Modern

By a treaty signed in Paris and dated 30 April 1803, the United States bought the vast Louisiana Territory from Napoleonic France for roughly $15 million, acquiring some 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River.

On 1 January 1804, at Gonaïves, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed the independence of the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, restoring the indigenous Taíno name Haiti.

On 2 December 1804, in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris and in the presence of Pope Pius VII, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of the French, inaugurating the First French Empire and the Bonaparte dynasty.

On 21 March 1804 France promulgated the Civil Code of the French, soon known as the Code Napoléon.

Around 1804 the human population is generally estimated to have reached one billion for the first time, a milestone that marks the onset of the modern demographic transition.

On 2 December 1805, near Austerlitz in Moravia, Napoleon won what is often regarded as his greatest tactical victory.

On 21 October 1805, off Cape Trafalgar on the southwest coast of Spain, a British fleet of 27 ships of the line under Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson decisively defeated a combined Franco-Spanish fleet of 33 ships commanded by Admiral…

In 1805 Muhammad Ali, an Albanian commander in the Ottoman force sent to expel Napoleon's army from Egypt, was confirmed by the Sublime Porte as wali (governor) and pasha of Egypt after Cairo's notables and ulama backed his claim.

On 6 August 1806, Francis II abdicated the imperial crown and released all member states and officials from their obligations, formally dissolving the Holy Roman Empire after roughly a thousand years.

On 21 November 1806, from occupied Berlin, Napoleon issued a decree declaring the British Isles under blockade and prohibiting all trade and correspondence with Britain across territories under French control.

On 25 March 1807 the Slave Trade Act received royal assent, making it illegal for British subjects and British ships to engage in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans; the ban took effect on 1 May 1807.

In the first part of A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), the English chemist and meteorologist John Dalton set out a coherent atomic theory of matter, building on ideas he had been developing since around 1803.

The Peninsular War erupted in 1808 after French armies, having transited Spain to occupy Portugal in 1807, turned on their Spanish ally and Napoleon installed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne.

Napoleon's 1808 invasion of Spain, the forced abdication of Ferdinand VII and the installation of Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne triggered a crisis of legitimacy across Spain's American colonies.

In June 1812 Napoleon led a multinational Grande Armée of around 600,000 men across the Niemen River to compel Tsar Alexander I to return to the Continental System.

Fought from 16 to 19 October 1813 around Leipzig in Saxony, the Battle of the Nations was the largest engagement of the Napoleonic Wars and one of the largest in European history before the twentieth century, involving more than half a…

From late 1814 the great powers convened at Vienna under the guiding hand of the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich to reconstruct Europe after more than two decades of revolutionary and Napoleonic upheaval.

On 18 June 1815, near the village of Waterloo in present-day Belgium, Napoleon's bid to reclaim power during the Hundred Days came to a decisive end.

The Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, signed on 9 June 1815, concluded the post-Napoleonic settlement that redrew the map of Europe.

On 10 April 1815 Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) erupted in the most powerful volcanic event in recorded history, a VEI-7 explosion that ejected roughly 40 cubic kilometres of material and…

The Mfecane (Nguni for "the crushing" or "scattering"; difaqane in Sesotho) was a period of widespread warfare, upheaval, and forced migration that transformed the political and demographic landscape of southern Africa during the first…

On 7 August 1819 Simón Bolívar's patriot army, having crossed the flooded plains of the Orinoco and the freezing Andean pass of the Páramo de Pisba, routed a Spanish royalist force at the Boyacá bridge in present-day Colombia.

In October 1819, only months after the death of Kamehameha I, his son and successor Liholiho (Kamehameha II) publicly dismantled the ancient kapu system in an event known as the ʻAi Noa, or "free eating." Strongly urged by the powerful…

In 1821 the Bank of England resumed full convertibility of its notes into gold, putting the gold standard into operation in the United Kingdom following the framework set by the Coinage Act of 1816.

The Greek War of Independence (1821–1832) was the first successful nationalist revolt to break a European people away from the Ottoman Empire, making the Greeks the first Ottoman subject nation to win recognition as an independent…

On 7 September 1822, beside the Ipiranga brook near São Paulo, Prince Regent Pedro of Braganza proclaimed Brazil's independence from Portugal in the episode remembered as the Grito do Ipiranga ("Cry of Ipiranga").

