Attachment #3: Key Dates in World History: 1800 AD to 1945

The 19th Century

It took over two hundred thousand years of modern human history and 6 million years of human evolution for the world’s population to reach 1 billion in 1800; by the end of the century it was 1.6 billion. 

It took most of this century to move away from human and animal muscles to provide the mechanical energy needed for farming, construction, and manufacturing. Even by 1850, rising coal extraction in Europe and North America supplied no more than 7% of all fuel energy, nearly half of all useful kinetic energy comes from draft animals, about 40% from human muscles, and just 15% from the three inanimate movers: waterwheels, windmills, and the slowly spreading steam engines. The world of 1850 is much more akin to the world of 1700 or even 1600 than that of the year 2000. (Source: Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works)

• 1800: Population of the world reaches 1 billion people (See “1700”, “1900”, “1975”, “2000” and “2022, Nov”)

• 1800-1850: Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature-all components of modernity.It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on the study of history, education, social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism

• 1800: A means of cutting metal screws, efficiently, precisely, and fast was invented by Henry Maudslay. With his lathe constructed in iron and not wood, he could machine things to a standard of tolerance of one in one ten-thousandth of an inch. (He was technically not the first to perfect a screw-making lathe, as in 1775, Jesse Ramsden made a small screw-cutting lathe – but it was a delicate machine not made for larger devices made of metal.) Maudslay was a transformative figure, who built a whole family of machine tools

• 1803, April: A meteorite exploded in the sky and rained about 3,000 stones on L’Aigle, France. Scientists didn’t believe in meteorites until this day 

• 1803, May: The Louisiana Purchase, where the US, in a great deal, bought the vast territory of Louisiana (1.3 million sq. miles) from France. The purchase was intended to provide growing room and ease tensions between settlers and France. The US doubled in size

• 1804, Jan: The new nation of Haiti was established. The Haitian Revolution has been described as the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. Slaves initiated the rebellion in 1791 and by 1803 they had succeeded in ending not just slavery but French control over the colony. In the 18th century, Saint-Dominigue, as Haiti was then known, became France’s wealthiest overseas colony. The revolution was influenced by the French Revolution of 1789, which would come to represent a new concept of human rights and universal citizenship. A great irony considering the chaos occurring in the country now (See “1697”, “1791, Aug” and “2024, March”)

• 1804, Feb: The world’s first locomotive-hauled railway journey took place when Richard Trevithick’s steam locomotive hauled a train along the a tramway in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. This was followed in 1812 by the first commercially-successful steam locomotive built by Matthew Murray and run in Leeds, England. In 1830, the first railway to rely exclusively on steam-powered trains was the Liverpool and Manchester Railway 

• 1804, May: Lewis and Clark expedition eventually transformed the United States.They were sent west by US president Thomas Jefferson to explore the northern half of the vast Louisiana Territory that the US bought from France in 1903 and to find a usable water route to the Pacific Ocean (which they reached). They head up the Missouri River in search of its source. While they were not the first non-Indians to explore the area, and did not find an all-water route across the continent, the expedition did contribute significant geographic and scientific knowledge of the West, and aided the expansion of the fur trade, and strengthened US claims to the Pacific. Over the next two centuries, new Americans and many immigrants would wash across the central and western portion of what would eventually become the contiguous 48 United States. This wave of settlement would significantly transform virgin forests and grasslands into a landscape of cities, farms and harvested forests – displacing fauna such as the buffalo and squeezing the Native American tribes who survived onto reservations

• 1804, July: Aaron Burr kills Alexander Hamilton in a duel. The latter, beside being the first and former US Secretary of the Treasury, was considered by some as the founder of American capitalism. His achievements were so numerous they defy cataloguing. Burr was VP of the US and while identified as a Republican, his independent streak sowed distrust on both sides. Hamilton’s death permanently weakened the Federalist Party, which was founded by Hamilton in 1789 and one of the nation’s major two parties at the time. It also ended Burr’s political career. The duel, one of the most famous personal conflicts in American history, was the culmination of a bitter rivalry that had developed over years between these two high-profile politicians in the newly established US

• 1804: Ludwig van Beethoven completed his ‘Eroica’ Symphony. It changed the musical world with a significant impact upon composers, and is perhaps his defining work. German-born Beethoven (1770-1827) was one of the most revered figures in the history of Western music and was the predominant musical figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras

• 1804, Dec: Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned Emperor Napoleon I, the first Frenchman to hold the title of emperor in a thousand years. In 1802, he had established the Napoleonic Code, a new system of French law, and in 1804 he established the French empire. By 1807, Napoleon’s empire stretched from the River Elbe in the north, down through Italy in the south, and from the Pyrenees to the Dalmatian coast. As the century progressed, Napoleon turned the armies of the French Empire against every major European power 

• 1805, Oct: The naval Battle of Trafalgar confirming British naval supremacy. Vice-Admiral HoratioNelson (who was widely regarded as one of the greatest naval commanders in history) dies while British warships defeat the French and Spanish. The victory confirmed the naval supremacy Britain had established during the course of the eighteenth century

