This is the fourth (and last) part of a four-part Timeline of Human History.  To see the other parts, click on the following links:
Timeline of Human History I: Prehistory-1499
Timeline of Human History II: 1500-1799
Timeline of Human History III: 1800-1899
Timeline of Human History IV: 1900-1999

NOTE: Some of the dates given below are approximate and some are subject to debate.

1900

• In the Boxer Rebellion: (1) the Boxers march to Beijing, where they lay siege to foreign legations; (2) in support of the Boxers, Empress Dowager Cixi declares war on all foreign powers; and (3) an eight-nation alliance (including the UK, the US, Russia and Japan) invades China and defeats the forces of the Boxers and the Chinese government (China).
• Paul Ulrich Villard discovers gamma rays (France).
• The White Pass & Yukon Route is completed (Canada).
  

  Don’t look down: a view of the White Pass and Yukon Route railway in Canada.

• Lord Jim, a novel written in English by Joseph Conrad (UK).
• Sister Carrie, a novel written in English by Theodore Dreiser (US).
• Uncle Vanya, a play written in Russian by Anton Chekhov (Russia).
• Tosca, an Italian opera by Giacomo Puccini, premieres in Rome (Italy).
• First European dance performance by Isadora Duncan, at the Lyceum Theatre in London (UK).
• Gottfried Daimler dies.
• Death of Oscar Wilde in Paris, France.
• Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir dies.
• Wolfgang Pauli is born in Vienna, Austria.

1901

• The Australian colonies unite under a single government.
• Theodore Roosevelt becomes 26th president of the United States.
• J.P. Morgan and Elbert H. Gary combine three preexisting steel companies to form U.S. Steel (US).
• Max Planck proposes that electromagnetic radiation consists of waves that gain and lose energy in finite packets called quanta (quantum theory) (Germany).
  

  A 1915 photograph of Max Planck (1858-1947).

• Karl Landsteiner identifies the A, B, and O blood types (Austria).
• Guglielmo Marconi announces the first transatlantic radio transmission (later disputed) (UK, Canada).
• Charles Hart and Charles Parr sell their first model No. 1 tractor (US).
• Dan Albone builds the Ivel Agricultural Motor tractor (UK).
• Herbert Cecil Booth invents an electric vacuum cleaner (UK).
  

  Herbert Cecil Booth’s jumbo-sized vacuum cleaner in the early 20th Century.

• Buddenbrooks, a novel written in German by Thomas Mann (Germany).
• Kim, a novel written in English by Rudyard Kipling (UK).
• Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, by Sergei Rachmaninoff (Russia).
• Death of Queen Victoria (UK).
• Linus Pauling is born in Portland, Oregon, US.
• Enrico Fermi is born in Rome, Italy.
• Werner Heisenberg is born in Würzburg, Germany.
• Ernest O. Lawrence is born in Canton, South Dakota, US.
• Birth of Walt Disney in Chicago, Illinois, US.
• Louis Armstrong is born in New Orleans, Louisiana, US.
• Hirohito is born in Tokyo, Japan.

1902

• The eruption of the Mount Pelée volcano kills 29,000 (Martinique).
  

  A 1902 photograph of the erupting Mount Pelée.

• Cuba obtains independence from the US.
• Under the Treaty of Vereenigning, which ends the Second Boer War, the UK defeats the South African Republic and the Orange Free State, which then become British colonies (South Africa).
• Léon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort (France) and Richard Assmann (Germany), working independently, discover that the atmosphere is divided into the troposphere and the stratosphere.
• Ivan Pavlov (Russia) and Edwin Twitmyer (US), working independently, discover the principles of classical conditioning.
• Alfred von Decastello and Adriano Sturli identify the AB blood type (Austria).
• Ernest Starling and William Bayliss are the first to identify and describe a hormone, secretin (UK).
• Willis Carrier invents the first modern electrical air conditioner (US).
  

  Willis Carrier and his air conditioner in an undated photo.

• Ransomes, Sims & Jeffries introduces gasoline-powered lawn mowers (UK).
• Egypt builds the first Aswan Dam on the Nile.
  

  The opening ceremonies for the Aswan Dam.

• William James publishes The Varieties of Religious Experience, an English-language work of philosophy, psychology and religion (US).
• Heart of Darkness, a novella written in English by Joseph Conrad (UK).
• The Hound of the Baskervilles, a novel written in English by Arthur Conan Doyle (UK: England).
• Symphony No. 5 in C# minor, by Gustav Mahler (Czech Republic/Austria).
• Symphony No. 2 in D Major, by Jean Sibelius (Finland).
• Pelléas et Mélisande, a French opera by Claude Debussy, premieres in Paris (France).
• A Trip to the Moon, a science fiction film by Georges Méliès (France).
  

  A still image from A Trip to the Moon.

• Portrait of Miss N, a photograph of Evelyn Nesbit by Gertrude Käsebier (US).
  

  Portrait of Ms. N (Evelyn Nesbit).

• Rodin with the Thinker, a photograph by Edward Steichen (France).
  

  Rodin and the Thinker.

• Paul Dirac is born in Bristol, England, UK.
• Walter Brattain is born in Xiamen, China.
• Fritz Strassmann is born in Boppard, Germany.
• Barbara McClintock is born in Hartford, Connecticut, US.
• Ruhollah Khomeini (Ayatollah Khomeini) is born in Khomeyn, Persia (now Iran).

1903

• With US support, Panama achieves independence from Colombia.
• Panama and US sign a treaty creating the US-controlled Canal Zone in Panama.
• Emmeline Pankhurst founds the Women’s Social and Political Union (UK).
  

  Emmeline Pankhurst.

• On December 17, Orville Wright makes the first powered, heavier-than-air flight in an airplane designed and built by Orville and Wilbur Wright.  The plane flies 12 seconds for a distance of 120 feet at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina (US).
  

  A photograph of the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight in December, 1903, by John Daniels.

• The Flatiron Building in New York City, designed by Daniel Burnham (US).
• The Souls of Black Folk, a work of sociology written in English by W.E.B. Du Bois (US).
  

  A 1918 photograph of W.E.B. Du Bois.

• The Ambassadors, a novel written in English by Henry James (UK).
• The Call of the Wild, a novel written in English by Jack London (US).
• Man and Superman, a play written in English by George Bernard Shaw (UK: England).
• String Quartet in F Major, by Maurice Ravel (France).
• Flatiron Building, a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz (US).
  

  Flatiron Building, a photo by Alfred Stieglitz.

• John von Neumann is born in Budapest, Hungary.
• George Wells Beadle is born in Wahoo, Nebraska, US.
• Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) is born in Motihari, India.

1904

• The Russo-Japanese War breaks out regarding disputes over Korea and Manchuria.
• The Trans-Siberian Railroad is completed (Russia).
• France and the UK sign the Entente Cordiale, which resolves disputes in Egypt, Morocco, Newfoundland, Senegal, Gambia, Nigeria, Madagascar and Siam.
• Christian Hülsmeyer invents the Telemobiloscope, a precursor to radar that can detect distant objects by bouncing radio waves off them (Germany).
  

  Christian Hülsmeyer’s Telemobiloscope.

• Benjamin Holt demonstrates the first tractor with crawler-type treads (US).
• Sir John Fleming invents the first thermionic valve (vacuum tube) (UK).
• New York tea seller Thomas Sullivan invents the tea bag (US).
  

  These gauze tea bags were made by Thomas Sullivan in the early 20th Century.

• The Carson, Pirie, Scott building, designed by Louis Sullivan, opens in Chicago, Illinois (US).
  

  A photo of the Carson, Pirie, Scott Building in the early 1900s.

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a work of sociology and economics written in German by Max Weber (Germany).
• The Cherry Orchard, a play written in Russian by Anton Chekhov (Russia).
• Nostromo, a novel written in English by Joseph Conrad (UK).
• Violin Concerto in D minor by Jean Sibelius (Finland).
• Madama Butterfly, an Italian opera by Giacomo Puccini, premieres at La Scala in Milan (Italy).
• Robert Oppenheimer is born in New York, New York, US.

1905

• After the decisive Japanese victory over the Russian navy at the Battle of Tsushima, Japan defeats Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and becomes a world power.
• President Theodore Roosevelt brokers the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War, in which Russia recognizes Japan’s claims to Korea and agrees to withdraw from Manchuria (US).
  

  A contemporary political cartoon shows President Roosevelt bringing together warring countries Russia and Japan.

• A revolution in Russia fails to overthrow the Emperor, but results in a new constitution, a multi-party system and limited constitutional monarchy.
• Norway obtains full independence from Sweden.
• France and Germany come close to war over Germany’s interference with Morocco in the First Moroccan Crisis.
• The British Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon announces the Partition of Bengal into mostly-Hindu west Bengal and mostly-Muslim east Bengal (India).
• The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is formed in Chicago, Illinois (US).
• During his Annus Mirabilis, Albert Einstein publishes four papers in the journal Annalen der Physik on the following topics:  (1) the special theory of relativity; (2) the equivalence of mass and energy (E = mc²); (3) Brownian motion, in which he proved that atoms and molecules exist; and (4) the photoelectric effect, which he explained in terms of quantum theory (Switzerland).
  

  A c. 1905 photograph of Albert Einstein (1879-1955).

• Ernest Rutherford proposes radiometric dating, the use of radioactive isotopes to determine the age of a substance (Canada).
• Walter Griffiths invents the first portable vacuum for home use (UK).
• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, a book on psychology written in German by Sigmund Freud (Austria).
• The House of Mirth, a novel written in English by Edith Wharton (US).
• Major Barbara, a play written in English by George Bernard Shaw (UK: England).
• La Mer, an orchestral compostition by Claude Debussy (France).
• Salome, a German opera by Richard Strauss, premieres in Dresden (Germany).
• The Dying Swan, a ballet choreographed by Michel Folkine and set to music from The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns, premieres in St. Petersburg, with Anna Pavlova dancing the lead role for the first of approximately 4,000 times (Russia).
• Dutch dancer Gertrude Zelle begins performing in Paris under the name Mata Hari (France).
• The Flatiron Building, New York, a photograph by Edward Steichen (US).
  

  Edward Steichen experimented with various tints in his photograph of the Flatiron Building.

• Carl David Anderson is born in New York, New York, US.
• M. Stanley Livingston is born in Brodhead, Wisconsin, US.

1906

• A magnitude 7.8 earthquake and subsequent fire in San Francisco, California kills 3,000 people and destroys 80% of the city’s buildings (US).
• The Algeciras Conference resolves the First Moroccan Crisis by allowing France to maintain influence in Morocco (Spain).
• Lee de Forest invents the triode amplifying tube (US).
  

  Lee de Forest’s original triode amplifying tube.

• Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne paints Mont Sainte Victoire Seen from Les Lauves and The Large Bathers (France).
  