In his seventh annual message to Congress on 2 December 1823, President James Monroe set out the principles that became known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Founded in the 1820s on the Merrimack River in Massachusetts by the Boston Associates and named for Francis Cabot Lowell, the planned mill town of Lowell became the showcase of the American Industrial Revolution.

On 9 December 1824, on the high plateau near Ayacucho in Peru, a patriot army of about 6,000 commanded by Antonio José de Sucre, Bolívar's most capable lieutenant, decisively defeated a larger Spanish royalist force under Viceroy José de…

On 7 May 1824 Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, received its first performance at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna.

On 27 September 1825 the Stockton and Darlington Railway in County Durham opened as the world's first public railway to use steam locomotives. On opening day George Stephenson's locomotive 'Locomotion No.

The Java War of 1825–1830 was the largest and costliest armed challenge to Dutch colonial rule in the East Indies during the nineteenth century.

At the Rainhill Trials of 6-14 October 1829 the directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway held a public competition to decide what motive power their line should use.

On 14 June 1830 a French expeditionary force of some 34,000 troops under General de Bourmont landed at Sidi Ferruch, west of Algiers, and within three weeks compelled the surrender of Hussein Dey, ruler of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers.

The Revolutions of 1830 were a wave of liberal and nationalist uprisings that further eroded the conservative settlement of 1815.

Signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on 28 May 1830, the Indian Removal Act authorised the federal government to negotiate the exchange of Native American lands east of the Mississippi for territory in the west, opening the way for…

On 29 August 1831, working at the Royal Institution in London, Michael Faraday demonstrated electromagnetic induction by winding two insulated coils on opposite sides of an iron ring: switching current on or off in one coil induced a…

Around 1831, during Japan's late Edo period, the ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai produced 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' (Kanagawa-oki nami-ura), the first print in his woodblock series 'Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji'.

The Factory Act of 1833, passed by the Whig government, was the first effective British legislation to regulate the conditions of factory labour and a landmark response to the human costs of the new industrial system.

In September 1833 Benjamin Henry Day launched The Sun in New York, the first successful 'penny press' newspaper in the United States.

Receiving royal assent on 28 August 1833 and taking effect on 1 August 1834, the Slavery Abolition Act abolished slavery throughout most of the British Empire, freeing some 800,000 enslaved people, chiefly in the Caribbean, Mauritius and…

On 2 November 1834 the ship Atlas reached Mauritius from Calcutta carrying thirty-six Indian labourers, the pioneer cohort of what became the modern indentured labour system.

On 1 January 1834 the Zollverein, a customs union led by Prussia, came into force, abolishing internal tariffs among most German states and creating a single market of some twenty-five million people.

In March 1834 six agricultural labourers from the Dorset village of Tolpuddle were sentenced to seven years' transportation to penal colonies in Australia.

Published in May 1838 and publicly launched at mass meetings in Glasgow, Birmingham and the north of England, the People's Charter became the founding document of Chartism, the first mass working-class political movement in Britain.

On 7 January 1839 the painter and stage designer Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre presented his photographic process to the French Academie des Sciences, and on 19 August 1839 the details were publicly disclosed in Paris.

Beginning on 3 June 1839, Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu oversaw the public destruction of roughly 1,000 long tons (some 20,000 chests) of opium that he had compelled British and other foreign merchants to surrender at Canton (Guangzhou).

On 3 November 1839 the young Sultan Abdülmecid I proclaimed the Hatt-i Sharif of Gülhane (the Noble Edict of the Rose Garden), opening the Tanzimat or 'Reorganisation' era of the Ottoman Empire.

The First Opium War (1839–1842) pitted the Qing dynasty against the British Empire after China's suppression of the illegal opium trade at Canton.

On 6 February 1840 Captain William Hobson, representing the British Crown, and some 43 to 46 Māori rangatira (chiefs) signed the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) in the Bay of Islands, after a day and night of debate among…

On 24 May 1844 Samuel F. B. Morse transmitted the message "What hath God wrought" from the Capitol in Washington to his partner Alfred Vail at a railroad station in Baltimore, the first public demonstration of his electromagnetic telegraph…

From 1845 to 1852 Ireland suffered the Great Famine, or An Gorta Mór, one of the most catastrophic subsistence crises of nineteenth-century Europe.