• 1807, May: The Slave Trade Act 1807 took effect in the British Parliament prohibiting the slave trade in the British Empire. The Kitty’s Amelia, a slave trading ship, was the last legal slave voyage for a British vessel

• 1808, Jan: An act of Congress was passed making it illegal for Americans to engage in the slave trade between nations, and gave US authorities the right to seize slave ships which were caught transporting slaves and confiscate their cargo. Then the “Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves” took effect. This legislation was promoted by President Thomas Jefferson. The domestic slave trade within the US was not affected by the 1808 law. Indeed, with the legal supply of imported slaves terminated, the domestic trade increased in importance. In addition, some smuggling of slaves persisted

• 1809: The Prussian government asked philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt to redesign their entire education system. He changed the system so that everyone should (regardless of age) start with the same all-around foundation – a general picture of good character. It was about creating human beings with moral responsibility, a rich inner life, and intellectual openness to knowledge (and not to be primarily about acquiring skill sets). He (1767-1835) also believed in lifelong learning. His approach brought up key questions, such as what is the right relationship between useful skill-learning and the more nebulous benefits of the making or forming of a person, to develop a person’s complete humanity as he grows, until he takes his place as a well-rounded personage in adult society

• 1810: The first patent for preserving food in tin cans was received by Englishman Peter Durand. By 1812 the world’s first commercial canning factory was opened in London, England. Early tin cans were sealed by soldering with a tin-lead alloy, which could lead to lead poisoning. It wasn’t until 1858 that Ezra Warner of Connecticut invented the can opener (initially a series of blades to puncture and then saw off the top of a can, leaving a dangerously jagged edge). The classic toothed-wheel crank design” that we know and use today came around 1925

• 1811, May: A single-shot breech-loading rifle, as opposed to being loaded down through the barrel, was patented by John Hancock Hall. This was the first breech-loading rifle to be adopted in large numbers by any nation’s army (but not the first breech-loading military rifle – the Ferguson rifle , which was used briefly by the British Army in the American Revolutionary War.)

• 1812, June: The US/Canada War of 1812 started (or to be clearer between the US and itsindigenous allies against the United Kingdom and its own indigenous allies.) Causes of the war included British attempts to restrict US trade, the British Royal Navy’s impressment of American seamen and America’s desire to expand its territory. Manyhistorians believe that a desire to permanently annex Canada was a direct cause of the war. Both the Americans and Canadians declared victory. It fuelled patriotism in both countries. Canada (Upper and Lower) emerged with an increased sense of patriotism and united to maintain its freedom. The Canadian militia, formed mostly by farmers – not professional soldiers (nor much support from the British, but important and critical support from its Indian allies – the alliance of the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes axis) performed well. The Treaty of Ghent ratified in February 1815 terminated the war, leaving Canada still a British possession. Many in the US celebrated the War of 1812 as a “second war of independence,” beginning an era of partisan agreement and national pride. The war’s outcome boosted national self-confidence and encouraged the growing spirit of American expansionism that would shape the better part of the 19th century

• 1812, Sept: Napoleon leaves Moscow severely weakened after a Pyrrhic victory in the Battle of Borodino, the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars. The Russian army retreated, still intact, implementing scorched earth tactics, whereby they destroyed everything of value to the invaders. It became a textbook example of what a hold logistics placed upon an army far from its centre of supply. After narrowly defeating the imperial Russian army (in total, there were a total of over 70,000 casualties in only twelve hours), he continued on to briefly occupy Moscow desperately hoping to reach a peace agreement with the tsar. When it became clear that no such peace was forthcoming, Napoleon ordered a retreat from Moscow on 18 October. The infamous Russian winter soon set in, and the Grande Armée was whittled down by attrition and the pursuing Russian army. By the time it limped back in early December, it had lost half a million troops and almost all its horses and cannons. Of the 100,000 survivors, most were unfit for battle, rendering the Grande Armée effectively destroyed. Borodino constituted a Pyrrhic victory for the French; Russian guerrilla warfare, lack of food and shelter, and bitter cold all decimated the French army. Of the 600,000+ soldiers who invaded the Russian Empire, less than 100,000 returned (See “1813, Oct”, “1814, March” and “1815, June”)

• 1813, Oct: Napoleon suffered one of his worst defeats in the Battle at Leipzig (aka Battle of the Nations), the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and indeed in European history prior to WWI (there were 133,000 casualties). He faced the Coalition armies of Prussia, Austria and Russia. Decisively defeated again, Napoleon was compelled to return to France while the Sixth Coalition kept up its momentum, dissolving the Confederation of the Rhine and invading France early the next year.  It hastened the decline of Napoleon’s empire. It was a clash of empires that decided the fate of the continent’s governance for 50-plus years to come 

• 1813: The idea of mechanically calculating mathematical tables first came to Charles Babbage. He is credited with having conceived the first automatic digital computer. Later this English mathematician and inventor made a small calculator that could perform certain mathematical computations to eight decimals. Then in 1823 he obtained government support for the design of a projected machine, the Difference Engine, with a 20-decimal capacity. He also compiled the first reliable actuarial tables, invented a type of speedometer and the locomotive cowcatcher. He is considered by some as the “father of the computer”

