This Year in History:
2021
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
On the afternoon of January 6, 2021, a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters descend on the U.S. Capitol, attempting to interfere with the certification of electoral votes from the 2020 presidential election. The rioters assaulted the Capitol police force and ransacked the complex, destroying property and sending members of Congress and their staff into […]
Kamala Harris makes history when she is sworn in as the 49th U.S. vice president on January 20, 2021, becoming the first woman, the first Black American and the first Asian American to occupy the office. When Harris was chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate in August 2020, the former California senator and attorney general, […]
Deb Haaland is sworn in as Secretary of the Interior. She is the first Indigenous person to serve as a cabinet secretary in U.S. history. Incoming President Joe Biden announced his nomination of Deb Haaland, first-term congresswoman from New Mexico, to serve as Secretary of the Interior on December 17, 2020. Three months later, the […]
Early in the morning on June 24, 2021, 98 people die when a 12-story, beachfront condominium building collapses in Surfside, Florida, near Miami. The disaster is one of the worst of its kind in U.S. history. Responders pulled dozens of survivors from the 40-year-old Champlain Towers South building the day of the collapse. But searches […]
On July 2, 2021, the United States vacates Bagram Airfield, the U.S. Air Force Base north of Kabul, and turns it over to Afghan forces, a major milestone in the longest war in U.S. military history. Bagram, previously used by the Soviet Union to store aircraft hangars, had become the epicenter of the U.S. occupation. […]
On August 15, 2021—just two weeks before U.S. troops were set to officially withdraw from Afghanistan—Taliban leaders enter the capital city of Kabul and sweep back into power with little resistance. The Afghan government collapses, the country’s president Ashraf Ghani flees, and many desperate Afghan civilians are left behind. The withdrawal ended a two-decade war […]
On August 23, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fully approves the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for people aged 16 and older, following a manufacturing review and analysis of the company’s expanded clinical trial, which included approximately 44,000 participants and found the vaccine to be 91 percent effective in preventing COVID-19. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was […]
On October 13, 2021, Canadian actor William Shatner—best known for his iconic “Star Trek” role as Captain Kirk—boards Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space shuttle with three other people, and becomes the oldest living person to travel into space at age 90. News stations broadcast the historic launch. As exciting as exploring space may seem, despite […]