Fought between 1846 and 1848, the Mexican–American War grew out of the United States' 1845 annexation of Texas and a disputed border on the Rio Grande, set against the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny.

In late February 1848, around the 21st, a slim pamphlet titled the Manifesto of the Communist Party appeared in London, printed in German and commissioned by the Communist League.

On 27 April 1848 the provisional government of the French Second Republic issued a decree abolishing slavery in all French colonies, freeing roughly 250,000 enslaved people in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and elsewhere.

On 19 and 20 July 1848 some three hundred people gathered at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, for the first women's rights convention in the United States.

The Frankfurt National Assembly, which first met in the Paulskirche on 18 May 1848, was the first freely elected parliament for all of Germany and the boldest attempt of the 1848 revolutions to create a unified, constitutional German…

The Revolutions of 1848, known as the 'Springtime of Peoples', formed the most widespread revolutionary wave in nineteenth-century Europe, spreading across France, the German and Italian states, the Habsburg Empire and beyond between…

The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was a vast civil war against the Qing dynasty led by Hong Xiuquan, a Hakka schoolteacher who, after failing the imperial examinations and experiencing religious visions, proclaimed himself the younger…

Across the mid-nineteenth century the science of thermodynamics took systematic shape.

From roughly the mid-19th century into the early 20th century, Arabic-speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire—especially Egypt, Greater Syria, Lebanon, and Tunisia—experienced a wide-ranging cultural and intellectual awakening known as the…

In 1851 the discovery of payable gold, first at Ophir in New South Wales and soon afterwards at Ballarat and Bendigo in the newly separated colony of Victoria, set off a transformative gold rush.

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened in Hyde Park, London, on 1 May 1851 and ran until 15 October, the first in the great series of international world's fairs.

On 4 October 1851 a telegraph circuit linking Calcutta with Diamond Harbour began operating, the first electric telegraph line on the Indian subcontinent.

In July 1853 a United States naval squadron under Commodore Matthew C. Perry steamed into Edo (Tokyo) Bay, its 'black ships' a deliberate display of steam-powered force intended to end Japan's two centuries of self-imposed seclusion under…

The Crimean War (October 1853 – February 1856) pitted Russia against an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France and, from 1855, the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.

During a severe cholera outbreak that struck the Soho district of London from late August 1854, killing more than 600 people, the physician John Snow conducted a pioneering epidemiological investigation.

The Third Plague Pandemic, the last of the three great bubonic plague pandemics caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, originated in China's Yunnan province around 1855, where mining booms and rising trade brought people into contact…

In August 1856 quarry workers clearing a limestone cave, the Kleine Feldhofer Grotte, in the Neander Valley (Neandertal) near Düsseldorf, Germany, uncovered a skullcap and limb bones with a heavy browridge and unusually thick, robust form.

In 1856 the English engineer Henry Bessemer publicly described his new process for making steel, presenting it on 11 August at the Cheltenham meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science after securing patents earlier…

The Second Opium War (1856–1860), also called the Arrow War, saw Britain and France wage a joint campaign against the Qing dynasty to expand the privileges won in 1842.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857—known variously as the Sepoy Mutiny, the Great Rebellion, or India's First War of Independence—erupted on 10 May 1857 when sepoys of the East India Company's Bengal Army mutinied at Meerut, in part over the…

After years of effort led by the American financier Cyrus Field, the first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed on 5 August 1858, and on 16 August Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan exchanged congratulatory messages, the…

On 24 November 1859 the English naturalist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, arguing that the diversity of life arose through descent with modification from common ancestors, driven chiefly by…

The Second Italian War of Independence (April–July 1859) was the decisive military step that made Italian unification possible.

The Expedition of the Thousand and the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy completed the central act of the Risorgimento.

On 3 March 1861 (19 February in the Russian Julian calendar) Tsar Alexander II issued the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing more than 23 million privately held serfs and inaugurating the most far-reaching reform of nineteenth-century Russia.

The American Civil War (1861–1865) was fought between the United States and eleven Southern states that seceded to form the Confederacy, primarily over slavery and its expansion.