• 1814, Jan: Denmark cedes Norway to Sweden; they became a loose union until both countries became independent in 1905. The Treaty of Kiel ended the hostilities between Denmark and Sweden during the Napoleonic Wars. (After Denmark’s defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, the victorious powers, led by Great Britain, decided to transfer the territory to Sweden. This triggered a wave of nationalism in Norway. Norwegians asserted their independence and elected a constitutional assembly.) The treaty thus ended the union initiated in 1380 and further reducing Denmark’s status as a Baltic and European power. The treaty however was not recognized by Norway, which resisted the attempt in the 1814 Swedish-Norwegian War. Norway thereafter entered into a much looser personal union with Sweden until 1905, when that union was dissolved and both kingdoms became independent

• 1814, March: The Battle of Paris (or the Storming of Paris) was fought between the French Empire, who surrendered, and the Sixth Coalition (consisting of Russia, Austria, Prussia, Portugal, Great Britain, Sweden, and Spain). After a day of fighting in the suburbs of Paris, the French surrendered on 31 March, ending the War of the Sixth Coalition and forcing Napoleon to abdicate in April and go into exile on the island of Elba. The victorious Coalition met in Vienna to begin planning a post-Napoleonic Europe; of course, the Congress of Vienna would be briefly interrupted by Napoleon’s return in March 1815 (See “1813, Oct”, “1815, March” and “1815, June”)

• 1814, Aug: The Battle of Bladensburg “the greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms,” took place as part of the War of 1812 at Bladensburg, Maryland. A British force of army regulars and Royal Marines routed a combined US force of Regular Army and state militia troops. Inept leadership, ill-preparedness, insufficient numbers and unreliable muskets have been the excuses offered for the American defeat. The defeat resulted in the capture and burning of Washington, the capital of the US 14 kms away (See next)

• 1814, Aug: The Burning of Washington was a British invasion of Washington City, during the Chesapeake campaign of the War of 1812. It was the only time since the American Revolutionary War that a foreign power has captured and occupied the capital of the US. The attack was in part a retaliation for prior American actions in British-held Upper Canada (the “upper” prefix in the name reflecting its geographic position along the Great Lakes, contrasted with Lower Canada – present-day Quebec), in which US forces had burned and looted York the previous year and had then burnt large portions of Port Dover, Ontario

• 1814, Sept-1815, June: The Congress of Vienna reorganized Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. It began in September 1814, five months after Napoleon I’s first abdication and completed its “Final Act” in June 1815, shortly before the Waterloo campaign and the final defeat of Napoleon. The settlement was the most-comprehensive treaty that Europe had ever seen. All the powers (except Spain) acceded to it. At the negotiation table, the position of France was weak in relation to that of Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia, partly due to the military strategy of its leader, Bonaparte over the previous two decades, and his recent defeat. Prussia added territory from smaller states. Russia added the central and eastern parts of the Duchy of Warsaw. Switzerland was given neutralization status. As a result, the political boundaries laid down by the Congress of Vienna lasted, except for one or two changes, for more than 40 years. The statesmen had successfully worked out the principle of a balance of power. However, the idea of nationality had been almost entirely ignored – necessarily so because it was not yet ready for expression. Territories had been bartered about without much reference to the wishes of their inhabitants. (An even greater settlement took place at Versailles after WWI.) 

• 1815, March 20-June 18: The Hundred Days for Napoleon. This refers to the second reign of French Emperor Napoleon I, who unexpectedly returned from exile to reclaim the French throne. It encompasses his triumphant return to Paris on 20 March 1815 to begin his second reign, his climactic defeat at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June, his abdication for a second time four days later, and once again exiled, this time to the island of St. Helena, and the restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne (King Louis XVIII) on 8 July, a period of 110 days

• 1815, April: The most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history at Mount Tambora. It occurred on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia and created a “year without a summer” in 1816 and the coldest year in some 250 years and triggered harvest failures and extreme weather. Volcanic ash was ejected into the upper atmosphere and carried around the planet by the jet stream

• 1815, June: The British and others beat the French in the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon was once again exiled. Napoleon’s forces invaded Belgium, where British and Prussian troops were stationed. On June 16, Napoleon’s troops defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny. However, two days later at the Battle of Waterloo near Brussels, the French were crushed by the British (led by the Duke of Wellington), with assistance from the Prussians. The Bourbons were restored to the French throne, and Napoleon was once again exiled, this time to the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic and died in 1821. After his defeat Napoleon supposedly said “History is a series of lies that people have agreed upon.”

