Emily Greene Balch wrote Our Slavic Fellow Citizens(1910), the classic study of Slavic immigration; helped found the National Women's Trade Union League; and campaigned for minimum wage legislation.

Historian Charles A. Beard published two influential books, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915). Beard emphasized an economic interpretation of history and the need to use historical research as a means of reform. He resigned from Columbia University in 1917 in protest over the dismissal of three faculty members who opposed America's involvement in World War I. He later helped found the New School for Social Research in 1919.

On 25 January 1915 the first transcontinental telephone call was made by Alexander Graham Bell in New York to Dr. Thomas A. Watson in San Francisco. Bell said,...