In 1862 the French writer Victor Hugo published 'Les Misérables', an epic novel released in volumes in Brussels and Paris that became an immediate international success and was rapidly translated into many languages.

In July 1863 Governor George Grey launched the invasion of the Waikato, the largest campaign of the New Zealand Wars and a decisive moment in the colonial conquest of New Zealand.

The Baha'i Faith emerged as a distinct world religion in 1863 when Baha'u'llah (Mirza Husayn-Ali Nuri, 1817-1892) declared in the Garden of Ridvan near Baghdad that he was the messianic 'He whom God shall make manifest' foretold by the Bab.

On 28 September 1864 delegates meeting at St Martin's Hall in London founded the International Workingmen's Association, later known as the First International.

Ratified on 6 December 1865 and proclaimed on 18 December, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime, throughout the country and its territories.

In 1865 the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel presented the results of eight years of breeding experiments with pea plants to the Natural History Society of Brünn (Brno, in the Austrian Empire), publishing them in 1866 as 'Experiments on…

Drawing on Louis Pasteur's emerging germ theory, the Scottish surgeon Joseph Lister concluded that the wound infections that killed many surgical patients were caused by airborne and contact microbes rather than by 'bad air'.

Between 1865 and 1869 the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy serialised and then published in full 'War and Peace' (Voyna i mir), a vast novel set during the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia.

The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light into a single mathematical theory.

Between 1865 and 1876 the Russian Empire subjugated the three Uzbek khanates of Central Asia, completing its southward expansion into Turkestan.

The Austro-Prussian or 'Seven Weeks' War of 1866 resolved the long-standing contest over whether a unified Germany would be led by Habsburg Austria or Hohenzollern Prussia.

On 1 July 1867 the British North America Act came into force, uniting three British colonies—the Province of Canada (divided into Ontario and Quebec), Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—into a single federation styled the Dominion of Canada.

On 3 January 1868 a coalition of reformist samurai from the Satsuma and Chōshū domains, together with court nobles, proclaimed the restoration of direct rule by the young Emperor Meiji (Mutsuhito), ending more than two and a half centuries…

On 6 March 1869 (Old Style; 18 March by the Gregorian calendar) a paper by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev on 'The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements' was read to the Russian Chemical Society in St…

The Suez Canal, a 100-mile waterway linking the Mediterranean and Red seas across the Isthmus of Suez, opened to navigation on 17 November 1869 after a decade of construction overseen by Ferdinand de Lesseps and the Suez Canal Company.

Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan undertook a rapid program of technological modernisation that placed it at the forefront of non-Western industrialisation.

The Franco-Prussian War (July 1870 – May 1871) completed the unification of Germany and reshaped the European order.

On 1 March 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act establishing Yellowstone National Park in the territories of Wyoming and Montana, creating the first federally protected national park in the world.

In May 1873 the Vienna Stock Exchange crashed, ending a speculative boom across central Europe and igniting what has been called the first truly international financial crisis.

On 15 April 1874 a group of independent artists opened their first exhibition in the former studio of the photographer Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, bypassing the official Salon.

In November 1875, facing bankruptcy, the Egyptian khedive Isma'il Pasha sold his holding of roughly 44 percent of the Suez Canal Company.

On 7 March 1876 the U.S. Patent Office granted Alexander Graham Bell patent No. 174,465 for an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically." Three days later, on 10 March, Bell transmitted the first intelligible…

From 13 to 17 August 1876 Richard Wagner's complete four-opera cycle 'Der Ring des Nibelungen' was performed for the first time, inaugurating the first Bayreuth Festival in a purpose-built theatre, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, designed to…

The Great Famine of 1876–1878 devastated southern and central India—chiefly the Madras and Bombay presidencies, Mysore, Hyderabad and parts of the Central Provinces—after the failure of the monsoon rains, with modern demographic estimates…

The Anglo-Zulu War was fought in 1879 between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom of southern Africa, triggered by an ultimatum from British colonial authorities seeking to break Zulu independence and advance confederation in the…

On 31 December 1879 Thomas Edison publicly demonstrated a practical incandescent electric lamp at his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory, where his team had developed a carbon-filament bulb that burned for many hours; special trains…

The germ theory of disease holds that specific microorganisms such as bacteria invade the body and cause specific infectious illnesses, overturning the long-dominant miasma theory that attributed disease to bad air.