• 1816: The stethoscope was invented in France by René Laennec at a Paris hospital. It consisted of a wooden tube and was monaural. Laennec invented the stethoscope because he was not comfortable placing his ear directly onto a woman’s chest in order to listen to her heart. He learned to correlate sounds captured by his new instrument with specific pathological changes in the chest, in effect pioneering a new non-invasive diagnostic tool

• 1817: An American, Thomas Blanchard, invented a lathe that made lasts for shoes – then went on to do the same for gunstocks. Before this, shoes were offered up, in barrels, at random. A customer shuffled through the barrel until finding a shoe that fit. Now he simply asked for a size seven or eleven or whatever the specific dimensions Blanchard made for shoes for various sized feet. He went on to do the same thing for gunstocks, a process that lasted at the Harpers Ferry Armoury in Virginia for the next half century. It is considered the first establishment in the US, and maybe in the world, to employ precessional techniques and mass production to create weapons for the country’s military

• 1817: The start of the bicycle: a German, Karl von Drais, created a steerable, two-wheeled contraption. Known by many names, including the “velocipede,” “hobby-horse,” “draisine” and “running machine,” this early invention has made Drais widely acknowledged as the father of the bicycle. But the bicycle as we know it today evolved in the 19th century thanks to the work of several different inventors. A Philipp Moritz Fischer invented the pedal crank in 1853. New models that sported an oversized front wheel (dubbed “penny-farthings”) became all the rage during the 1870s and 1880s. In 1885, an Englishman, John Kemp Starley, perfected a “safety bicycle” design that featured equal-sized wheels and a chain drive. New developments in brakes and tires followed shortly, establishing a basic template for what would become the modern bicycle

• 1817-24: Spain’s colonies in Central and South America win independence. In 1817 José de San Martin defeats Chilean royalists at the Battle of Chacabuco, and enters Santiago, Chile. In 1819 the forces of Simon Bolivar defeat the Spanish at the Battle of Boyaca, which leads to the independence of New Granada (Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela). In 1824, the Battle of Ayacucho ends the Spanish presence in Peru

• 1818: Karl von Drais patented the first commercially successful two-wheeled, steerable, human-propelled machine, i.e. the world’s first balance bicycle (and then commonly called a velocipede, and nicknamed hobby-horse or dandy horse). It was initially manufactured in Germany and France

• 1818: The German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, published his famous The World as Will and Representation, which characterizes the observable world as the manifestation of a blind and irrational nominal will (knowledge posited as an object that exists independently of human sense). His metaphysics and philosophy of nature led him to the doctrine of pessimism: the view that sentient beings, with few exceptions, are bound to strive and suffer greatly, all without any ultimate purpose or justification and thus life is not really worth living. Schopenhauer (1788-1960) has been dubbed the artist’s philosopher on account of the inspiration his aesthetics has provided to artists of all stripes

• 1818, Oct: The Convention of 1818 defined the Missouri Territory in the US and British North America (later US/Canada border) westward along the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. Along with the 1817 Rush-Bagot Pact, the Convention of 1818 serves as an example of improved relations between the US and Britain following the War of 1812. Further treaties would continue to define the US/Canada border which is now the longest in the world (8891 kms/5525 miles)

• 1818: The Treaty of 1818 defined the Canadian/US boundary westward along the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. Further treaties would continue to define the Canada/US border which is now the longest in the world

• 1821, Sept: Mexico declared independence from the Spanish Empire after the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821). After some Spanish reconquest attempts, Spain under the rule of Isabella II recognized the independence of Mexico in 1836

• 1820s: The early days of steam power for ships gradually supplanting sail

• 1820s: The Dutch and British empires drew a line in the sea along the critical and busy Malacca Strait and agreed to hunt down pirates on their respective sides. That line went on to become the modern-day border between Malaysia and Indonesia. It’s a narrow route running 550 miles, connecting the Andaman Sea (Indian Ocean) and the South China Sea (Pacific Ocean). As the main shipping channel between the Indian and Pacific oceans, it is one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. This bottleneck is plied by one-third of the world’s shipping trade making it the busiest strait in the world, carrying about 25% of the world’s traded goods. About a quarter of all oil carried by sea passes through the Strait, mainly from Persian Gulf suppliers to Asian markets 

• 1824: Braille was invented by Louis Braille, who was blinded at the age of three. It is a universally accepted system of writing used by and for blind persons and consists of a code of 63 characters, each made up of one to six raised dots arranged in a six-position matrix or cell. These Braille characters are embossed in lines on paper and read by passing the fingers lightly over the manuscript. A universal Braille code for the English-speaking world was adopted in 1932, when representatives from agencies for the blind in Great Britain and the US agreed upon a system known as Standard English Braille, grade 2

• 1824: Modern cement patented by Joseph Aspdin, an English bricklayer. His hydraulic mortar was made by firing limestone and clay at high temperatures. He called the product Portland cement because he believed the mortar made from it resembled ‘the best Portland stone’ and Portland stone was the most prestigious building stone in use in England at the time. Then large-scale commercial adoption of concrete in construction took place after it was reinforced by steel. (Key was, in 1884, Ernest Ransome’s reinforcing steel bars.)