  Cézanne’s painting The Large Bathers, unfinished at the time of his death, is now located in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

• First professional dance performance by Fred and Adele Astaire (ages 6 and 9, respectively) In Keyport, New Jersey (US).
• Looking Down Sacramento Street, San Francisco, April 18, 1906, a photograph by Arnold Genthe (US).
  

  San Francisco photographer Arnold Genthe’s camera shop and studio were destroyed by the earthquake, so he borrowed a camera to take this and other pictures of the devastation.

• Hans Bethe is born in Strasbourg, Germany.

1907

• Bubonic plague kills 1.5 million people in India.
• A peasants’ revolt in Romania results in 11,000 deaths.
• Leo Baekeland invents Bakelite, the first completely synthetic plastic (US).
• Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Pablo Picasso, sets off a modernist revolution in art (France).
  

  Picasso’s revolutionary painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is now located at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

• Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a painting by Symbolist artist Gustav Klimt (Austria).
  

  Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is now at the Neue Galerie in New York.

• Pragmatism, a work of philosophy written in English by William James (US).
• Creative Evolution, a work of philosophy written in French by Henri Bergson (France).
• The Secret Agent, a novel written in English by Joseph Conrad (UK: England).
• The Steerage, a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz (US).
  

  Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph The Steerage heralded a new realism in photography.

• William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, dies.
• Dmitri Mendeleev dies.
• Rachel Carson is born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, US.
• John Mauchly is born in Cincinnati, Ohio, US.
• Frank Whittle is born in Earlsdon, England, UK.

1908

• An asteroid or comet causes devastation in Tunguska, Siberia (Russia).
  

  A forest destroyed by the Tunguska meteoroid.

• Republican activists assassinate Portuguese King Carlos I and his heir, Luis Filipe, leading to accession of King Manuel II (Portugal).
• The Young Turk Revolution returns constitutional government to the Ottoman Empire (Turkey).
• In the Bosnian Crisis, Austria-Hungary annexes Ottoman territories Bosnia and Herzegovina at the same time that Bulgaria declares independence, sparking protests and bringing the world closer to war.
• Discovery of oil in Persia (Iran).
• Alva Fisher invents the first commercially-successful electric washing machine (US).
  

  Alva Fisher’s 1910 Thor electric washing machine.

• Hans Geiger and Ernest Rutherford invent the Geiger counter (UK).
• Jack Johnson becomes the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion (US).
  

  A 1910 photo of Jack Johnson (1878-1946).

• Reflections on Violence, a work of political philosophy written in French by Georges Sorel (France).
• A Wind in the Willows, a children’s novel written in English by Kenneth Grahame (UK: England).
• The final movement of Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 in F# minor (with soprano), op. 10, has no key signature, making it his first consciously atonal piece (Austria).
• Sadie Pfeifer – 48 Inches Tall and Spinner in Whitnel Cotton Mill, photographs by Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee (US).
  

  Spinner in Whitnel Cotton Mill was one of many photographs taken by Lewis Hine to document child labor in the U.S.

• Henri Becquerel dies.
• Edward Teller is born in Budapest, Hungary.
• John Bardeen is born in Madison, Wisconsin, US.
• Willard Libby is born in Grand Valley, Colorado, US.
• Lyndon B. Johnson is born in Stonewall, Texas, US.
• Simone de Beauvoir is born in Paris, France.

1909

• W.E.B. Du Bois, Moorfield Storey and Mary White Ovington found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York (US).
• Louis Bleriot becomes the first person to fly across the English Channel in a heavier than air aircraft (France; UK).
• American Navy engineer Robert Peary claims that he is the first person to reach the North Pole (later disputed).
• Frank Shailor at General Electric invents the first commercially successful electric toaster (US).
• The Robie House, a Prairie-style residence designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (US).
  

  The Robie House in Chicago, Illinois.

• The Kiss, a painting by Symbolist Gustav Klimt (Austria).
  

  Klimt’s painting The Kiss is now located at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere museum in Vienna.

• Three Lives, a book containing three short novels written in English by Gertrude Stein (US).
• Das Lied von der Erde, a composition for two voices and orchestra by Gustav Mahler (Czech Republic/Austria).
• Three Piano Pieces, an atonal work by Arnold Schoenberg (Austria).
• Premiere of Les Sylphides, a non-narrative ballet blanc with choreography by Michel Fokine and music by Frédéric Chopin (orchestrated by Alexander Glazunov), at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, danced by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, including Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, and Alexandra Baldina (France).
• Playground in Tenement Alley, a photograph by Lewis Hine (US).
  

  Lewis Hine’s photograph Playground in Tenement Alley highlighted the need for parks where children could play.

• Colin MacLeod is born in Port Hastings, Nova Scotia, Canada.
• Edward Lawrie Tatum is born in Boulder, Colorado, US.

1910

• The Mexican Revolution begins.
• A revolution in Portugal leads to First Portuguese Republic.
• Japan annexes Korea.
• Four British colonies unite to form the Union of South Africa.
• Working with fruit flies, Thomas Hunt Morgan identifies the first genetic mutations and proves that genes are carried on chromosomes (US).
  

  Thomas Hunt Morgan in the fly room at Columbia University.

• Mary Phelps Jacob designs the first modern bra (US).
• The Art Nouveau AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin, designed by Peter Behrens (Germany).
  

  The influential AEG Turbine Factory.

• Henri Matisse’s painting Dance (France).
  

  Matisse’s painting Dance is now located in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. A 1909 study for the work is located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

• Gitanjali (Song Offerings), poems written in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore (India).
• Howards End, a novel written in English by E.M. Forster (UK: England).
• Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 in D Major (Czech Republic/Austria).
• Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, a work for string orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams (UK).
• Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes premieres two ballets in Paris: (1) Scheherazade, with choreography by Michel Folkine, music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and designs by Leon Bakst, and (2) The Firebird, with choreography by Folkine, costumes and designs by Bakst and Golovine, and music by Igor Stravinsky (France).
• Robert Koch dies.
• Death of Florence Nightingale.
• Death of Leo Tolstoy.
• Death of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) in Connecticut, US.
• William Shockley is born in London, England, UK.
• Birth of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (Mother Teresa) in Üsküp, Kosovo Vilayet, Ottoman Empire (now Skopje, Macedonia).

1911

• The Xinhai revolution overthrows the Qing Dynasty and establishes the Republic of China.
• Italy occupies Ottoman-controlled Libya, triggering war.
• Roald Amundsen becomes the first person to reach the South Pole (Norway).
  

  Roald Amundsen poses at the South Pole with the flag of his native Norway.

• A fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory kills 146 women workers in New York (US).
• Ernest Rutherford proposes the solar system model of the atom (UK).
• Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity in liquid helium (The Netherlands).
• Georges Claude invents the neon light bulb (France).
• The Palais Stoclet, in Brussels, a Vienna Secession-style home designed by Josef Hoffmann (Belgium).
  

  The Palais Stoclet in Brussels.

• I and the Village, a painting by Marc Chagall (France).
  

  Chagall’s I and the Village is now located at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

• Georges Braque’s Cubist painting The Portuguese (France).
  

  Georges Braque’s painting The Portuguese is now located in Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel, Switzerland.

• The Red Studio, a painting by Henri Matisse (France).
  

  Matisse’s painting The Red Studio is now located in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

• The Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes premieres Petrushka, a ballet with choreography by Michel Folkine, music by Igor Stravinsky and sets and costumes by Benois, in Paris (France).
• Der Rosenkavalier, a German opera by Richard Strauss, debuts in Dresden (Germany).
• Breaker Boys in Coal Chute, South Pittston, Pennsylvania, a photograph by Lewis Hine (US).
  

  Breaker Boys in Coal Chute.

• Francis Galton dies.
• Maclyn McCarty is born in South Bend, Indiana, US.
• Ronald Reagan is born in Tampico, Illinois, US.

1912

• The British passenger liner Titanic collides with a North Atlantic iceberg on her maiden voyage and sinks, killing over 1,500 of the 2,224 people on board (UK).
  

  A photograph of the Titanic leaving Southampton, UK in April 1912 on her first and final voyage.

• Sun Yat-Sen becomes the first President of the Republic of China.
  

  A tinted photographic portrait of Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925).

• France colonizes Morocco.
• The African National Congress is founded (South Africa).
• The Bread and Roses Strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts (US).
• Alfred Wegener proposes the theory of continental drift (Germany).
  

  A 1910 photograph of Alfred Wegener (1880-1930).

• Frederick Gowland Hopkins proposes the existence of “accessory food factors” (later called vitamins) that are essential for animal growth and survival (UK).
• Lester Wire installs the first modern traffic lights in Salt Lake City, Utah (US).
  

  Lester Wire and his 1912 two-color traffic lights.

• Native American athlete Jim Thorpe wins eight gold medals at the Olympic Games in Stockholm (Sweden).
• Casa Milà, a modernist building in Barcelona designed by Antoni Gaudì (Spain).
  

  Casa Mila is known by the nickname La Pedrera (‘the quarry’).

• Orphic artist Robert Delaunay begins painting the Simultaneous Windows series (France).
  

  Delaunay’s painting Windows Open Simultaneously (First Part, Third Motif) is now located at the Tate Liverpool in the UK.

• Nude Descending a Staircase #2, a Cubist-Futurist painting by Marcel Duchamp (France).
  

  Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase #2 is now located in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

• The Guitar, a cardboard sculpture by Pablo Picasso (France).
  

  Picasso’s sculpture The Guitar is now located in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

• Death in Venice, a novella written in German by Thomas Mann (Germany).
• Pierrot Lunaire, a song cycle by Arnold Schoenberg (Austria).
• Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes premieres Daphnis et Chloé, a ballet with choreography by Michel Folkine and music by Maurice Ravel (France).
• Vaslav Nijinsky choreographs and dances in the ballet L’Après-midi d’un faune to music of Claude Debussy (France).
• The Octopus, a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn (US).
  

  Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photograph The Octopus.

• Joseph Lister dies.
• Wilbur Wright dies.
• Alan Turing is born in London, England, UK.

1913

• A military coup by the Committee of Union and Progress overthrows the government of the Ottoman Empire and leads to the rule of the Three Pashas: Mehmed Talaat Pasha, Ismail Enver Pasha and Ahmed Djemal Pasha (Turkey).
• Woodrow Wilson becomes the 28th president of the United States.
• Charles Fabry and Henri Buisson discover a layer of ozone in the atmosphere (France).
• Henry Ford establishes a moving assembly line to build the Model T automobile (US).
  

  Ford’s assembly line in action at his Highland Park Plant.

• Fred W. Wolf invents the first electric refrigerator for home use (US).
• Gideon Sundback invents the modern zipper (US).
• The New York World publishes the first true crossword puzzle (US).
• The International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show) introduces Americans to European avant garde styles (US).
• The Fagus Factory in Alfeld an der Leine, designed by modernists Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer (Germany).
  

  The Fagus Factory.

• Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a sculpture by Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni (Italy).
  

  No bronze casts of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space were made in Boccioni’s lifetime. The original plaster cast is displayed at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea in São Paulo, Brazil. The first two bronze casts were made in 1931: one (shown above) is located at the Museo del Novecento in Milan; the other is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

• Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract painting, Composition VII (Germany).
  

  Kandinsky’s Composition VII is located at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

• Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell publish Principia Mathematica, an English-language treatise on the foundations of mathematics (UK).
• Sons and Lovers, a novel written in English by D.H. Lawrence (UK).
• The Rite of Spring, a Ballet Russes ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky, reportedly causes a riot at its premiere in Paris (France).
  

  A 1946 photographic portrait of Igor Stravinsky by Arnold Newman.

• Death of Harriet Tubman.
• Birth of Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm (Willy Brandt) in Lübeck, Germany.
• Birth of Richard M. Nixon in Yorba Linda, California, US.
• Rosa McCauley (Rosa Parks) is born in Tuskegee, Alabama, US.

1914

• The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo triggers World War I (Bosnia & Herzegovina).
• World War I begins: Austria-Hungary delivers the July Ultimatum to Serbia; Russia mobilizes; Serbia mobilizes; Austria mobilizes; Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia; Germany declares war on Russia; Germany attacks Luxembourg; Germany declares war on France; Germany declares war on Belgium; the UK declares war on Germany; Japan declares war on Germany and Austria-Hungary; the Ottoman Empire attacks Russia.
• In the First Battle of the Marne, British and French troops stop the German advance into France and set the stage for four years of trench warfare stalemate on the Western Front of World War I (France).
• With the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, the entire continent of Africa is now occupied by European powers.
• Opening of the 47-mile-long Panama Canal, which connects the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean (Panama).
  

  A man, a plan, a canal: Panama. Photo courtesy of Jimmy Carter Library.

• Martha, the last passenger pigeon, dies in the Cincinnati Zoo (US).
• James Fields Smathers invents the first practical electric typewriter (US).
• The Bride of the Wind, a painting by Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka (Austria).
  

  Kokoschka’s painting The Bride of the Wind, also known as The Tempest, is now located in the Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel, Switzerland.

• The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, a painting by Metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico (Italy).
  

  De Chirico’s painting Melancholy and Mystery of a Street is now located in a private collection.

• Kokoro, a novel written in Japanese by Natsume Soseki (Japan).
• Dubliners, a book of stories written in English by James Joyce (Ireland).
• Three Places in New England, an orchestral composition by Charles Ives (US).
• Joseph Swan dies.
• Jonas Salk is born in New York, New York, US.
• Norman Ernest Borlaug is born in Cresco, Iowa, US.

1915

• The Ottoman Empire begins the systematic killing, forced labor and deportation of ethnic Armenians known as the Armenian genocide, with an estimated 1-1.5 million killed (Turkey; Armenia).
• Maurice Levy invents tube lipstick (US).
  

  Maurice Levy’s 1915 lipstick tube.

• Self-Portrait as a Soldier, a painting by Expressionist artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Germany).
  

  Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier is located at Oberlin College’s Allen Art Museum, in Oberlin, Ohio, US.

• Black Square, a painting by Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich (Russia).
  

  Kazimir Malevich said of Black Square: “It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins.” The original version (shown above), which has deteriorated over time, is located at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

• The Charge of the Lancers, a painting and collage by Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni (Italy).
  

  Boccioni’s The Charge of the Lancers is now located in a private collection.

• Alfred Wegener publishes The Origin of Continents and Oceans, a German-language text that explains his theory of continental drift (Germany).
• The Rainbow, a novel written in English by D.H. Lawrence (UK: England).
• The Metamorphosis, a story in German by Franz Kafka (Czech Republic/Austria).
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a poem written in English by T.S. Eliot (UK)
• The Birth of a Nation, a film by D.W. Griffith, sparks protests by the NAACP for its overt racism (US).
  

  A still image from The Birth of a Nation.

• Wall Street, a photograph by Paul Strand (US).
  

  Strand’s Wall Street.

• Making Human Junk, a poster by Lewis Hine (US).
  

  Lewis Hine’s poster, Making Human Junk.

• Paul Ehrlich dies.
• Henry Moseley dies.
• Charles Hard Townes is born in Greenville, South Carolina, US.
• Eleanora Fagan (Billie Holiday) is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.

1916

• The Battle of Verdun rages from February to December, with estimates of casualties ranging from 700,000 to 1.25 million. By the end of the battle, the ultimately victorious French push the Germans back 4.7 miles from their starting point, but World War I is far from over (France).
• British officer T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) fights alongside Arab troops in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire (Saudi Arabia).
• Haile Selassie becomes de facto ruler of Ethiopia after King Iyasu V is deposed.
  

  A 1923 photograph of Haile Selassie.

• Irish Republicans stage the unsuccessful Easter Rising in Dublin against British rule (Ireland).
• Radical Party leader Hipólito Yrigoyen is elected president of Argentina.
• Germany and Austria create the autonomous Kingdom of Poland on Polish land formerly controlled by Russia (Poland).
• Daylight savings time begins in Germany and Austria-Hungary.
• Albert Einstein announces the general theory of relativity (Germany).
• Gilbert N. Lewis develops the modern concept of the electron-pair bond (US).
• Karl Schwarzschild uses Einstein’s relativity theory to predict the existence of black holes (Germany).
• The British and French use Benjamin Holt’s Caterpillar tractors as the basis for creating the first military tanks.
  

  British troops surround a Mark I tank during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

• The Summer Olympics are cancelled due to World War I.
• Albert Einstein publishes the German-language science book Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (Germany).
• Democracy and Education, a work about education written in English by John Dewey (US).
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an English-language novel by James Joyce (Ireland).
• The Planets, an orchestral suite by Gustav Holst (UK).
• Intolerance, a film by D.W. Griffith (US).
  

  A still image from the Babylonian sequence of Intolerance.

• Blind Woman, New York, and Porch Shadows, photographs by Paul Strand (US).
  

  Strand’s photograph Blind Woman.

• Francis Crick is born in Weston Favell, England, UK.
• Claude E. Shannon is born in Petoskey, Michigan, US.

1917

• The Russian Revolution: (1) the February Revolution forces Emperor Nicholas II to abdicate, while a Provisional Government assumes power; (2) in the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Communists overthrow Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government and take power; (3) Bolshevik success triggers a civil war between the Reds (Bolsheviks) and the Whites (monarchists and liberals); (4) Vladimir Lenin becomes head of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
  

  Lenin speaks to a crowd in 1917.

• The Arabs, working with British officer T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), capture the city of Aqaba from the Ottomans (Jordan).
• The US enters World War I after Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare.
• The United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary issues the Balfour Declaration expressing support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine that does not prejudice existing non-Jewish communities (UK).
• Under the Treaty of the Danish West Indies, the US purchases the Danish West Indies from Denmark; the US renames the islands the U.S. Virgin Islands.
• A collision in Nova Scotia’s Halifax Harbour between two ships, one carrying tons of explosives, leads to a three-kiloton explosion that triggers a tsunami, kills 1,950 people and destroys buildings for miles (Canada).
• Ernest Rutherford discovers the proton (UK).
• Robert William Boyle and A.B. Wood create the first modern sonar system (UK).
• The Gates of Hell, a set of doors by sculptor Auguste Rodin (France), is cast in bronze for the first time shortly after the artist’s death.
  

  A bronze cast of the Gates of Hell, a set of doors measuring 19.6 ft. tall and 13.1 wide and containing 180 figures.

• Fountain, a readymade artwork consisting of an upturned urinal signed “R.Mutt”, widely attributed to Dadaist Marcel Duchamp (France).
  

  A replica of Duchamp’s original Fountain.

• Egon Schiele’s Expressionist painting The Embrace (Austria).
  

  The Embrace (also known as Lovers II) is a self-portrait of Schiele and his wife Edith Harms, both of whom died within days of each other in the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918.

• On Growth and Form, a work of biology and mathematics written in English by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (UK: Scotland).
• Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes premieres Parade, a ballet with choreography by Léonide Massine, scenario by Jean Cocteau, music by Erik Satie, and costumes and sets by Pablo Picasso (France).
• Wire Wheel, a photograph by Paul Strand (US).
  

  Strand’s photograph Wire Wheel.

• Vortograph No. 1, a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn (US).
  

  Coburn’s experimental photograph Vortograph #1.

• Birth of John F. Kennedy in Brookline, Massachusetts, US.
• Birth of Indira Priyadarshini Nehru (Indira Gandhi) in Allahabad, India.

1918

• A worldwide influenza pandemic kills at least 50 million in 1918-1919.
• In March, Bolshevik Russia signs the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and cedes rights to Poland, the Baltic States and Ukraine (Belarus).
• In August, the Allies beat back Germany’s final offensive of World War I in the Second Battle of the Marne (France).
• In October, the German people overthrow Kaiser Wilhelm’s Empire and in November establish a German Republic.
• World War I ends with Allied victory on November 11 when Germany becomes the last of the Central Powers to sign an armistice agreement (France).
• The Bolsheviks execute Tsar Nicholas II and his family (Russia).
• T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) helps establish a short-lived independent Arab state based at Damascus, under Emir Faisal (Syria).
  

  Emir Faisal and his party (including T.E. Lawrence) at the Versailles peace talks.

• Ukraine and Belarus declare independence.
• The Republic of Poland obtains sovereignty and independence.
• Iceland, Yemen and Azerbaijan become independent nations.
• Oswald Spengler publishes the first volume of The Decline of the West, a work of history written in German (Germany).
• The Education of Henry Adams, a memoir written in English by Henry Adams (US).
  

  An undated photograph of Henry Adams.

• Willa Cather’s English-language novel My Ántonia (US).
• The Twelve, a poem in Russian by Alexander Blok (Russia).
• Richard Feynman is born in New York, New York, US.
• Frederick Sanger is born in Rendcomb, England, US.
• Rolihlahla Mandela (Nelson Mandela) is born in Mveso, South Africa.

1919

• The Paris Peace Conference results in the Treaty of Versailles, which redraws the map of Europe (France).
• The League of Nations is established, although the U.S. Senate refuses to allow the US to join (Switzerland).
• Estonia becomes independent.
• After blocking the exits, British troops fire into a crowd of unarmed Indian protesters in Jallianwala Bahg, Amritsar, killing 379-1500 people.
• The Spartacist uprising, a Communist rebellion in Germany, ends with the arrests and killing of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
• The moderate Weimar Republic is established in Germany.
• The Ottoman Empire is dissolved.
• The Sinn Féin party declares independence from the UK and forms an Irish Republic, trigging the Irish War of Independence.
• The Egyptian Revolution begins in Egypt and Sudan when the British exile Saad Zaghlul and the Wafd Party.
• The Chinese government’s response to the Treaty of Versailles, in which Japan received territory in Shandong, triggers nationalist demonstrations known as the May Fourth Movement.
• Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge suppresses the Boston Police Strike (US).
• Assassination of Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata.
• Arthur Eddington and Frank W. Dyson confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity during a solar eclipse (US).
• British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown are the first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean when they leave Newfoundland and arrive in Ireland less than 72 hours later (Canada; Ireland).
• Charles Strite invents the automatic pop-up toaster (US).
  