Between 1883 and 1885 the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche published 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' (Also sprach Zarathustra) in four parts, a work of philosophical fiction written in a prophetic, poetic style.

The Berlin West Africa Conference, convened by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck and held from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885, brought together fourteen states — twelve European powers, the Ottoman Empire and the United States to…

The Mahdist War pitted Sudanese followers of Muhammad Ahmad, who proclaimed himself the Mahdi, against Egyptian and British forces.

On 6 July 1885 the French chemist Louis Pasteur, with physicians Jacques-Joseph Grancher and Alfred Vulpian, administered an experimental rabies vaccine to nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been severely bitten by a rabid dog days…

In 1885 the German engineer Carl Benz completed the Patent-Motorwagen, a three-wheeled vehicle powered by a compact, high-speed single-cylinder four-stroke internal-combustion engine, generally regarded as the world's first practical…

The Third Anglo-Burmese War (November 1885) completed the British conquest of Burma.

From 1885 the Congo Free State was ruled as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, who exploited its people to extract ivory and, especially, wild rubber for export.

On 17 October 1887 France formally established the Indochinese Union (Union indochinoise), binding together the directly ruled colony of Cochinchina with the protectorates of Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia under a single Governor-General.

On 13 May 1888 Princess Isabel, acting as regent for her father Emperor Pedro II, signed the Lei Áurea, or Golden Law, which declared slavery abolished in Brazil with immediate effect and without compensation to slaveholders.

On 11 February 1889 Emperor Meiji promulgated the Constitution of the Empire of Japan, presented as a gift bestowed by the sovereign on his subjects.

On 14 July 1889, the centenary of the storming of the Bastille, a Marxist International Socialist Congress convened in Paris and founded the Second International, a federation of socialist and labour parties drawn from some twenty…

On 1 January 1892 the federal immigration station at Ellis Island, in New York Harbor, opened its doors, becoming the principal gateway for the climax of the greatest voluntary human migration in history.

The War of the Currents pitted Thomas Edison's direct-current (DC) system against the alternating-current (AC) system championed by George Westinghouse and the inventor Nikola Tesla, whose polyphase AC induction motor and patents…

On 17 January 1893 a Committee of Safety dominated by American and European business interests, backed by the landing of US Marines from the USS Boston ordered by minister John L.

On 19 September 1893 the Governor of New Zealand, Lord Glasgow, signed a new Electoral Act into law, making the colony the first self-governing nation in the world to grant all adult women the right to vote in parliamentary elections.

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) was fought between Qing China and the Empire of Japan, primarily for influence over Korea, long a Chinese tributary.

In the space of a few years a cluster of discoveries opened the study of radiation and the inner structure of the atom.

On 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa in northern Ethiopia, an Ethiopian army under Emperor Menelik II decisively defeated an invading Italian colonial force led by General Oreste Baratieri.

On 20 August 1897, while working in Secunderabad in British India, the army surgeon Ronald Ross dissected an Anopheles mosquito that had fed days earlier on a malaria patient and found the malarial parasite developing within cells of the…

The Fashoda Incident was the climax of Anglo-French rivalry in the partition of Africa.

The Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) was an anti-foreign, anti-Christian uprising in northern China led by the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, whose members—nicknamed 'Boxers' for their martial-arts practices—believed ritual training…

The Second Boer War, fought from October 1899 to May 1902, pitted the British Empire against the two Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, whose independence and rich Witwatersrand gold deposits clashed with…

Sigmund Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (Die Traumdeutung) was issued by the publisher Franz Deuticke with the date 1900, though it appeared in late 1899 and was post-dated to mark the new century.

On 12 December 1901 the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi reported receiving the first wireless signal transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean.

On the morning of 17 December 1903, near Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the first sustained, controlled, powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft.

In German South West Africa (present-day Namibia), German colonial rule and land seizures provoked an uprising by the Herero people under Samuel Maharero in January 1904, followed by a Nama revolt in 1905.

The Russo-Japanese War (8 February 1904 – 5 September 1905) was fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea.

Beginning in April 1906 in a converted building at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles, a series of revival meetings led by the African American preacher William J. Seymour gave organisational and spiritual momentum to modern Pentecostalism.

