Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai

1940 – 2011

Activism & Social Change

Wangarĩ Maathai was a Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist who founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on planting trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Contemporaries

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez

Their World

Global Events

1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor; US enters WWII

1944 D-Day: Allied invasion of Normandy

1945 Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; WWII ends

1945 United Nations founded

1947 India and Pakistan gain independence

1948 State of Israel established

1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted

1949 People's Republic of China proclaimed

1950 Korean War begins

1953 Watson and Crick discover DNA structure

1955 Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

1957 Sputnik launched; Space Age begins

1959 Cuban Revolution; Castro takes power

1961 Berlin Wall constructed

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

1963 Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

1964 Civil Rights Act signed in the United States

1969 Apollo 11: first humans walk on the Moon

1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and independence

1973 1973 oil crisis

1975 Fall of Saigon; Vietnam War ends

1979 Iranian Revolution

1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster

1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall

1989 Tiananmen Square protests

1990 Nelson Mandela released from prison

1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union

1994 Rwandan genocide

1994 End of apartheid; South Africa holds first free elections

1997 Dolly the Sheep cloned

1998 Good Friday Agreement signed in Northern Ireland

2001 September 11 attacks

2003 Human Genome Project completed

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami

2008 Global financial crisis

2010 Arab Spring begins

2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster

In Their Field

1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted

1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott begins

1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivers 'I Have a Dream' speech

1964 Civil Rights Act signed into US law

1969 Stonewall riots spark LGBTQ rights movement

1973 American Indian Movement occupies Wounded Knee

1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines

1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China

1990 Nelson Mandela released; apartheid dismantled

2011 Arab Spring uprisings spread across Middle East