• 1825: The Erie Canal opened. It connects the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and on to NYC and Europe. The canal was the greatest engineering feat of the first half of the American 19th century and served as the vital connection between the western frontier and the eastern seaboard for most of the 1800s. Without the Erie Canal, it would have taken much longer for the young American republic to exploit the politically imaginative leap of the Louisiana Purchase

• 1827: Scientists discover the existence of the female egg – the ovum – the first step in understanding the science of human reproduction

• 1826: The first photograph – a foreshadowing of a whole new art form to come. A View from the Window at Le Gras is the earliest surviving photograph. Nicéphore Niépce used a sheet of metal with a film of chemicals spread on it. It probably took over 8 hours to record the image. No knowledge exists regarding the lens he used; it was probably lemon shaped and convex at both ends, and certainly not precise. But the result is a piece of deliberate creation and a foreshadowing of a whole new art form to come (See “300 BC”, “150 AD” and “1913”)

• 1830, April: Founding of the Mormon and The Latter Day Saint (LDS) movement. Joseph Smith, an American religious leader, organized the religion’s first legal church entity, the Church of Christ. In late 1830, Smith envisioned a “city of Zion”, a utopian city in Native American lands near Independence, Missouri. The religion continues to the present with millions of global adherents. Mormons generally regard Smith as a prophet comparable to Moses and Elijah. According to the LDS church, Adam and Eve lived in Daviess County, Missouri after being driven from the Garden of Eden. They originally condoned polygamy; the practice began during the lifetime of Joseph Smith but became publicly and widely known during the time of Brigham Young. Today, the practice is strictly prohibited. In Mormonism, there are three levels of heaven – celestial, terrestrial and telestial. Only those in the celestial kingdom will live in God’s presence. He published the Book of Mormon which was, according to Smith, a translation of text written on gold plates by the Prophet Mormon of the history and the teachings of Jesus (abridged). Smith found these plates which he then returned to Mormon’s son, Moroni, who had appeared as a resurrected being or angel

• 1830, May: The US Indian Removal Act transported 250,000 native people westward. The Act was Introduced by President Andrew Jackson to open up more land to make way for the importation of slaves. While Americans sprinted across the Great Plains to get to Oregon and California, the Indigenous groups were forced to relocate to what was called the Great American Desert because it was thought that the land was useless. The huge irony was that it was only later that Americans realized that the land was good for buffalo and would be ideal cattle country

• 1830, June: France invades and colonizes Ottoman Algeria, a state in North Africa. It has had various degrees of autonomy throughout its existence, in some cases reaching complete independence. It has been named “Kingdom of Algiers”, “Republic of Algiers”, “State of Algiers”, “State of El-Djazair”, “Ottoman Regency of Algiers”, “precolonial Algeria”, “Ottoman Algeria”, etc.

• 1831: Michael Faraday discovers magnetic induction, the basis of electricity generation. An English scientist Faraday (1791-1867) was the first to show that electrical energy can be translated into motive force, by building a prototype electric motor. Conversely, he demonstrated that motive force could be converted into electricity – magnetic induction – by inventing the dynamo 

• 1831-36: Charles Darwin sails to the Galapagos Islands as a naturaliston board the H.M.S. Beagle. He stopped at the islands where he began to formulate his theory on “natural selection” (See “1859, Nov”)

• 1832, June: The Reform Bill passed in England introducing major changes to the electoral system of England and Wales. It gave the vote to small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers, householders who paid a yearly rental of £10 or more, and some lodgers. The Act introduced the first explicit statutory bar to women voting by defining a voter as a male person. While flawed it has been agreed it marked the beginning of the development of a recognizably modern political system

• 1832: Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War, the most significant attempt in Western history to understand war, both in its internal dynamics and as an instrument of policy. It has been read throughout the world, and has stimulated generations of soldiers, political leaders, and intellectuals. He (1780-1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the “moral”, in modern terms meaning psychological, and political aspects of waging war

• 1833: The first electromagnetic telegraph was created by two German scientists, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber. This invention set the stage for modern communication. The telegraph showed that it was no longer impossible to quickly speak to individuals that were a great distance away

• 1833, Sept: The Sun was a New York newspaper and the first successful penny daily newspaper in the US. It was popular with the city’s less affluent, working classes. Its publisher emphasized local events, police court reports, and sports in his four-page morning newspaper. It was the first one to hire a Police reporter. It inspired a new genre across the nation, known as the penny press, which made the news more accessible to low-income readers at a time when most papers cost five cents to purchase 

• 1844, June: Charles Goodyear received a patent for his development of vulcanized rubber. Rubber was then adopted to multiple applications, including footwear and tires. The term vulcanization is a range of processes for hardening rubbers. The term originally referred exclusively to the treatment of natural rubber with sulfur, which remains the most common practice. It has also grown to include the hardening of other (synthetic) rubbers via various means. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company is named after (though not founded by) Goodyear. (Interestingly, the mass production and availability of rubber condoms and diaphragms made possible by the 1844 invention eventually forced the Catholic Church to take a public position on specific contraceptives.)