Beginning in November 1910 with Francisco Madero's call to arms against the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican Revolution became the first major social revolution of the twentieth century.

The Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty and ended more than two thousand years of imperial rule in China.

In November 1913 the Bengali poet, composer, and polymath Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first non-European and first Asian laureate.

The Haber-Bosch process, which synthesises ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen under high temperature and pressure, reached industrial scale when BASF's Oppau plant in Germany went on-stream on 9 September 1913.

On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie were shot dead in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb member of the Young Bosnia movement.

Beginning on 24 April 1915, when Ottoman authorities arrested and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople, the Ottoman government carried out the systematic destruction of its Armenian population…

In 1916 the Western Front produced two of the deadliest battles in history, epitomising the industrialised attrition warfare of World War I.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret wartime convention concluded on 16 May 1916 between Britain and France, with the assent of Imperial Russia, to define their respective spheres of influence and control in the Arab lands of the Ottoman…

On 2 November 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, for transmission to the Zionist Federation, stating that the British government viewed 'with favour the establishment in Palestine of a…

Two revolutions in 1917 transformed Russia and world history. The February Revolution (March, New Style) erupted amid wartime hardship, military defeats, and food shortages; on 15 March 1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, ending three…

The Armistice between the Allies and Germany was signed at around 5:45 a.m. on 11 November 1918 in a railway carriage in the Compiègne Forest in France and took effect at 11:00 a.m.

On 3 March 1918 the Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire), formally ending Russia's participation in World War I.

The Representation of the People Act 1918 granted parliamentary voting rights to women in Britain for the first time, alongside near-universal male suffrage.

The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I ended an imperial state that had endured for over six centuries.

The 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, caused by an H1N1 virus and commonly called the 'Spanish flu', was the deadliest pandemic of the modern era.

During the total solar eclipse of 29 May 1919, British expeditions led by Arthur Eddington (on Principe, off West Africa) and a Greenwich party at Sobral, Brazil, photographed stars near the obscured Sun and measured the deflection of…

On 4 May 1919, around three thousand students gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing to protest the decision at the Paris Peace Conference to transfer Germany's former concessions in Shandong to Japan rather than return them to China.

In April 1919 the architect Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, and issued a four-page manifesto proclaiming a new school that would unite fine art, craft, and industry.

Signed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles on 28 June 1919 — five years to the day after the Sarajevo assassination — the Treaty of Versailles formally ended the state of war between Germany and most of the Allied powers.

On 2 November 1920, Westinghouse station KDKA in Pittsburgh transmitted returns from the Harding-Cox presidential election, an event widely cited as the first scheduled broadcast by a licensed commercial radio station.

The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the denial of the right to vote on the basis of sex.

Launched by Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Indian National Congress on 4 September 1920, the Non-Cooperation Movement was the first mass nationwide campaign of nonviolent resistance against British rule in India.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, drafted while he served as a soldier in the First World War and completed during military leave in 1918, was first published in German in 1921 and then in 1922 in a bilingual edition…

The year 1922 became a landmark of literary modernism with the publication of two of the century's most influential works in the English language.

In late October 1922 tens of thousands of Fascist Blackshirts converged on the Italian capital in a coordinated show of force orchestrated by Benito Mussolini and the National Fascist Party.

Burdened by war debt and the reparations imposed at Versailles, and after the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923 prompted the government to print money to fund passive resistance, Germany experienced one of history's…

In 1923 Sigmund Freud published Das Ich und das Es (The Ego and the Id), which set out the structural model of the psyche that would become the most widely recognised framework of psychoanalysis: the id, the reservoir of unconscious…

Following Ottoman defeat in World War I and the Turkish War of Independence, recognition of the Ankara government at the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923) cleared the way for the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923…

In October 1924 the French writer André Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism in Paris, formally launching one of the most influential avant-garde movements of the twentieth century.

In 1925 the philosopher and critic Alain Locke edited and published The New Negro: An Interpretation, an anthology of fiction, poetry, essays, and art that became the defining text of the Harlem Renaissance.

Between 1925 and 1927 physicists developed a complete and self-consistent quantum mechanics, replacing the ad hoc 'old quantum theory' of Planck and Bohr.

