read more…