January 5, 1901 – Typhoid Fever breaks out in a Seattle jail, the first of two typhoid outbreaks in the United States during the year. January 10 – In the first great Texas gusher, oil is discovered at Spindletop in Beaumont, Texas. March 4 – William McKinley is sworn in, for a second term as President of the United States. March 17: A showing of 71Vincent van Gogh paintings in Paris, 10 years after his death, creates a sensation. April 25: New York becomes the first U.S. state to require automobile license plates. May 3: The Great Fire of 1901 begins in Jacksonville, Florida. May 17: The Panic of 1901 begins when the New York Stock Exchange crashes. August 14: The first claimed powered flight is made, by German-born American aviator Gustave Whitehead, in his Number 21, in Connecticut. September 2: U.S. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt utters the famous phrase, "Speak softly and carry a big stick", at the Minnesota State Fair. October 24: Michigan schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor goes over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and survives. September 6: William McKinley assassination: American anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots U.S. President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley dies 8 days later. December 12: Guglielmo Marconi receives the first trans-Atlantic radio signal, sent from Poldhu, England, to Newfoundland; it is the letter "S" in Morse code. (date unknown): American businessman William S. Harley draws up plans for his first prototype motorcycle.

January 24 , 2016: In Browning, Montana, the temperature drops from 44 °F to −56 °F in one day, the greatest change ever on record for a 24-hour period. February 11: Emma Goldman is arrested for lecturing on birth control. March 8 and 9: Mexican Revolution: Pancho Villa leads about 500 Mexican raiders in an attack against Columbus, New Mexico, killing 12 U.S. soldiers. A garrison of the U.S. 13th Cavalry Regiment fights back and drives them away. March 15: President Woodrow Wilson sends 12,000 United States troops over the U.S.-Mexico border to pursue Pancho Villa; the 13th Cavalry regiment enters Mexican territory. June 15: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America. July 1 to 12: At least one shark mauls five swimmers along 80 miles of the New Jersey coastline resulting in four deaths and the survival of one youth who required limb amputation. This event is the inspiration for author Peter Benchley, over half a century later, to write Jaws. August 25: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs legislation creating the National Park Service. September 1: The Keating-Owen Act, the first federal law to restrict child labor, is passed, but is ruled unconstitutional in 1918. October 16: Margaret Sanger opens a family planning and birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the U.S., a forerunner of Planned Parenthood.] Nine days later, she is arrested for breaking a New York state law prohibiting distribution of contraceptives. November 1: The first 40-hour work week officially begins in the Endicott-Johnson factories of Western New York. November 21: The U.S. rejects a German offer of £10000 per American lost in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. The following April, President Wilson asks the U.S. Congress for a declaration of war on Germany.