Charlotte Russell (1903 - 1979)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during Charlotte's lifetime.

In 1903, in the year that Charlotte Russell was born, the United States Department of Commerce and Labor was created by President Theodore Roosevelt to control the excesses of big business. Renamed the Department of Commerce 10 years later, many departments concerned with workers were transferred to the Department of Labor at that time. Another spin-off, the Bureau of Corporations, became the Federal Trade Commission.

In 1915, when she was merely 12 years old, in April, the Ottoman Empire rounded up, arrested, and deported 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Turkey. As their actions continued through the next several years, an estimated 600,000 to 1 million Armenians were killed by Turkish soldiers.

In 1923, Charlotte was 20 years old when the A.C. Nielsen Company was founded in Chicago. It provided an audience measurement system that could provide radio station owners with information on their listeners and the popularity of their shows. Later, the Nielsen company became the basis for the fate of television programs.

In 1964, she was 61 years old when in June, three young civil rights workers - Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner from New York City, and James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi - were kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi. Working with "Freedom Summer", they were registering African-Americans to vote in the Southern states. Their bodies were found two months later. Although it was discovered that the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff's Office and the Philadelphia, Mississippi Police Department were involved, only 7 men were convicted and served less than six years.

In 1979, in the year of Charlotte Russell's passing, on November 4th, Iranian militant students seized the US embassy in Teheran and held 52 American citizens and diplomats hostage for 444 days. They were released at the end of the inauguration speech of the newly elected Ronald Reagan.