  A Waters-Genter toaster from the 1920s, based on Charles Strite’s design.

• In the Black Sox scandal, eight members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team agree to intentionally lose the World Series in return for payments (US).
• Sir Barton is the first horse to win the Triple Crown (Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes) of American horse racing (US).
• Winesburg, Ohio, linked stories written in English by Sherwood Anderson (US).
• Wallace Stevens publishes Harmonium, his first book of poems, written in English and including Anecdote of the Jar (US).
• Poetry, a poem written in English by Marianne Moore (US).
• D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks form United Artists, an independent film production company (US).
  

  Charlie Chaplin signs the United Artists contract in 1919, with (from left) D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks standing beside him.

• Cello Concerto in E minor, by Edward Elgar (UK).
• Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes premieres The Three-Cornered Hat, a ballet with choreography by Leonide Massine and music by Manuel de Falla (France).
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a film by Robert Wiene (Germany).
  

  A still image from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

• Death of Theodore Roosevelt.
• J. Presper Eckert is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.
• Birth of Eva María Ibarguren (Eva Perón) in Los Toldos, Argentina.

1920

• The Haiyuan earthquake, magnitude 7.8, kills 273,400 people (China).
• The UK creates the Palestine Mandate from the southern part of the Ottoman Empire’s Syria province (Israel; Palestine).
• Poland defeats the invading Soviet army at the Battle of Warsaw, saving Polish independence.
• On Bloody Sunday in Dublin, the Irish Republican Army assassinates 14 British intelligence officers and informers, and the British respond by shooting into a crowd at a Gaelic football game, killing 14 civilians (Ireland).
• The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution gives women the right to vote.
• First meeting of the General Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva (Switzerland).
• The US begins Prohibition, a ban on the sale, production, importation and transportation of alcoholic beverages.
• Arthur Eddington proposes that the heavy elements in the universe were created in stars or explosions of stars (UK).
• Earl Dickson at Johnson & Johnson invents the Band-Aid (US).
• Racine Universal Motor Co. and Hamilton Beach Co., working independently, introduce the first portable handheld electric hair dryers (US).
• The Skat Players (also called Card-Playing War Invalids) a painting by Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) artist Otto Dix (Germany).
  

  Dix’s The Skat Players in now located in the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen in Berlin.

• The Second Coming, a poem written in English by W.B. Yeats (Ireland).
• Edith Wharton’s English-language novel The Age of Innocence (US).
• Women in Love, a novel written in English by D.H. Lawrence (UK).
• Power House Mechanic, a work portrait photograph by Lewis Hine (US).
  

  Hine’s photograph Power House Mechanic.

• Rosalind Franklin is born in London, England, UK.
• Birth of Karol Józef Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II) in Wadowice, Poland.

1921

• The Pahlavi Dynasty comes to power in Persia through a coup d’etat (Iran).
• The Irish War of Independence ends with a ceasefire and partition of Ireland into the Irish Free State (an independent nation) and Northern Ireland (part of the UK).
• Frustrated by Bolshevik economic policies, Stepan Petrichenko leads the Kronstadt Rebellion, which is suppressed by troops led by Mikhail Tukhachevsky (Russia).
• The Indian National Congress invests Mohandas K. Gandhi with executive authority and he leads India on a non-cooperation campaign.
• Frederick Banting and Charles Best are the first to isolate and extract insulin (Canada).
  

  Banting and Best with one of the diabetic dogs they used to test insulin.

• Otto Loewi identifies acetylcholine, the first known neurotransmitter (Austria).
• Pittsburgh radio station KDKA broadcasts a boxing match (US).
• The Expressionist Einstein Tower, an astrophysical observatory in Potsdam designed by Erich Mendelsohn (Germany).
  

  Einstein’s Tower. Einstein himself praised the architecture as “organic.”

• The Elephant Celebes, a Surrealist painting by Max Ernst (Germany).
  

  Ernst’s painting The Elephant Celebes is now located in the Tate Modern in London.

• Six Characters in Search of an Author, a play written in Italian by Luigi Pirandello (Italy).
• John Galsworthy completes The Forsyte Saga, a series of three novels and two interludes written in English (UK: England).
• Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, by Sergei Prokofiev (Russia).
• Birth of Bettye Naomi Goldstein (Betty Friedan) in Peoria, Illinois, US.

1922

• The partition of Ireland under the Anglo-Irish Treaty triggers the Irish Civil War.
• Official end of the Ottoman Empire and formation of the state of Turkey.
• Egypt obtains independence from the UK, except for the Suez Canal Zone.
• Birth of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the first Communist state.
• Vladimir Lenin becomes the first leader of the Soviet Union.
• Benito Mussolini’s Fascists crush a general strike and march on Rome, where King Victor Emmanuel III hands power to Mussolini (Italy).
• The first successful treatment of a human diabetic using insulin (Canada).
• Howard Carter and George Herbert, Lord of Carnarvon, discover the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun (Egypt).
  

  Howard Carter with Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus.

• First radio broadcast of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (UK).
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a German-language work of philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein (UK: England).
• Ulysses, a novel written in English by James Joyce (Ireland).
• The True Story of Ah Q, a novella written in Chinese by Lu Xun (China).
• Wallace Stevens’ English-language poem The Emperor of Ice Cream (US).
• The Waste Land, a poem written in English by T.S. Eliot (UK).
• Premiere of Alban Berg’s German opera Wozzeck, which includes free atonality (Austria).
• Nanook of the North, a documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty (US).
  

  A still image from Nanook of the North.

• Echeveria, a photograph by Albert Renger-Patzsch (Germany).
  

  Albert Renger-Patsch’s photograph Echeveria.

• Alexander Graham Bell dies.

1923

• The Great Kantō earthquake, magnitude 7.9, causes over 100,000 deaths in Japan.
• National Socialist (Nazi) leader Adolf Hitler is imprisoned after the failed Beer Hall Putsch (Germany).
• Mustafa Kemal Atatürk becomes the first president of the Republic of Turkey.
  

  A 1931 photograph of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

• Spanish King Alfonso XIII supports the military coup by General Miguel Primo de Rivera (Spain).
• Assassination of Pancho Villa in Parral, Mexico.
• Irish Free State forces defeat the anti-Anglo-Irish Treaty irregulars, ending the Irish Civil War.
• In retaliation for Germany’s failure to make reparations payments due under the Treaty of Versailles, France invades and occupies the Ruhr section of Germany.
• Walt and Roy Disney open Disney Brothers’ Studio in Hollywood, California (US).
• Peking Man (Homo erectus) fossils discovered in Zhoukoudian (China).
• Bird in Space, a sculpture by modernist Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuși (France).
  

  Brâncuși made a number of casts of Bird in Space in both marble and bronze.  This marble cast is located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

• The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), a work of art by Marcel Duchamp (US).
  

  Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass), is now located in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

• The Ego and the Id, an article on psychology by Sigmund Freud (Austria).
• Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening and Nothing Gold Can Stay, poems written in English by Robert Frost (US).
• Duino Elegies, poems written in German by Rainer Maria Rilke (Germany).
• William Carol Williams publishes Spring and All, a book of poems written in English and containing The Red Wheelbarrow (US).
• Zeno’s Conscience (The Confessions of Zeno), a novel written in Italian by Italo Svevo (Italy).
• Five Pieces for Piano, by Arnold Schoenberg, is the first composition using the 12-tone technique (Austria).
  

  A 1927 photograph of Arnold Schoenberg by Man Ray.

• The Broadway musical Runnin’ Wild features The Charleston, a song by James P. Johnson and accompanying dance that becomes a sensation (US).
• Lathe No. 3, Akeley Shop, NY, a photograph by Paul Strand (US).
  

  Strand’s photograph Lathe No. 3.

• Russian constructivist Alexander Rodchenko creates a series of photocollages to illustrate About This, a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky (Russia).
  

  One of the collages made by Alexander Rodchenko for About This.

• Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen dies.
• Jack Kilby is born in Jefferson City, Missouri, US.

1924

• Lenin’s death triggers a struggle for leadership of the Soviet Union (Russia).
• Mohandas K. Gandhi becomes president of the Indian National Congress (India).
• Raymond Dart discovers bipedal hominid Australopithecus africanus, which lived 3.3 to 2.1 mya (South Africa).
  

  A photograph of Raymond Dart (1893-1988) with the Taung Child skull.

• Henry Gerber founds the Society for Human Rights, a gay rights organization, in Chicago, Illinois (US).
• Aviators of the U.S. Army Air Service flying four Douglas World Cruiser biplanes become the first to circle the Earth by air.
• William Howard Livens invents the first modern electric dishwasher (UK).
• Kimberly-Clark Co. markets the first Kleenex facial tissues (US).
• André Breton drafts the first Surrealist Manifesto (France).
• Elements of Physical Biology, a English-language science text by Alfred Lotka (US).
• The Magic Mountain, a novel in German by Thomas Mann (Germany).
• A Passage to India, a novel written in English by E.M. Forster (UK).
• Saint Joan, a play written in English by George Bernard Shaw (UK).
• Juno and the Paycock, a play written in English by Sean O’Casey (Ireland).
• Rhapsody in Blue, a musical composition by George Gershwin, premieres in New York (US).
• Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), a film by F.W. Murnau (Germany).
  

  Emil Jannings in a still image from Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh).

• Greed, a film by Erich von Stroheim (US).
  

  A still image from Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, starring Gibson Gowland and Zasu Pitts.

• Le Violon d’Ingres, a photograph by Man Ray (France).
  

  Man Ray’s photograph Violon d’Ingres features the model Kiki de Montparnasse.

• Portrait of My Mother, a photograph by Alexander Rodchenko (Russia).
  

  Rodchenko’s Portrait of My Mother.

• Death of Woodrow Wilson.

1925

• High school teacher John Scopes is convicted of teaching human evolution, in violation of Tennessee state law (US).
• Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Pascual Jordan and Erwin Schrödinger develop quantum mechanics (Germany).
• Wolfgang Pauli formulates the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that two electrons cannot occupy the same quantum state simultaneously (Austria).
• Goodyear launches its first blimp (US).
• Surrealist artist Joan Miró paints The Harlequin’s Carnival and The Birth of the World (France).
  

  The Birth of the World.

• Adolf Hitler publishes the first volume of his political manifesto, Mein Kampf (Germany).
• Franz Kafka’s German-language novel The Trial is published (Czech Republic/Austria).
• The Great Gatsby, a novel written in English by F. Scott Fitzgerald (US).
• Mrs. Dalloway, a novel written in English by Virginia Woolf (US).
  