• 1835: Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was published (Volume #2 in 1840). Written ironically by French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, the book served as a kind of textbook for US students regarding America self-government. In the book, Tocqueville examines the democratic revolution that he believed had been occurring over the previous several hundred years. It is an analysis of why republican representative democracy has succeeded in the US while failing in so many other places

• 1837: Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne of England (at age 18)on the death of William IV (the “Sailor King” of Great Britain since 1830 ). She (1819-1901) is associated with Britain’s great age of industrial expansion, economic progress and, especially, empire. Benjamin Disraeli persuaded her of the value of being proclaimed Empress of India in 1877. At her death, it was said, Britain had a worldwide empire on which the sun never set

• 1837 & 1838: Two rebellions took place in Lower and Upper Canada that led to their unification. The Durham Report (1839) resulted that recommended the unification of Upper and Lower Canada under one government and the establishment of the new Province of Canada. The Act of Union passed in 1840, merged the two colonies. The two areas were then called Canada East (formerly Lower Canada) and Canada West (formerly Upper Canada)

• 1839: The daguerreotype photo process introduced. This popular metal plate process opened up the mix of art and technology to the masses

• 1839: Start of a “century of humiliation” for China, (or the “hundred years of national humiliation”). This is a term used in China to describe the period of intervention and subjugation of the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China by Western powers and Japan from 1839 to 1949 (See “1839-42”, “1841, Jan” and “1949, Oct”)

• 1839-42: First Opium War between Britain and China. This was a series of military engagements fought between Britain and China (with the Qing dynasty). The immediate issue was the Chinese seizure of private opium stocks at Canton to stop the banned opium trade, and threatening the death penalty for future offenders. (Of importance is that an estimated 90 million Chinese became drug addicts from forced import of opium.) The British government insisted on the principles of free trade and equal diplomatic recognition among nations, and backed the merchants’ demands. The British navy defeated the Chinese using technologically superior ships and weapons, and the British then imposed a treaty (The Treaty of Nanking) that granted territory to Britain and opened trade with China. Many historians considered it the beginning of modern Chinese history (See previous entry plus “1856-60” and “1949, Oct”)

• 1840: Justus von Liebig figures out plant metabolism, the basis of crop fertilization. He is regarded as one of the greatest chemistry teachers of all time and has been described as the “father of the fertilizer industry” for his emphasis on nitrogen and trace minerals as essential plant nutrients 

• 1841-1867: The location of the capital city of the Province of Canada changed six times in its 26-year history. (The Province of Canada was formed by the merger in July 1840 of the Colonies of Upper Canada and Lower Canada, i.e. Quebec.) The first capital was in Kingston (1841-1844). The capital moved to Montreal  (1844-1849) until rioters protested against the Rebellion Losses Bill and burned down Montreal’s parliament buildings. It then moved to Toronto (1849-1852). It moved to Quebec City from 1852 to 1856, then returned to Toronto for one year (1858) before returning to Quebec City from 1859 to 1866. In 1857, Queen Victoria chose Ottawa as the permanent capital of the Province of Canada, initiating construction of Canada’s first parliament buildings, on Parliament Hill. The first stage of this construction was completed in 1865, just in time to host the final session of the last parliament of the Province of Canada before Confederation in 1867 

• 1841, Jan: A British naval force seized the island of Hong Kong, humiliating China. The Treaty of Nanking concluding the First Opium War was signed in August 1842 which confirmed British possession of the island and the nature of it being a “free” port. The Chinese defined the treaty as being an “unequal one”. The loss of Hong Kong was a humiliation that cut deeply and its repercussions continue to this day. The recent uprising in Hong Kong stoked modern Chinese leaders’ anger over a time when their ancestors were too weak to defend themselves against technologically advanced allied Western forces

• 1941: Joseph Whitworth devised and specified the world’s first national screw thread standard. Whitworth’s new standard specified a certain thread angle and thread depth and radius. The thread pitch increases with diameter in steps specified on a chart. The British Standard Whitworth (BSW) is an imperial-unit-based screw thread standard and by midcentury this BSW standard had been accepted throughout Britain and her empire

• 1844, May: The Baháʼí Faith began initially in Iran, where it has faced ongoing persecution since its inception. The religion is estimated to have 5-8 million adherents, known as Baháʼís, spread throughout most of the world’s countries

• 1844, May: Samuel Morse taps out the world’s first telegraph message – “What hath God wrought?” The telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication and bound the world together (like the Internet does today). As soon as the telegraph was invented, entrepreneurs started to find ways to sell what this device could do 

• 1845, May: John Franklin sets out to find the Northwest Passage over the top of Canada. 129 officers and men and two ships are all lost. Between 1848 and 1859, 36 separate expeditions were sent out to find the ships and men. Grave sites were found along with artifacts and stories from the local Inuit. The ships were finally found by Parks Canada with the help of Inuit oral history and contemporary research: the HMS Erebus in 2014 and the HMS Terror in 2016 (See “1905, Aug”)

