They say “History Repeats Itself” and “History Rhymes,” but History also creates cautionary tales. History is the reason we’ve kept ourselves from passing the line we drew on various problems in life. History is the reason we are making decisions every day. We may not know what to do during the day, but we always put one foot in front of the other and try to make the best choices we can and go about our day alive. We make history every second, every minute, every hour, and every day. History has enabled us to do better. Before such things happened, it was common for people to be exploited, tortured, and even be in outright danger without any retributions placed on the perpetrators, or even any lessons learned by the people. However, these actions were taken to the extreme, leading to wars, foreign attacks, and even outright mass murder. This article will cover some of the biggest events in history that led to the creation of organizations, government agencies, & even groups (officially recognized or not).

Before the early 1910s, Women and Children, both boys and girls, were subjected to unsanitary, immeasurable, and often illegal (today) working conditions, from work hours that stretched beyond 24 hours, to physical harm being a possibility. This was mainly done during the Gilded Age, where companies exploited the common people. This was even continued into the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, where the population of the U.S. doubled, with those from eastern, central, and southern Europe entering the country. However, this did lead to the economy increasing by the turn of the 20th century, this also led to child labor, misogyny in the workplace, and more. On March 25th, 1911, a fire occurred at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in the Asch Building, now known as the Brown Building, in Lower Manhattan, specifically in Greenwich Village on the intersection of Greene Street and Washington Place. The fire started when someone dropped a cigarette butt in a trash bin filled with flammable materials. The bin was then knocked over by a worker walking by, leading the bin to set the floor on fire. The elevator was working, but it could only store up to a small fraction of the 146 employees, almost all of them being young immigrant women. The exits and doors were closed up, a practice at the time to ensure no unauthorized breaks were taken during shifts & to minimize potential theft, so the women and girls had to jump out the windows, falling to their deaths. The firehoses were also too short to reach the 8th, 9th, & 10th floors of the building. There were also no sprinklers in the building, so the fire spread everywhere. The fire led to safety standards being improved and helped the ILGWU (International Ladies’ Garment Worker’s Union) grow drastically.

After WW1, the Triple Entente placed an immeasurable amount of repapations on Germany, specifically 132,000,000,000 gold marks in reparations. It took over 90 years for Germany to pay it all off, the final amount was paid off in 2010. However, the Weimar Republic was already suffering from inflation and changing ideologies. Adolf Hitler, who was struggling at this point, decided that the German people needed to get back on their feet. So, he used Jews as a scapegoat for Germany losing WW1, since Germany had a sizable, distinct population of Jews in the early 20th century. He would later publish his manifesto, Mein Kampf, in 1925. All of this would lead to Ghettos, Blitzkrieg, and eventually WW2. Japan was just as monstrous as Nazi Germany, having used tactics to plow through their colonies to virtually out of existence. When Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, and the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were Nuked 4 and a half months later, both ended the war completely. In October of that same year, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted and the United Nations was founded, with almost every country in the world coming together to ensure the bloodbath that was WW2 was never to happen again.

Air being used for transportation has only been a thing for 110+ years. And we still have a long way to go for it to reach the safety standards as water and land as transportation. While regulations for airplanes, like the various legislative acts enacted by Congress, we still have a long way to go to have aviation safety completely regulated. The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 opened a new chapter of new regulation and protocols. 9/11 exposed the flaws of airports and domestic security, as there were no scanners or x-ray machines before the traveler could enter into the terminal. This led to TSA (Transportation Security Administration) being founded 2 months after the attacks. 9/11 also exposed domestic security vulnerabilities, such as lack of communication between the FBI and CIA. The Department of Homeland security was also founded a year and a half after the attacks.

Not everything can be safe or secure the public. But with regulations, protocols, and laws, the most basic things of humanity, like labor, basic rights, and security between traveling, we can make life a little less scary and more breathable to live every day and ensure the next generation also feels the same way.