  A 1925 photograph of Virginia Woolf.

• An American Tragedy, a novel written in English by Theodore Dreiser (US).
• André Gide’s French language novel The Counterfeiters (France).
• Louis Armstrong makes the first Hot Five recordings (US).
  

  A 1926 photograph of Louis Armstrong (seated) and his Hot Five: from left, Johnny St. Cyr, Johnny Dodds, Kid Ory and Lil Hardin Armstrong.

• Bessie Smith records W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues (US).
• The Gold Rush, a film by Charlie Chaplin (US).
  

  Charlie Chaplin boils his boot in The Gold Rush.

• Battleship Potemkin, a film by Sergei Eisenstein (Russia).
  

  A still image from the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

• Avenue des Gobelins, a photograph by Eugène Atget (France).
  

  Avenue des Gobelins.

• Death of Sun Yat-Sen.
• Simon van der Meer is born in The Hague, The Netherlands.
• Malcolm Little (Malcolm X) is born in Omaha, Nebraska, US.
• Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe) is born in Los Angeles, California, US.

1926

• Dictators comes to power after coups in Greece, Poland and Portugal.
• Hirohito becomes Emperor of Japan.
• A massive general strike in support of 800,000 locked-out miners lasts 10 days (UK).
• Robert H. Goddard launches the first liquid fuel rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts (US).
  

  Robert Goddard with his first liquid fueled rocket in 1926.

• John Logie Baird demonstrates a television system that transmits an image of a recognizable human face (UK).
• Mark Lidwell and Edgar Booth invent the first cardiac pacemaker (Australia).
• Erik Rotheim invents the aerosol can (Norway).
• American athlete Getrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim the English Channel.
• Walter Gropius designs the modernist Bauhaus Dessau (Germany).
  

  The Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany.

• Claude Monet completes the last of his Nymphéas (Water Lilies) series of paintings (France).
  

  The Water Lilies: Setting Sun, by Claude Monet.

• Pillars of Society, a painting by New Objectivity artist George Grosz (Germany).
  

  The Pillars of Society.

• The Castle, a German-language novel by Franz Kafka, is published (Czech Republic).
• The Sun Also Rises, a novel written in English by Ernest Hemingway (US).
• Winnie-the-Pooh, a children’s novel written in English by A.A. Milne (UK: England).
• Leoš Janáček’s musical compositions Sinfonietta and Glagolitic Mass (Czech Republic).
• Turandot, an Italian opera by Giacomo Puccini, debuts at La Scala in Milan (Italy).
• Premiere of Béla Bartók’s ballet The Miraculous Mandarin in Cologne (Germany).  
• The General, a film by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton (US).
  

  Buster Keaton in The General.

• Mother, a film by Vsevolod Pudovkin (Russia).
• Satiric Dancer, Paris, a photograph by André Kertész (France).
  

  Satiric Dancer.

• Portrait of James Joyce, a photograph by Berenice Abbott (France).
  

  Portrait of James Joyce.

• Heike Kamerlingh Onnes dies.
• Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (Fidel Castro) is born in Birán, Cuba.
• Elizabeth Alexandra Mary (Queen Elizabeth II) is born in London, UK.

1927

• World population is estimated at two billion.
• Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists massacre Communists, triggering the Chinese Civil War.
• Mao Zedong becomes leader of the Red Army (China).
• Saudi Arabia becomes an independent nation.
• Charles Lindbergh completes the first solo transatlantic flight (US).
• Despite appeals and protests, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed for murder and armed robbery in Massachusetts (US).
• Georges Lemaître hypothesizes that the universe is expanding (Belgium).
• Physicist Werner Heisenberg first articulates the uncertainty principle (Germany).
• Philo T. Farnsworth’s Image Dissector, a precursor of the television, transmits a visual image to a receiver (US).
• Warren Marrison and J.W. Horton at Bell Labs invent the quartz clock (US).
  

  The first quartz clock, built in 1927 by Marrison and Horton at Bell Labs.

• Surrealist Max Ernst begins his Forest series of paintings (Germany).
  

  Petrified Forest, now at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

• The final volume of Marcel Proust’s French-language novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), is published posthumously (France).
• Virginia Woolf’s English-language novel To the Lighthouse (UK).
• Sailing to Byzantium, a poem written in English by William Butler Yeats (Ireland).
• String Quartets No. 3 and 4 in C minor, by Béla Bartók (Hungary).
• Bix Beiderbecke records his composition In a Mist (US).
• Martha Graham opens a school of contemporary dance in New York (US).
• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, a film by F.W. Murnau (US).
• Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (Germany).
  

  A still image from Metropolis.

• Napoléon, a film by Abel Gance (France).
• The Jazz Singer, directed by Alan Crosland, is the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue, a ‘talkie’ (US).
• Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, a photograph by Charles Sheeler for the Ford Motor Company (US).
  

  Criss-Crossed Conveyors.

• Shells, a photograph by Edward Weston (US).
  

  Shells.

• Theodore Maiman is born in Los Angeles, California, US.

1928

• By this date, Joseph Stalin has removed his rivals and become dictator of the Soviet Union (Russia).
  

  Joseph Stalin in 1943.

• The Northern Expedition, a military campaign by the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek, results in the end of the Warlord Era, the reunification of China and the start of the Nanjing government (China).
• The major powers sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which they renounce the use of war as an instrument of national policy (France).
• Alexander Fleming discovers that a mold, Penicillium notatum, destroys bacterial colonies (UK).
• Frederick Griffith discovers a ‘transforming principle’ that can change one type of bacteria to another (UK).
• Paul Dirac derives the Dirac equation, which describes the behavior of certain subatomic particles.
• Philo T. Farnsworth demonstrates the first working all-electronic television system to the press (US).
• Thomas Midgley, Jr. invents Freon (US).
• Otto Frederick Rohwedder invents the bread slicer (US).
  

  A 1930 demonstration of Rohwedder’s bread slicing machine in St. Louis, Missouri.

• Jacob Schick invents the electric razor (US).
• Surrealist Joan Miró’s Dutch Interior I (Spain/France).
  

  Dutch Interior I.

• Federico García Lorca’s book of Spanish-language poems Gypsy Ballads (Spain).
• D.H. Lawrence’s English-language novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (UK: England).
• André Breton’s French novel Nadja (France).
• The Carter Family records Wildwood Flower (US).
• Louis Armstrong records West End Blues and Weather Bird (US).
• Premiere of the ballet Boléro, with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska and music by Maurice Ravel, in Paris (France).
• The Threepenny Opera premieres, with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht and music by Kurt Weill (Germany).
• Premiere of Apollo, a ballet with choreography by George Balanchine and music by Igor Stravinsky, in Washington, D.C. (US).
• Walt Disney co-produces and co-directs Steamboat Willie, the first sound cartoon starring Mickey Mouse (US).
  

  A still image from Steamboat Willie.

• The Passion of Joan of Arc, a film by Carl Theodor Dreyer (France).
  

  Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.

• Pastry Cook, Cologne, a photograph by August Sander (Germany).
  

  Pastry Cook.

• On the Telephone, a photograph by Alexander Rodchenko (Russia).
  

  On the Telephone.

• Death of Emmeline Pankhurst.
• James Watson is born in Chicago, Illinois, US.
• Noam Chomsky is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.
• Charles David Keeling is born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, US.

1929

• The New York Stock Market collapses, triggering a world wide Depression (US).
• Edwin Hubble obtains direct evidence that the universe is expanding (US).
  

  A photograph of Edwin Hubble (1889-1953).

• Mies van der Rohe designs the Barcelona Pavilion (Spain).
  

  Meant to be a temporary structure, the Barcelona Pavilion was rebuilt in 1986.

• An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, a memoir by Mohandas K. Gandhi (India).
• A Room of One’s Own, an essay written in English by Virginia Woolf (UK).
• The Sound and the Fury, a novel written in English by William Faulkner (US).
• A Farewell to Arms, a novel written in English by Ernest Hemingway (US).
• All Quiet on the Western Front, a German novel by Erich Maria Remarqué (Germany).
• The Maltese Falcon, a detective novel written in English by Dashiell Hammett (US).
• Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), a Surrealist film by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel (France).
  

  A still image from Un Chien Andalou.

• Man with a Movie Camera, an experimental documentary film by Dziga Vertov (Russia).
• Pandora’s Box, a film by G.W. Pabst (Germany).
  

  A still image from Pandora’s Box.

• Equivalent, a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz (US).
  

  One of Stieglitz’s Equivalents, a series of photographs of clouds.

• E.O. Wilson is born in Birmingham, Alabama, US.
• Gordon Moore is born in San Francisco, California, US.
• Murray Gell-Mann is born in New York, New York, US.
• Annelies Marie Frank (Anne Frank) is born in Frankfurt, Germany.
• Birth of Michael King, Jr. (Martin Luther King, Jr.) in Atlanta, Georgia, US.

1930

• Mohandas K. Gandhi leads the 24-day, 240-mile Salt March to the coastal village of Dandi, when he makes salt without paying the salt tax, triggering a wider civil disobedience movement against British rule of India.
  

  Gandhi leads the Salt March.

• Haile Selassie is crowned Emperor of Ethiopia.
• King Alfonso XIII removes dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera from power (Spain).
• A military coup led by pro-fascist general José Félix Uriburu overthrows Argentine President Hipólito Yrigoyen, ushering in the Infamous Decade in Argentina.
• A military coup installs right wing dictator Getúlio Dornelles Vargas as president of Brazil, where he rules for 15 years.
• Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto, which was originally thought to be the ninth planet orbiting our sun. (US).
• Vladimir Zworykin at Westinghouse demonstrates both transmission and reception of images in an electronic television system (US).
• Richard Drew at 3M invents Scotch Tape (US).
• The Art Deco Chrysler Building, designed by William Van Alen, opens in New York City (US).
  

  The Chrysler Building. Photo by David Shankbone.

• American Gothic, a painting by Regionalist artist Grant Wood (US).
  

  American Gothic.

• Early Sunday Morning, a painting by American Realist Edward Hopper (US).
  

  Early Sunday Morning.

• As I Lay Dying, a novel written in English by William Faulkner (US).
• The Bridge, a poem written in English by Hart Crane (US).
• Duke Ellington records Mood Indigo (US).
• L’Age d’or (The Golden Age), a film by Luis Buñuel (France).
• The Blue Angel, a film by Josef von Sternberg (Germany).
  

  Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich in von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel.

• Earth, a film by Aleksandr Dovzhenko (Russia).
• Pepper No. 30, a photograph by Edward Weston (US).
  

  Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30.

• The Lynching of Young Blacks – Indiana, a photograph by Lawrence Beitler (US).
  

  The Lynching of Young Blacks was printed on postcards and sold to tourists..

