1907
- May 27: Rachel Louise Carson was born in one of the upstairs bedrooms of her family home in Springdale, Pennsylvania
1918 (11 years old)
- Publishes her first article in the St. Nicholas magazine “A Battle in the Clouds”
1925 (18 years old)
- Graduates from Parnassus High
- September 15: arrived at Berry Hall at PCW
1928 (21 years old)
- February: Carson tells Miss Skinker about plans to declare Biology as her new major
1929 (22 years old)
- Signs a formal agreement offering 2 of her father’s lots to PCW as collateral and for plans of payment by installments
- June: graduated magna cum laude from PCW
- Summer: earned a scholarship to study at MBL
- Reapplied to John Hopkins with a recommendation from Skinker and earned a full scholarship
1930 (23 years old)
- Most of her family joins her in Baltimore
1932 (25 years old)
- Signs over to PCW the title of the pair of lots owned by her father that she’d offered as collateral in 1929
- Earns her master’s degree from John’s Hopkins University
- Fall: began work toward her PhD
1935 (28 years old)
- Early 1935: Took and passed civil service examinations in parasitology, wildlife biology and aquatic biology
- Father passed away, leaving Rachel head of the household
- October: hired as a field aide by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in their Baltimore office
1936 (29 years old)
- 1 march:The Baltimore Sun publishes her first newspaper story “It’ll be shad time soon”
- Spring: Higgins rejects “The World of Waters” and suggests that she submit it to the Atlantic Monthly magazine instead
1937 (30 years old)
- Early 1937: Marian Carson passes away from pneumonia, leaving Rachel and her mother to care for Marian’s two daughters- Virginia and Marjorie
- September: “Undersea” appears in the Atlantic’s September 1937 issue
1938 (31 years old)
- Met von Loon and Howe, started planning her first book
- Fall: took a working vacation to the Bureau of Fisheries station at Beaufort, North Carolina with her mother and two nieces
1940 (33 years old)
- Bureau of Fisheries merges with the Bureau of Biological Survey to form the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
- Transferred from Baltimore to a research laboratory at College Park, Maryland
1941 (34 years old)
- Simon and Schuster Publishes Under the Sea-Wind
1942 (35 years old)
- became assistant aquatic biologist to the Fishery Biology section of the Interior Department’s Fish & Wildlife Service
- August: transferred from the Interior building to offices rented for the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS)
1943 (36 years old)
- May: returns to the interior building in Washington
1945 (38 years old)
- FWS airplane sprays 117 acres of forest in Patuxent Research Refuge in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
- July.: Wrote a story about the dangers of DDT and proposed it to Reader’s Digest but it was rejected
- Began to consider leaving government service
1946 (39 years old)
- Carson undergoes surgery to remove a tumor from her breast, it is believed to be non-cancerous
- Started the Conservation in Action Series
- July: Visited the Maine coast with her mother
1948 (41 years old)
- asked to be released from her contract with Simon and Schuster
1951 (44 years old)
- The Sea Around Us was published
1952 (45 years old)
- Leaves the Fish & Wildlife Service to become a full-time author
1953 (46 years old)
- June: Carson moves to a cottage called Silverledges on the Maine shoreline with her mother, niece- Marjie and grandnephew- Roger
1955 (48 years old)
- The Edge of the Sea is published
1957 (50 years old)
- Niece- Marjie dies, leaving Carson to care for Roger, her grandnephew
1958 (51 years old)
- Maria Carson dies
- Reader’s Digest was planning a favorable article about DDT, Carson wrote to the magazine’s editor warning him of the harmful effects
- Signed a contract with her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, for a book about pesticides tentatively titled “The Control of Nature”, would appear in installments in the New Yorker
1960 (53 years old)
- While writing Silent Spring, Carson discovers that she has cancer
1962 (55 years old)
- Silent Spring is published
- June 1962 three long excerpts of Silent Spring published in consecutive issues of the New Yorker
- September: CBS Reports interested in making an episode on Silent Spring and its author
- October: Life magazine wrote a piece about Carson
1963 (56 years old)
- April: Appears in television special “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson”
- May: The Science Advisory Committee issues a report that supports Carson’s claims
- June: Testifies in Congress about the harmful long-term effects of pesticides on human beings as well as the environment
1964 (57 years old)
- April 14: Carson dies in her home at Silver Spring, Maryland, after a long battle with breast cancer
1970
- The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is created
1972
- DDT is banned in the U.S.
1980
- Carson posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter
1991
- The Rachel Carson Prize is established
2004
- The Rachel Carson Award is established by the Audubon Society