In 1925 the Soviet Union established the League of Militant Atheists (later the League of the Militant Godless), a mass organisation tasked with propagating state atheism and eradicating religious belief across the USSR.

Around 1926, the Deobandi Islamic scholar Muhammad Ilyas Kandhlawi launched the Tablighi Jamaat ("Society for Spreading Faith") in the Mewat region of British India, near the Dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin in Delhi.

On 6 October 1927 Warner Bros. premiered The Jazz Singer in New York City, the first feature-length motion picture with synchronised recorded music and passages of lip-synchronous singing and speech.

In March 1928, the schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) in the Egyptian canal city of Ismailia, together with six workers of the Suez Canal Company.

Launched on 1 October 1928, Stalin's First Five-Year Plan committed the USSR to rapid, centrally planned industrialisation focused on steel, coal, and electricity, together with the collectivisation of agriculture into state and collective…

In September 1928 Alexander Fleming, at St Mary's Hospital in London, observed that a contaminating mould of the genus Penicillium inhibited the growth of Staphylococcus bacteria on a culture plate, and he named the active substance…

After a speculative boom, the New York Stock Exchange collapsed in late October 1929.

The Mau ("firmly held opinion") was a nonviolent independence movement that arose in Western Samoa against New Zealand's League of Nations mandate administration, drawing on earlier Mau a Pule resistance and uniting Samoan matai chiefs…

Between 12 March and 6 April 1930, Mohandas K. Gandhi led a 24-day, roughly 385-kilometre march from his Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat to defy the British salt monopoly and tax.

The inaugural FIFA World Cup, the first global international association football tournament organised by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), was held in Uruguay from 13 to 30 July 1930.

On 18 September 1931, officers of Japan's Kwantung Army detonated explosives on a Japanese-owned railway near Mukden (Shenyang) and blamed Chinese forces, staging the false-flag Mukden Incident as a pretext for invasion.

The 1931 Central China floods, also called the 1931 Yangtze–Huai River floods, were a series of catastrophic inundations across central and eastern China that are widely regarded as the deadliest natural disaster in recorded history.

A man-made famine devastated the grain-growing regions of the USSR in 1932–33, striking Soviet Ukraine with particular severity.

On 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor at the head of a coalition government. The Nazis moved swiftly to entrench a dictatorship.

Encircled by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces in their Jiangxi Soviet base, the Chinese Communists broke out beginning around 16 October 1934 and embarked on a fighting retreat that became known as the Long March.

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms and ecological catastrophe that devastated the agriculture and ecology of the American and Canadian Great Plains during the 1930s.

Receiving royal assent on 2 August 1935, the Government of India Act 1935 was the most extensive constitutional reform enacted by Britain for India before independence.

The Douglas DC-3 was the airliner that made passenger flight commercially viable and turned aviation into a mass form of transport.

Nylon was the first fully synthetic fiber, a laboratory breakthrough that launched the age of man-made materials and reshaped everyday life.

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was a war of colonial aggression that exposed the impotence of the League of Nations and hardened the road to global war.

The Long March was the epic 6,000-mile retreat that transformed Mao Zedong into the paramount leader of the Chinese Communist Party and seeded the movement that would rule China.

The Nuremberg Laws were the racial statutes that transformed Nazi antisemitism from street harassment into codified state persecution.

The sulfa drugs were the first medicines able to cure a broad range of bacterial infections, opening the antibiotic age years before penicillin became available.

On 2 November 1936 the British Broadcasting Corporation began the world's first regular, public, high-definition television service from studios at Alexandra Palace in north London.

The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin transformed the modern Olympic movement into an instrument of mass spectacle and propaganda.

From 12 to 26 December 1936, generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng detained Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek at Xi'an, demanding that he halt the civil war against the Chinese Communists and instead unite the nation against Japanese…

Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin unleashed a campaign of political repression across the Soviet Union.

On 17 July 1936 a coalition of conservative, monarchist, and far-right army officers launched a coup against Spain's elected Second Republic, beginning in Spanish Morocco and spreading to mainland garrisons the next day.

Alan Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" laid the theoretical foundation of the modern computer.