• Alfred Wegener dies.
• Neil Armstrong is born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, US.
• Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin is born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, US.

1931

• Flooding of the Yangtze, Yellow and Huai rivers; estimates of fatalities range from 400,000 to four million (China).
• Using a faked sabotage incident as pretext (the Mukden Incident), Japan invades and occupies Manchuria (China).
• A Spanish Republic is established after King Alfonso XIII flees the country.
• Georges Lemaître proposes that the universe began expanding from an initial point he calls the ‘primeval atom’ (Belgium).
• Mathematician Kurt Gödel publishes his incompleteness theorems (Austria).
• Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll invent the transmission electron microscope (US).
  

  A replica of Ruska and Knoll’s transmission electron microscope.

• The Art Deco Empire State Building, designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, opens in New York City (US).
• Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret design the International Style Villa Savoye (France).
  

  Villa Savoye is a dramatic revisioning of residential architecture.

• The Persistence of Memory, a painting by Surrealist Salvador Dali (France).
  

  The Persistence of Memory.

• Christ the Redeemer, a 98-foot-tall reinforced concrete and soapstone Art Deco statue, created by Paul Landowski and built by Heitor da Silva Costa and Albert Caquot, is placed at the top of Corcovado mountain in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).
  

  Christ the Redeemer is a Rio icon.

• Axel’s Castle, a book of literary criticism written in English by Edmund Wilson (US).
• Pearl Buck’s English-language novel, The Good Earth (US).
• Cab Calloway records Minnie the Moocher (US).
• Belshazzar’s Feast, a cantata by William Walton (UK).
• Fritz Lang’s film M (Germany).
• Le Million, a film by René Clair (France).
  

  A still image from Rene Clair’s Le Million.

• Thomas Alva Edison dies.
• Roger Penrose is born in Colchester, England, UK.
• Mikhail Gorbachev is born in Privolnoye, Russian SSR, USSR (now Russia).

1932

• Joseph Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization of agriculture triggers a two-year-long famine in the grain-producing areas of the USSR that causes the deaths of 3-8 million peasants, primarily in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
• The Kingdom of Iraq achieves independence from the UK.
• Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean (US/Ireland).
• James Chadwick discovers the neutron (UK).
  

  James Chadwick (1891-1974).

• Carl D. Anderson discovers the positron (US).
• Jan Oort is the first to propose the existence of dark matter to explain the orbital velocities of stars (the Netherlands).
• Linus Pauling introduces the concept of electronegativity to explain aspects of chemical bonding (US).
• Ernest O. Lawrence and M. Stanley Livingston build and operate the first cyclotron (US).
  

  M. Stanley-Livingston (left) and Ernest Lawrence standing with the cyclotron.

• Josef Klarer, Fritz Mietzsch and Gerhard Domagk synthesize and test Prontosil, the first sulfa drug (Germany).
• Ad Parnassum, a painting by Paul Klee (Germany/Switzerland).
  

  Ad Parnassum.

• Journey to the End of the Night, a novel in French by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (France).
• Light in August, a novel written in English by William Faulkner (US).
• Brave New World, a novel written in English by Aldous Huxley (UK).
• Fred Astaire debuts the Cole Porter song Night and Day in the play Gay Divorce (US).
• Trouble in Paradise, a film by Ernst Lubitsch (US).
  

  A still image from Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise.

• Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson (France).
  

  Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare.

• Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, a photograph attributed to Charles Ebbets (US).
  

  Lunch Atop a Skyscraper.

• Glass Tears, a photograph by Man Ray (France).
  

  Glass Tears.

• Harlem Couple in Raccoon Coats, a photograph by James Van Der Zee (US).
  

  Harlem Couple in Raccoon Coats.

• Luc Montagnier is born in Chabris, France.

1933

• President Field Marshal von Hindenburg appoints Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.
  

  Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering wave to a torchlight parade in honor of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.

• The U.S. Marines end their occupation of Nicaragua, leaving Anastasio Somoza in charge.
• Prohibition is repealed in the US.
• Wiley Post flies solo around the world (US).
• Eugene Wigner (US) and Enrico Fermi (Italy), working independently, propose the existence of a weak nuclear force/weak interaction that explains radioactive decay.
• Eugene Wigner (US) and Werner Heisenberg (Germany), working independently, propose the existence of a strong nuclear force/strong interaction that binds protons and neutrons together.
• Opening of the Afsluitdijk, which dams the Zuiderzee and creates the Ijsselmeer, part of the larger Zuiderzee Works hydraulic engineering project (The Netherlands).
• Departure, a triptych by New Objectivity artist Max Beckmann (Germany).
  

  Departure.

• The Human Condition (I), a painting by Surrealist René Magritte (Belgium).
  

  The Human Condition.

• The Expanding Universe, a book on astronomy written in English by Arthur Eddington (UK).
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a biography written in English by Gertrude Stein (US).
  

  Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and friend.

• André Malraux’s French-language novel Man’s Fate (France).
• Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) records Goodnight, Irene (US).
• Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance together for the first time onscreen in the film Flying Down to Rio (US).
• Duck Soup, a film by Leo McCarey starring the Marx Brothers (US).
  

  The four Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (from left, Chico, Zeppo, Groucho and Harpo).

• Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct), a film by Jean Vigo (France).
  

  A still image from Vigo’s Zero for Conduct.

• Madrid, a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson (Spain).
  

  Cartier-Bresson’s Madrid.

• Steven Weinberg is born in New York, New York, US.

1934

• Joseph Stalin begins the Great Purge, a campaign of political repression that targets Communist Party leaders, Army leaders, intellectuals and kulaks (well-off peasants) (Russia).
• Upon the death of President Hindenburg, Adolf Hitler becomes Führer und Reichskanzler of Germany with dictatorial powers.
• Mussolini invades Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia.
• American, German and Russian scientists, working independently, develop the first practical radar systems.
• Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, a collection of four scientific articles and an introductory survey originally written in Danish by Niels Bohr (Denmark).
• Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery), a treatise on the philosophy of science, written in German by Karl Popper (Austria).
• Tender Is the Night, a novel written in English by F. Scott Fitzgerald (US).
• Tropic of Cancer, a novel written in English by Henry Miller (US).
• The Idea of Order at Key West, a poem written in English by Wallace Stevens (US).
• Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5 (Hungary).
• Four Saints in Three Acts, an English-language opera with music by Virgil Thomson and libretto by Gertrude Stein (US).
• Triumph of the Will, a film by Leni Riefenstahl (Germany).
  

  A still image from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will.

• L’Atalante, a film by Jean Vigo (France).
• Newspapers publish a purported photograph of the Loch Ness Monster.  In 1975, Christian Spurling confesses that he, Robert Wilson and Ian Wetherall had perpetrated a hoax (UK: Scotland).
  

  The faked photo of the Loch Ness Monster.

• Marie Curie dies.
• Jane Goodall is born in London, England, UK.
• Carl Sagan is born in New York, New York, US.
• Carlo Rubbia is born in Gorizia, Italy.
• Yuri Gagarin is born in Klushino, Russia.
• Gloria Steinem is born in Toledo, Ohio, US.

1935

• During the Long March, Mao Zedong becomes de facto leader of both the Chinese Communist Party and the Red Army (China).
  

  Mao Zedong (right) and Zhou Enlai in 1935.

• British Parliament passes the Government of India Act, which contains some movement toward self-rule but also maintains British authority.
• Wallace Carothers at DuPont invents nylon, the first completely synthetic fiber (US).
• László and György Bíró patent the first practical and effective ballpoint pen (Hungary).
  

  A birome pen made by the Biro brothers in Argentina in the 1940s.

• Carlton C. Magee invents and installs the first parking meter in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (US).).
• The Viipuri Municipal Library, an example of regional modernism, designed by Alvar Aalto (Russia).
  

  An interior view of the Viipuri Municipal Library.

• The Book of Disquiet, a work of fiction written in Portuguese by Fernando Pessoa (Portugal).
• Independent People, a novel written in Icelandic by Halldór Laxness (Iceland).
• Murder in the Cathedral, a play written in English by T.S. Eliot (UK).
• Violin Concerto, by Alban Berg (Austria).
• Romeo and Juliet, a ballet score by Sergei Prokofiev (Russia).
• Porgy and Bess, an opera by George Gershwin, with an English-language libretto by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, premieres in Boston, Massachusetts (US).
• Fred Astaire debuts the Irving Berlin song Cheek to Cheek in the movie Top Hat (US).
• Bride of Frankenstein, a horror film by James Whale (US).
  

  Elsa Lanchester and Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein.

• Interior Detail, West Virginia Coal Miner’s House, a photograph by Walker Evans (US).
  

  Interior Detail, West Virginia Coal Miner’s House.

• William Dickson dies.
• Death of Jane Addams.
• Birth of Elvis Aaron Presley in Tupelo, Mississippi, US.
• Birth of Lhamo Döndrub (Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama) in Taktser, Tibet (now China).

1936

• No one opposes Hitler when German troops march into the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles (Germany).
• The pronunciamiento of a group of Spanish Army generals led by José Sanjurjo, against the leftist government of President Manuel Azaña, triggers the Spanish Civil War.
• Germany and Japan sign the Anti-Comintern Pact (Germany).
• Haile Selassie goes into exile during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.
• Arabs in the Palestine Mandate rebel against British rule and Jewish immigration (Israel; Palestine).
• A general strike in France ends after the Matignon Agreements provide for improved working conditions.
• Alan Turing establishes the basic principles of computer science, including the Turing machine and the Universal Turing machine (UK).
  

  A photograph of Alan Turing.

• The last captive thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) dies (Tasmania).
  

  The last known thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) in a 1933 photo at the Beaumaris Zoo in Tasmania.

• The Berlin Olympics are broadcast live on German television (Germany).
• African-American track and field athlete Jesse Owens wins four gold medals and sets three world records at the Berlin Olympics (Germany).
• The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) begins the first public television service (UK).
• Hoover Dam is completed (US).
  

  A view of Hoover Dam.

• The Old King, an Expressionist painting by Georges Rouault (France).
  

  The Old King.

• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, an economics treatise written in English by John Maynard Keynes (UK).
• Gone with the Wind, a novel in English by Margaret Mitchell (US).
• Absalom, Absalom! a novel written in English by William Faulkner (US).
• U.S.A., a trilogy of English-language novels by John Dos Passos (US).
• Peter and the Wolf, a musical composition by Sergei Prokofiev (Russia).
• Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is a musical setting of 24 of the poems in a medieval manuscript of the same name (Germany).
• Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is an arrangement for string orchestra of the second movement of Barber’s String Quartet, Op. 11 (US).
• Paul Robeson sings Ol’ Man River in the movie Show Boat (US).
• Billie Holiday records Summertime, written by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward for Porgy and Bess (US).
• Blues musician Robert Johnson records 16 songs, including Cross Road Blues and Kind Hearted Woman Blues, in the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas (US).
• Migrant Mother – Nipomo, California, by Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothea Lange (US).
  