• 1845: Beginning of the Irish Potato Famine and resulting push for Irish independence. Also known as the Great Hunger, the famine was caused by a destructive plant disease that spread rapidly throughout Ireland. The infestation ruined up to one-half of the potato crop in 1845, and about three-quarters of the crop over the next seven years. Because the tenant farmers of Ireland – then ruled as a colony of Great Britain – relied heavily on the potato as a source of food, the infestation had a catastrophic impact on Ireland and its population. Before it ended in 1852, the Potato Famine resulted in the death of roughly one million Irish from starvation and related causes, with at least another million forced to leave their homeland as refugees. The exact role of the British government in the Potato Famine (whether it ignored the plight of Ireland’s poor out of malice, or if their collective inaction and inadequate response could be attributed to incompetence) is still being debated. Certainly a renewed inclination was ignited for Irish independence from British rule

• 1846, March: The Treaty of Amritsar established the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir under the suzerainty of the British Indian Empire. It was executed by the British East India Company and Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu after the First Anglo-Sikh War, The East India Company didn’t want to have the expense of running Kashmir, so why not get a local feudal lord to govern the province. It marked the beginning of Dogra rule in Kashmir. The Dogra people, are an Indo-Aryan ethno-linguistic group in India and Pakistan consisting of the Dogri language speakers 

• 1846, May: The Associated Press (AP) was founded. It is an American not-for-profit news agency headquartered in NYC. The first of many wire services, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association, and produces news reports that are distributed to its members, US newspapers and broadcasters. Thus did news itself turn into merchandise. Every news event had a factual core separable from the event (answering the questions who, where, when, and why)

• 1846, Oct: An early form of anesthesia was first used in Boston by dentist William T.G. Morton and surgeon John Warren. Up until the mid-1800s surgeons could not offer patients much more than opium, alcohol or a bullet to bite on to deal with the pain 

• 1848, Jan: California gold rush started when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. Then on December 5, the US President James K. Polk announced during his State of the Union address: “The accounts of abundance of gold are of such an extraordinary character. ” The trickle turned into a flood: the news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the US and abroad. It became one of the largest migrations in US history, reached its peak in 1852 and was over by the end of the decade

• 1848, Feb: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially ended the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). The treaty required Mexico to cede 55 percent of its territory including the present-day states of California (at the time, only around 160,000 people – mostly Native Americans – lived there, but by the mid-1850s, some 300,000 miners were working in the territory’s goldfields), Nevada, Utah, most of Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, and a small portion of Wyoming. Mexico also relinquished all claims for Texas. In turn, the US government paid Mexico $15 million

• 1848, Feb: German philosophers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, publish their pamphlet The Communist Manifesto.The opening lines set forth the principal basis of Marxism: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Subsequently Marx wrote his four-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx believed that private ownership of capital goods, or the means of production such as factories and businesses, led to the exploitation of the workers and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the capitalists. But he also believed that socialism was not possible without a society having gone through capitalism first. By his theory, socialism should not happen in agrarian societies such as tsarist Russia or pre-revolutionary China, neither of which had gone through the stage of capitalism. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and the pamphlet as one of the world’s most influential political documents

• 1848, Feb: The first instance of responsible government in the British Empire outside of the UK itself was achieved by the colony of Nova Scotia through the efforts of Joseph Howe.The first Executive Council chosen exclusively from the party having a majority in the representative branch of a colonial legislature was formed. Ministers account to Parliament for their decisions and for the performance of their departments. Responsible government was a major element of the gradual development of Canada towards independence

• 1848, March: Responsible government was introduced in the Province of Canada. From this point Canada is now the oldest continuous democratic federation in the world, and one of the two or three oldest continuous democracies of any sort. The governor-general, Lord Elgin, invited Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, from Montreal, to form the government of the Canadas. With his friend and political partner, RobertBaldwin, from Toronto, LaFontaine had been leading the democratic movement for a decade. The key principle of a responsible government is that it needs the confidence of Parliament to create laws and taxation. This system of government embodies the principle of parliamentary accountability, the foundation of the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy. This originated in British practice. It also provided an opportunity for French Canadians to find a means for their survival through the British Constitution. It was the beginning of the multicultural concept – the idea that a modern nation-state could comfortably be based on more than one language, religion or race. The partnership and friendship between Baldwin and LaFontaine were terrific examples of collaboration (See: “1848, Feb” re Nova Scotia)

• 1849: The Railway Guarantee Act established in Canada the principle of government assistance to railways. Under the terms of the Act, any railway more than 120 kms long was eligible for a government guarantee on the interest of half its bonds as soon as half the line had been completed. With the incentive of the Guarantee Act, as well as with the aid provided by the 1852 Municipal Loan Act, railway building became a mania in the Canadas, the amount of track increasing from 106 km in 1850 to more than 3200 km in 1860. The darker side of this policy was the economic recklessness that government assistance encouraged: by 1860 railways in the Canadas were suffering severe financial problems

• 1850s: Football (soccer) modern day was invented in England, and was mostly played by private school teams and soccer clubs. The game originated from a 9th century medieval period game called ‘folk football’ played in England that would involve teams of players competing to get a pigs bladder from one landmark to another. The World Cup is the most widely viewed sporting event in the world. The 2022 final averaged nearly 26 million viewers in the U.S when Argentina defeated France in a penalty kick shootout; in 2018 it was 17.8 million viewers; in 2014 it was 27.3

