Elizabeth Nail (1906 - 1987)

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

In 1906, in the year that Elizabeth Nail was born, President Theodore Roosevelt received the Nobel Prize for Peace. The award was considered controversial at the time because many thought that he was an imperialist. But he had brokered peace between Russia and Japan a year previous and had allowed a dispute between Mexico and the U.S. to go to arbitration, resolving the issue peacefully rather than resorting to military conflict. For these two reasons, the Nobel Prize committee chose him for the Peace Prize.

In 1933, by the time she was 27 years old, the day after being inaugurated, the new President, Franklin Roosevelt, declared a four-day bank holiday to stop people from withdrawing their money from shaky banks (the bank run). Within 5 days of his administration, the Emergency Banking Act was passed - reorganizing banks and closing insolvent ones. In his first 100 days, he asked Congress to repeal Prohibition (which they did), signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, signed legislation that paid commodity farmers to leave their fields fallow, thus ending surpluses and boosting prices, signed a bill that gave workers the right to unionize and bargain collectively for higher wages and better working conditions as well as suspending some antitrust laws and establishing a federally funded Public Works Administration, and won passage of 12 other major laws that helped the economy.

In 1953, by the time she was 47 years old, on January 20th, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the 34th President of the United States. Formerly the 1st Supreme Allied Commander Europe in World War II, Eisenhower had never previously held a political office.

In 1979, she was 73 years old when on March 28th, a partial nuclear meltdown occurred at the power plant at Three Mile Island Pennsylvania. Radiation leaked into the environment, resulting in a rating of 5 on a scale of 7 ("Accident With Wider Consequences") . It ended up costing $1 billion to clean up the site.

In 1987, in the year of Elizabeth Nail's passing, on October 19th, stock exchanges around the world crashed. Beginning in Hong Kong then spreading to Europe, the crash then hit the United States. It was called Black Monday. The Dow Jones fell 508 points to 1,738.74 (22.61%).