  Migrant Mother.

• Death of a Loyalist Soldier, a photograph by Robert Capa (Spain).
  

  Many now believe that this famous photo was staged.

1937

• Hostilities break out between Japan and the Republic of China at the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (China).
• The Communists under Mao Zedong and the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek suspend the civil war and unite to fight Japan (China).
• Anastasio Somoza Garcia takes power in Nicaragua.
• Italy signs the Anti-Comintern Pact.
• The Hindenburg, a German passenger airship, explodes at Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 35 of the 97 people on board (US).
• On June 1, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan take off from Miami, Florida in a Lockheed Electra 10E airplane in an attempt to circumnavigate the globe, but on July 2, the plane is lost near Howland Island in the Pacific (US).
  

  Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan in 1937 with a map showing the route of their last flight.

• Mother Teresa takes vows as a Roman Catholic Sister of Loreto and begins teaching school in Calcutta (India).
• The Congress of Industrial Organizations splits from the American Federation of Labor (US).
• Following sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, General Motors recognizes the United Auto Workers union (US).
  

  Sit down strikers in Flint, Michigan.

• In April, Frank Whittle bench tests a prototype turbojet engine (UK).
• In September, Hans von Ohain and Ernst Heinkel bench test a jet engine (Germany).
• György Jendrassik designs the first working turboprop engine (Hungary).
• Manfred von Ardenne invents the scanning electron microscope (Germany).
• Chester F. Carlson invents the photocopier (US).
• The Golden Gate Bridge, designed by Joseph Strauss, Irving Morrow and Charles Ellis, opens in San Francisco, California (US).
  

  The Golden Gate Bridge.

• Theodosius Dobzhansky publishes the English-language biology text, Genetics and the Origin of Species (US).
• Out of Africa, a memoir written in English by Isak Dinesen (Denmark).
• Of Mice and Men, a novel written in English by John Steinbeck (US).
• Pablo Picasso’s mural-sized protest painting Guernica (France).
  

  Picasso’s Guernica.

• Symphony No. 5 in D minor, by Dmitri Shostakovich (Russia).
• Benny Goodman records Louis Prima’s Sing, Sing, Sing (US).
• Count Basie records One O’Clock Jump (US).
• Walt Disney releases Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated film (US).
  

  A still image from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

• Explosion of the Hindenburg, a photograph by Sam Shere (US).
  

  Sam Shere’s photograph of the Hindenburg disaster.

• At the Time of the Louisville Flood, a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White (US).
  

  Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of flood victims lining up for food became a symbol for the Great Depression.

• Ernest Rutherford dies.
• Guglielmo Marconi dies.
• Wallace Carothers dies.
• George Zweig is born in Moscow, Russian SSR, USSR (now Russia).
• Robert Gallo is born in Waterbury, Connecticut, US.

1938

• Hitler occupies Austria in the Anschluss.
• In the Munich Agreement, the UK, France and Italy allow Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, a portion of Czechoslovakia (Germany).
  

  At Munich in 1938 are (from left): Neville Chamberlain (UK), Édouard Daladier (France), Adolf Hitler (Germany), Benito Mussolini (Italy) and Galeazzo Ciano (Italy).

• Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ends the Great Purge, although mass arrests, exile and political executions continue at a reduced pace (Russia).
• Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann split the nucleus of a uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons (Germany); Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch confirm that Hahn and Strassmann have achieved nuclear fission (Sweden).
• Guy Stewart Callendar demonstrates that global land temperature has increased over the past 50 years due to rising carbon dioxide levels (UK).
• Oil is discovered in Saudi Arabia.
• Roy Plunkett invents Teflon coating (US).
• American Joe Louis defeats German Max Schmeling in a world heavyweight boxing championship (US).
  

  Joe Louis (standing) and Max Schmeling (not standing).

• American baseball player Johnny Vander Meer, a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, pitches back-to-back no-hitters, four days apart, against different teams (US).
• Homage to Catalonia, a memoir written in English by George Orwell (UK).
  

  George Orwell in 1933.

• Our Town, a play written in English by Thornton Wilder (US).
• Nausea, a novel written in French by Jean-Paul Sartre (France).
• Rebecca, a novel written in English by Daphne DuMaurier (UK: England).
• Benny Goodman, his band and members of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands are the first jazz musicians to perform at Carnegie Hall in New York (US).
• Artie Shaw records Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine (US).
• Sunday on the Banks of the River Marne, a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson (France).
  

  Sunday on the Banks of the River Marne.

• Lynn Margulis is born in Chicago, Illinois, US.
• Donald Knuth is born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US.
• Birth of Kofi Annan in Comassie, Gold Coast (now Kumasi, Ghana).

1939

• The Spanish Civil War ends with the defeat of the Republican Loyalists and victory for Fascist dictator Francisco Franco.
  

  Generalissimo Francisco Franco reviewing his troops after taking Madrid in 1939.

• In the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression, Germany and the USSR agree to divide up Poland.
• The Nazi invasion of Poland starts World War II.
• The USSR invades Finland, starting the Winter War.
• British forces suppress the Arab uprising in the Palestinian Mandate (Israel; Palestine).
• Michael Perrin synthesizes polyethylene (UK).
• Packard introduces the first air conditioned automobile (US).
• Igor Sikorsky invents the first practical, commercially successful helicopter (US).
  

  Igor Sikorsky pilots his 1939 helicopter, the VS-300.

• On August 27, the first jet aircraft, the Heinkel He178, takes its maiden flight (Germany).
• NBC broadcasts the opening of the New York World’s Fair on W2XBS, its experimental television station (US).
• Frank Lloyd Wright designs Fallingwater, a residence in Bear Run, Pennsylvania (US).
  

  The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed residence, Fallingwater, has many Japanese influences.

• The Two Fridas, a painting by Surrealist/Magical Realist Frida Kahlo (Mexico).
  

  The Two Fridas.

• Linus Pauling publishes the English-language scientific text, The Nature of the Chemical Bond (US).
• Finnegan’s Wake, a novel written in English by James Joyce (Ireland).
• Mother Courage and Her Children, a German-language play by Bertolt Brecht (Germany).
• The Big Sleep, a detective novel written in English by Raymond Chandler (US).
• Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra, by Joaquín Rodrigo (Spain).
• Jazz pianist Art Tatum records Tea for Two (US).
• Jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins records Body and Soul (US).
• Glenn Miller and his band record In the Mood (US).
• Billie Holiday records Strange Fruit, a song by Abel Meeropol (US).
  

  A 1947 portrait of Billie Holiday.

• The Wizard of Oz, a film by Victor Fleming, in which Judy Garland sings Over the Rainbow, a song by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg (US).
• Gone with the Wind, a film by Victor Fleming (US).
  

  A still image from Gone with the Wind, showing Vivien Leigh and Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel.

• The Rules of the Game, a film by Jean Renoir, is banned by the French government (France).
• Stagecoach, a film by John Ford (US)
• Mainbocher Corset, Paris, a photograph by Horst  P. Horst (France).
  

  Mainbocher Corset.

• Sigmund Freud dies.

1940

• Nazi Germany invades and occupies France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Norway.
• Germany, Italy and Japan sign the Tripartite Pact in Berlin (Germany).
• Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister (UK).
  

  Winston Churchill giving the “V for Victory” sign in 1940.

• Britain fails to succumb to Nazi air attacks in the Battle of Britain (UK).
• Following the Nazi occupation of France and the establishment of the pro-Germany Vichy government, Charles de Gaulle organizes the Free French forces in England (UK).
• The Moscow Peace Treaty, which gives some land to the USSR but maintains Finland’s independence, ends the Russo-Finnish War (Russia).
• Agents of Stalin assassinate Leon Trotsky in Mexico.
  

  From left: Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, and André Breton in a 1938 photo by Fritz Bach.

• The USSR annexes Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
• The Olympics are cancelled due to World War II.
• The Grapes of Wrath, a novel written in English by John Steinbeck (US).
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel written in English by Ernest Hemingway (US).
• Requiem, a poem written in Russian by Anna Akhmatova (Russia).
• Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play written in English by Eugene O’Neill (US).
• Native Son, a novel written in English by Richard Wright (US).
• The Power and the Glory, a novel written in English by Graham Greene (UK: England).
• Martha Graham – Letters to the World: Kick, a photograph by Barbara Morgan (US).
  

  Letters to the World: Kick.

• Hitler in Paris, by Heinrich Hoffmann (France).
  

  Hitler in Paris with Albert Speer.

• J.J. Thomson dies.
• John Lennon is born is Liverpool, England, UK.

1941

• The Japanese stage a surprise attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
  

  The USS Shaw explodes after being struck during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

• Hitler’s army invades the Soviet Union.
• Hitler invades and occupies Yugoslavia and Greece.
• The Nazis massacre 30,000 Jews in Babi Yar (Ukraine).
• British, Ethiopian and other troops drive Italy out of Ethiopia; Haile Selassie returns from exile.
• Hideki Tojo becomes Japanese Prime Minister.
• Over 2,500 people suffocate in bomb shelters during a three-hour Japanese bombing raid of Chongquing, China.
• The US passes the Lend-Lease Act, which provides supplies to the Allies.
• George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum propose that genes control cells by controlling the specificity of enzymes – the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis (US).
• Konrad Zuse builds the Z3, which may be the first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer (Germany).
• John Rex Whinfield and James Tennant Dickson invent polyester (UK).
• DuPont introduces acrylic (US).
• American baseball player Joe DiMaggio sets a record by hitting in 56 consecutive games (US).
• American baseball player Ted Williams finishes the season with a batting average of .406 (US).
• Billie Holiday records God Bless the Child, a song by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr. (US).
• Duke Ellington records Billy Strayhorn’s Take the “A” Train (US).
• Citizen Kane, a film by Orson Welles (US).
  

  Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane.

• The Maltese Falcon, a film by John Huston (US).
  

  Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon.

• Portrait of Winston Churchill, a photograph by Yousuf Karsh (Canada).
  

  Portrait of Winston Churchill.

• Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, a photograph by Ansel Adams (US).
  

  Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.

• Pure Energy and the Neurotic Man, a photograph by Barbara Morgan (US).
  

  Pure Energy and the Neurotic Man.

• The Last Jew in Vinnitsa, a photograph by an unknown photographer (Ukraine).
  

  “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa”, was written on the reverse of this photo, which was taken by an unknown Nazi soldier.

• Frederick Banting dies.
• Walther Nernst dies.
• Stephen Jay Gould is born in New York, New York, US.

1942

• Japan captures the Philippines, Singapore, Borneo, Celebes, Sarawak, the Dutch East Indies and Burma, marking the greatest extent of the Japanese Empire.
  

  A map of the Japanese Empire in 1942.

