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A severe economic panic, striking in 1893, led the city of Seattle to create the nation’s first municipal unemployment assistance office on this date in 1894. State and federal unemployment assistance wasn’t established until the 1930s. Recently, the national unemployment rate, as determined by the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, has settled to around 5.5 percent. In 2010, Washington state’s average was at the then national average of 9.6 percent. The most current unemployment rate in Washington state is 6.6 …

The first woman to serve in Congress took her seat on this date in 1917. Barely a month later, Jeannette Rankin of Montana shortly became one of the few representatives to vote against entry into World War I, a stand that contributed to her defeat when she ran for the Senate in 1918. She reentered Congress in 1940, and putting her principles ahead of office holding, cast the lone vote against declaring war on Japan after Pearl Harbor in 1941. …

Children have worked for family enterprises like farms and small shops for countless generations. But child labor in mines and the often-dangerous factories arising from the Industrial Revolution was quickly regarded as a social ill. In response, Massachusetts became the first state to regulate child labor on this date in 1842. The modest measure prohibited children under the age of 12 from working more than 10 hours a day. Now, all states have statutes regulating child labor, and nationally, the …

The capital of the vanquished Confederacy was the site of the first chartered black-owned bank in the U.S., founded on this date in 1888 by former slave and Union Army veteran William Washington Browne. It was known as the Savings Bank of the Grand Fountain, United Order of True Reformers. The bank provided mortgage loans and other banking services that were difficult for African-Americans to obtain in the segregated climate after reconstruction. When the bank opened, Richmond had a population …

On this date in 1872, America’s third female law student was graduated. But this third was a first. Charlotte Ray was a freeborn African-American, and the first black woman to graduate law school. With her degree from historically black Howard University, she shortly began her law practice in Washington, D.C., and was the first woman accredited to argue a case before the Supreme Court. When Charlotte Ray graduated, only some 8,500 college and professional degrees were awarded in the U.S. …