1960

Medsger graduates as valedictorian of her high school in West Wheatfield Township, Armagh, Pennsylvania.

1964

After earning her bachelor's degree from Grover City College, she starts her career at the Tribune-Democrat in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where she says she becomes "a thinking person" for the first time.

1967

Wanting to experience life in a city, she moves to Philadelphia where she works for the Evening Bulletin covering education, religion and race issues. Committed to unbiased coverage of the Second Vatican Council and its impact on Philadelphia's large Catholic population, she clashes with Catholic editors and leaves the Bulletin for The Washington Post in January of 1970.

1971

As a Washington Post reporter, she finds in her mailbox an anonymous manila envelope containing stolen documents from the FBI's office in Media, Pennsylvania.

It was the first time a journalist had received stolen government files from sources outside the government. It was also the first time Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham confronted demands from the Nixon administration to suppress a story.

Despite immense pressure, and only months after Vice President Spiro Agnew's dismissal of the media as "nattering nabobs of negativism," The Post publishes the FBI story. Three months later the Post publishes the Pentagon papers . A year later, the Post begins publishing the Watergate stories.

1973

Medsger reports and produces "Don't Call Me Girl Anymore," a seven-part documentary series on domestic workers and "D.C. Village One Year Later," a five-part series on a public home for the city's elderly, for the local NBC television station.

1974

Medsger travels throughout the United States photographing women for her first book, "Women at Work: A Photographic Documentary," The photographs, also exhibited in one-woman shows in the U.S. and abroad, were the first collection of images to illustrate the full range of work, traditional and non-traditional, done by American women.

1975

The U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare commissions Medsger's photography exhibit, "Women in Health," for the International Conference on Women and Health in Washington, D.C.

Her book, "Women at Work: A Photographic Documentary," is published.

1977

Medsger joins the faculty at San Francisco State University as a part-time lecturer. She would be hired as the first full time female faculty member in 1981. She leads department in making major revisions in the department's curriculum, including adding an experience-based reporting course, the adding journalism ethics as a required course and as a subject to be included in all journalism skills courses.

1983

Her book, "Framed: The New Right Attack on Chief Justice Rose Bird and the Courts," is published.

San Francisco State University awards her a doctoral equivalency for her body of work over the previous 18 years.

1985

Medsger is named Chair of the Department of Journalism at San Francisco State University. In this capacity she leads successful efforts to racially integrate the previously all white faculty and the mostly white student body.

1989

At a dinner party in Philadelphia, Medsger's hosts reveal themselves as two of the eight burglars of the FBI's Media, Pennsylvania, office. She learns they had all avoided arrest, despite one of the largest FBI investigations in history of the bureau as of that time.

Her hosts tell her that shortly after the break in, the burglars agreed to take the secret of the burglary to their graves and, as a precaution against arrest, to not associate with each other. Weeks later, Medsger begins plans to convince the burglars to reconsider that vow and be interviewed for a book about this important and largely unknown piece of American history. Eventually, all eight agree to participate and six agree to reveal their names.

Medsger conducts research for the book on a part-time basis over many years, interviewing the burglars and their children, FBI agents, congressional staff and intelligence scholars; reading the 34,000-page bureau investigation of the burglary, transcripts of a related trial, as well as many thousands of pages of official reports and investigations, journalistic and scholarly articles and books. Her goal: to write a book that tells the story of the burglary but also the story of the impact of this act of resistance and its revelations on the FBI, the government and the public.

1990

With faculty approval, Medsger founds the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism in San Francisco State University's Department of Journalism. The Center became a national model for creating effective methods to recruit, retain and place a growing number of journalists of color in newsrooms.

1996

Backed by The Freedom Forum , Medsger conducts a comprehensive national study of journalism education in the U.S. The resulting book, "Winds of Change – Challenges Confronting Journalism Education," has been used in journalism education programs across the world.

1997

A retrospective exhibit of Medsger's "Women at Work" photographs runs in San Francisco.

Photographs from Medsger's "I Don't Just Cope – I Live" series on life for the physically disabled are featured extensively in the documentary film Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien," which wins that year's Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject).

2003

Medsger teaches a seminar on race and ethnicity at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

2014

"The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI" is published. In the book, Medsger tells the story of the Media, Pennsylvania, burglars and their theft of the FBI's COINTELPRO files.

Documentary film, "1971," made possible because of Medsger's reporting and book, in which she is interviewed.