• The US severely damages the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway.
• The Axis powers reach the maximum extent of domination in Europe.
  

  A map showing Nazi domination of Europe in 1942.

• At the Wannsee Conference, the Nazis plot the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’ (Germany).
• The Nazi SS install the first gas chambers for exterminating Jews and other prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (Poland).
• The Germans make the first successful test flight of the V-2 rocket, the first long-range ballistic missile (Germany).
  

  The Germans launched over 3,000 V-2 rockets from Peenemünde between 1942 and 1945.

• The Japanese Navy scores a tactical victory, but the US and Australian navies win a strategic victory at the Battle of the Coral Sea (Australia; New Guinea).
• British Imperial forces under Claude Auchinleck and Bernard Montgomery defeat the Germans under Erwin Rommel at the first and second battles of El Alamein (Egypt).
• The United States begins forcing 110,000-120,000 Japanese-Americans living on the Pacific coast into internment camps for the duration of World War II.
• Mohandas K. Gandhi and the All-India Congress Committee launch the Quit India campaign (India).
• A gas explosion in the Japanese-controlled Benxihu mine in Liaoning leaves 1,549 people dead (China).
• Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in an Amsterdam building (The Netherlands).
• The Manhattan Project to build an atomic weapon begins (US).
• Ernico Fermi and his team at University of Chicago (including Leó Szilárd) create the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction inside the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1 (US).
  

  A black and white photo of a 1957 painting by Gary Sheehan showing Enrico Fermi and his team observing Chicago Pile No. 1 on December 2, 1942.

• Howard Florey, Norman Heatley, Ernst Chain and Andrew J. Moyer develop a method of manufacturing penicillin as a drug (US).
• Dorothy Hodgkin and Harry Carlisle use X-ray diffraction to determine the three-dimensional structure of a complex molecule (cholesterol iodide) for the first time (UK).
• Hugo Schmeisser invents the assault rifle (Germany).
• Nighthawks, a painting by American Realist Edward Hopper (US).
  

  Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks is based on a diner in Greenwich Village in New York City.

• The Stranger, a novel written in French by Albert Camus (Algeria/France).
• Bing Crosby introduces Irving Berlin’s White Christmas in the movie Holiday Inn (US).
• Casablanca, a film by Michael Curtiz, in which Dooley Wilson sings Herman Hupfeld’s song As Time Goes By (US).
• The Tetons and the Snake River, a photograph by Ansel Adams (US).
  

  The Tetons and the Snake River.

• Stephen Hawking is born in Oxford, England, UK.
• Paul McCartney is born in Liverpool, UK.
• Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. (Muhammad Ali) is born in Louisville, Kentucky, US.

1943

• The Russians defeat the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad (Russia).
• The Nazis suppress an uprising in Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto (Poland).
• Allied leaders meet at the Tehran conference (Iran).
• The Allies invade and liberate Sicily; then they land in Salerno and oust the Nazis from Italy; the Fascists fall; and the new Italian government declares war on Germany.
• Max Newman, Tommy Flowers and others build the Mk I Colossus computing machine for the British military to break the German encryption system (UK).
  

  The Mk 1 Colossus in 1943.

• Broadway Boogie Woogie, a Neoplasticist painting by Piet Mondrian (US).
  

  Broadway Boogie-Woogie.

• The final volume of Robert Musil’s German-language novel The Man Without Qualities is published posthumously (Germany).
• Canto General, poems written in Spanish by Pablo Neruda (Chile).
• The Little Prince, a novella in French by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (France).
• Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (Hungary).
• Symphony No. 8 in C minor, by Dmitri Shostakovich (Russia).
• Lena Horne sings Stormy Weather in the movie Stormy Weather (US).
• The Critic (Opening Night at the Opera), a photograph by Weegee (US).
  

  The Critic.

• Marines Under Fire, Saipan, a photograph by W. Eugene Smith (Mariana Islands).
  

  Marines under Fire.

• Nikola Tesla dies.
• Karl Landsteiner dies.
• Lech Wałęsa is born in Popowo, Poland.
• Billie Jean Moffitt (Billie Jean King) is born in Long Beach, California, US.

1944

• Allied troops invade Normandy on D-Day (France).
  

  Allied troops land at Normandy on D-Day.

• The Soviets defeat the Germans at the Siege of Leningrad (Russia).
• Germany launches its final offensive in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes forest (France; Belgium; Luxembourg).
• Following the Allied liberation of France, Charles de Gaulle becomes leader of the French provisional government.
• The Anti-Fascist Liberation Council of Yugoslavia governs areas liberated by Partisans under Josip Broz Tito (Serbia; Croatia; Bosnia & Herzegovina).
• The underground militant Jewish group Irgun proclaims a revolt against the British government of the Palestine Mandate (Israel; Palestine).
• Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty discover that DNA is the substance that carries genetic information (US).
• Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a tryptich by Francis Bacon (UK).
  

  Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.

• Ficciones, stories written in Spanish by Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina).
• Appalachian Spring, a ballet score by Aaron Copland (US).
• Woody Guthrie records his song This Land is Your Land (US).
• Double Indemnity, a film by Billy Wilder (US).
  

  Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity (1944).

• Henry V, a film by Laurence Olivier (UK).
  

  Laurence Olivier directed and starred in Henry V.

1945

• In February, Allied fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo (Germany; Japan).
• In February, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meet at the Yalta Conference to make plans for postwar Europe (Ukraine/Russia).
  

  Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at Yalta.

• Anne Frank dies in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (Germany).
• On May 7, Germany surrenders to the Allies, ending World War II in Europe (France).
• On July 16, the US test detonates a plutonium implosion atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico (US).
• On August 6, the US drops a uranium gun atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing 90,000-140,000 people and destroying 69% of the city’s buildings.
  

  Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after atomic blast.

• On August 9, the US drops a plutonium implosion atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing approximately 74,000 people.
• On August 15, Japan surrenders to the Allies, ending World War II in the Pacific.
• Ho Chi Minh announces the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
• Tito’s Partisans and the Soviets liberate Yugoslavia from German occupation.
• After Japan’s defeat, Chinese Communists and Nationalists resume their civil war (China).
• Surviving Nazis are tried for war crimes in Nuremberg (Germany).
• Founding of the United Nations.
• Six nations form the Arab League in Cairo (Egypt).
• Indonesia proclaims its independence, with Sukharno as its first president, triggering the Indonesian National Revolution against the Netherlands.
• John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania launch ENIAC, the first electronic, digital, programmable general purpose computer (US).
  

  John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert with ENIAC.

• Percy L. Spencer invents the microwave oven (US).
• The Open Society and its Enemies, a work of political philosophy and the philosophy of history written in English by Karl Popper (UK).
• Animal Farm, a novel written in English by George Orwell (UK).
• Loving, a novel written in English by Henry Green (UK: England).
• Brideshead Revisited, a novel written in English by Evelyn Waugh (UK: England).
• Fern Hill, a poem written in English by Dylan Thomas (UK).
• Peter Grimes, an English-language opera by Benjamin Britten, premieres in London (UK).
• Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie introduce the world to bebop with their recording of Ko-Ko (US).
  

  Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie at the Town Hall Concert in New York, 1945.

• Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), a film by Marcel Carné (France).
  

  A still image from Children of Paradise.

• Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, a photograph by Joe Rosenthal (Japan).
  

  Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.

• Soviet Soldiers Raise USSR Flag over Reichstag in Berlin, a photograph by Yevgeny Khaldei (Germany).
  

  Soviet Soldiers Raise USSR Flag Over Reichstag.

• The Kiss – V-J Day in Times Square, a photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt (US).
  

  The Kiss made the front cover of Life magazine.

• Buchenwald Victims, a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White (Germany).
  

  Prisoners at Buchenwald.

• Thomas Hunt Morgan dies.
• Robert Goddard dies.
• Aung San Suu Kyi is born in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar).

1946

• Jordan becomes an independent nation.
• The Philippines are declared independent by Treaty of Manila.
• The First Indochina War begins between the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, and France, allied with Emperor Bảo Đại’s Vietnamese National Army.
• In the Iran Crisis of 1946, the Soviet Union refuses to withdraw from Iranian lands occupied during World War II and instead establishes two puppet states within Iran.
• Eva Perón becomes the First Lady of Argentina.
  

  Eva and Juan Perón in 1950.

• Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri (US).
• Walter Elsasser proposes that the Earth’s liquid outer core is a dynamo that generates the Earth’s magnetic field (US).
• Marion Donovan invents disposable diapers (US).
  

  Marion Donovan with one of her disposable diapers.

• The Temptation of St. Anthony, a Surrealist painting by Salvador Dali (US).
  

  The Temptation of St. Anthony.

• Nude in the Bath and Small Dog, a painting by Pierre Bonnard (France).
  

  Nude in Bath with Small Dog.

• Hiroshima, a work of journalism written in English by John Hersey (US).
• All the King’s Men, a novel written in English by Robert Penn Warren (US).
• The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a German play by Bertolt Brecht (Germany).
• Directive, a poem written in English by Robert Frost (US).
• The Best Years of Our Lives, a film by William Wyler (US).
• Gandhi at his Spinning Wheel, a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White (US/India).
  

  Margaret Bourke-White photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi for Life magazine.

• Gilbert N. Lewis dies.
• Felix Hoffmann dies.
• John Logie Baird dies.
• Craig Venter is born in Salt Lake City, Utah, US.
• William Jefferson Blythe III (Bill Clinton) is born in Hope, Arkansas, US.
• George W. Bush is born in New Haven, Connecticut, US.

1947

• India separates from the UK and becomes an independent nation.
• The Partition of India and Pakistan triggers the first Indo-Pakistani War.
• The Dutch invade Indonesia.
• The United Nations adopts a resolution recommending adoption of a plan to partition Palestine, triggering a civil war between Arabs and Jews (Israel; Palestine).
• President Harry S. Truman announces the Truman Doctrine, which pledges American support for anticommunist regimes threatened by Communist insurgencies or the USSR (US).
• George Gamow develops Georges Lemaître’s ‘primeval atom’ idea into the Big Bang theory (UK).
• The first Dead Sea Scrolls are found near Jericho (Israel; Palestine).
  

  A portion of the Dead Sea scrolls.

• Piloted by Chuck Yeager, the Bell X-1 becomes the first aircraft to break the sound barrier (US).
• William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs build the first solid-state electronic transistor (US).
• Dennis Gabor invents holography (UK).
• Edwin Land introduces the Polaroid Land Camera, the first instant camera (US).
• Jackie Robinson becomes the first African-American to play for a Major League Baseball team when he signs a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers (US).
  

  Jackie Robinson steals home.

• The structural expressionist Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, designed by Eero Saarinen and Hannskarl Bandel (US).
  

  The Gateway Arch symbolizes St. Louis’s status as gateway to the western frontier of the United States.

• The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s journal from 1942-1944, written in Dutch, is published (The Netherlands).