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in his Paris studio between 1 May and 4 June 1937 in response to the aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937 by Nazi Germany's Condor Legion and Italian forces supporting Francisco…

Full-scale war between China and Japan erupted after the Marco Polo Bridge (Lugou Bridge) Incident near Beijing on 7 July 1937, when a clash between Japanese and Chinese troops escalated into a Japanese invasion of the Chinese heartland.

The Golden Gate Bridge was an engineering triumph of the Depression era, linking San Francisco to Marin County across a treacherous strait and becoming an enduring symbol of American ambition.

The Hindenburg disaster was the fiery destruction of the world's largest airship, a spectacle that abruptly ended commercial rigid-airship travel.

The Estado Novo was the authoritarian dictatorship that Getúlio Vargas imposed on Brazil, reshaping the nation's politics for a generation.

In December 1938, chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin, bombarding uranium with neutrons, identified barium among the products — evidence that the uranium nucleus had split, a result they confirmed on 19 December 1938.

The Mexican oil expropriation was a landmark assertion of economic sovereignty by a developing nation against powerful foreign corporations.

Frida Kahlo's first solo exhibition marked the international breakthrough of a Mexican painter who would become one of the twentieth century's most celebrated artists.

Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," was the state-orchestrated pogrom that turned Nazi persecution of Jews from legal exclusion into open physical violence.

The Munich Agreement was the diplomatic surrender that let Nazi Germany dismember Czechoslovakia and became the enduring symbol of appeasement's failure.

On 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, north and south, employing fast-moving armoured and air forces in a campaign that became associated with the term Blitzkrieg.

The year 1939 is widely regarded as the greatest in Hollywood history, a peak of the studio system that produced an extraordinary run of enduring classics as the film industry recovered from the Depression.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was the shock non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that cleared the way for the Second World War in Europe.

Between July and October 1940 the German Luftwaffe attempted to gain air superiority over the United Kingdom as a precondition for a planned cross-Channel invasion (Operation Sea Lion).

Beginning on 10 May 1940, German forces invaded France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, bypassing the Maginot Line by driving armoured columns through the Ardennes.

On the morning of 7 December 1941, Japanese carrier-based aircraft launched a surprise attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, sinking or damaging numerous battleships and other vessels and killing about 2,400…

On 22 June 1941 Germany and its Axis allies launched Operation Barbarossa, invading the Soviet Union along a front of roughly 2,900 km with more than three million troops.

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

From 4 to 7 June 1942 the United States Pacific Fleet defeated a Japanese naval force near Midway Atoll in the central Pacific.

The Battle of Stalingrad was fought from 23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943 between German and Soviet forces for control of the city on the Volga.

The Bengal Famine of 1943 was a catastrophic famine in the Bengal Province of British India (encompassing present-day West Bengal in India and Bangladesh) during World War II, in which an estimated 2 to 3 million people died from…

The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, from 1 to 22 July 1944, brought together 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations to design the post-war international monetary order.

On 6 June 1944, Allied forces under Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower launched Operation Overlord, the amphibious invasion of German-occupied France across five beaches in Normandy.

The Second World War and its immediate aftermath produced a second global wave of women's enfranchisement, exemplified by France and Japan.

Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in American exile by the Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.

The Guatemalan Revolution began on 20 October 1944, when a coalition of students, teachers, junior officers, and urban professionals overthrew the entrenched dictatorship associated with Jorge Ubico, launching a decade of democratic reform…

The United States detonated nuclear weapons over Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945) — the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict.

At the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco (25 April – 26 June 1945), delegates of fifty nations drafted and signed the Charter of the United Nations on 26 June 1945.

On 29 October 1945, only months after the end of the war in Europe, Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a public lecture titled "Existentialism Is a Humanism" at the Club Maintenant in Paris.

In 1945 the leaders of the principal Allied powers — the 'Big Three' — met twice to shape the postwar order. At Yalta (4–11 February 1945) Franklin D.

The 1945 Nigerian general strike was one of the largest labour actions in colonial Africa, mobilising tens of thousands of workers against British rule from 22 June to 6 August.

Indonesia declared independence on 17 August 1945, when Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta read a terse two-sentence proclamation at Sukarno's Jakarta residence, days after Japan's surrender left a power vacuum in the archipelago.

Vietnam declared independence on 2 September 1945, when Ho Chi Minh read a declaration before hundreds of thousands at Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, founding the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.