• 1850: The first dishwasher to be granted a patent was invented by Joel Houghton. It was a wooden box that used a hand-turned wheel to splash water on dirty dishes, and it had scrubbers. Europe’s first domestic dishwasher with an electric motor was invented and manufactured by Miele in 1929. Dishwashers were only successfully sold as domestic utilities in the postwar boom of the 1950s

• 1850, Sept: The US Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. This controversial Act required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to the enslaver. The Act required federal officials – including those in free states – to return the the South anyone a white enslaver claimed was his property. Anyone helping a “runaway” could be imprisoned for six months and fined $1,000 (~ 3 years income). Those turning in black refugees were paid a fee. This contributed to the growing polarization of the country and was one of the factors that led to the American Civil War. (The support from Northerners for fugitive slaves caused ill will between the North and the South.) There is an ominous parallel with current (August 2023) ordinances, e.g. at least 51 jurisdictions in Texas have passed ordinances to make it illegal to transport anyone on roads within city or county limits to get an abortion (keeping pregnant women trapped in this antiabortion state)

• 1851, May-Oct: The Great Exhibition was an international exhibition that took place in London. (Formally called the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations or the Crystal Palace Exhibition, it was the first in a series of World’s fairs, exhibitions of culture and industry that became popular in the 19th century. It had 13,000 exhibits and attracted huge crowds – six million people (equivalent to a third of the entire population of Britain at the time). It was driven by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, with its prime motive for Britain to make clear to the world its role as industrial leader. Britain also sought to provide the world with the hope of a better future. Europe had just emerged from “two difficult decades of political and social upheaval,” and now Britain hoped to show that technology, particularly its own, was the key to a better future. The event made a surplus which was used to found the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, and the Natural History Museum 

• 1851: Giuseppe Verdi wrote Rigoletto. Then followed it with Il trovatore and La traviata in 1853. Writing 29 operas, this Italian composer (1813-1901) came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. Later in life he wrote the opera Aida (1871), and then his three late masterpieces: his Requiem (1874), and the operas Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) 

• 1851-1864: There was a massive peasant uprising in China known as Taiping Rebellion; millions perished. It was waged between the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the Han, Hakka-led Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. (It contained a mixture of rebel militias and apocalyptic religious cults, one of them being the revolutionary Society of God Worshippers.) About 20 million perished  (and perhaps millions more if deaths by starvation and disease are included) in the seesaw battle between the peasants and government forces before the rebellion was brutally crushed. Foreshadows of the Warlord Era of 1916 to 1928?

• 1852: The British captured Yangon and all of Lower Burma in the Second Anglo-Burmese War, and subsequently transformed Yangon into the commercial and political hub of British Burma (now Myanmar). After the war, the British moved the capital to Yangon (Rangoon) and constructed a new city on a grid plan on delta land

• 1853: Elisha Graves Otis designed the first elevator equipped with an automatic safety device to prevent it from falling if the lifting chain or rope broke. In 1861, he patented an independently controlled steam engine for elevator use. This invention laid the foundation for the business of what eventually became the Otis Elevator Company. Elevators have become a key part in making a modern city possible

• 1853-56: The Crimean War was fought and lost by Russia, triggering major reforms. An ultimately victorious alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, the UK and Piedmont-Sardinia fought Russia. The flashpoint was a disagreement over the rights of Christian minorities in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, with the French promoting the rights of Roman Catholics, and Russia promoting those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Crimean War was one of the first conflicts in which military forces used modern technologies such as explosive naval shells, railways, and telegraph. The war was also one of the first to be documented extensively in written reports and in photographs. The war marked a turning point for the Russian Empire:  it weakened the Russian army, drained the treasury and undermined Russia’s influence in Europe. The empire would take decades to recover. Russia’s humiliation forced its educated elites to identify its problems and to recognize the need for fundamental reforms; it became a catalyst for reforms (See “1856, March”)

• 1855, Dec: African American civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger. Her subsequent arrest initiated a sustained bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. The protest began a few days later, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., then a young local pastor, and was so successful that it was extended indefinitely. Finally, the Supreme Court in December 1956 upheld a lower court’s ruling that segregated seating was unconstitutional

• 1856, March: The Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War. It forbade Russia to base warships in the Black Sea (See “1853-56” and “1867, Oct”)

• 1856-1860: The Second Opium War in China, during which the joint forces of the British and French empires marched to Beijing to force China to legalize the opium trade and open its ports to foreigners. The British later in 1860 demanded further territory, acquiring outright the Kowloon Peninsula, adjacent to Hong Kong. (Then in 1898, the British procured another 99-year lease on what is known as the New Territories to grow the city of Hong Kong.) It was the second major conflict in the Opium Wars, which were fought over the right to import opium to China, and resulted in a second defeat for the Qing dynasty and the forced legalization of the opium trade. It caused many Chinese officials to believe that conflicts with the Western powers were no longer traditional wars, but part of a looming national crisis (See “1839-42”)

• 1857: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. Also called the Sepoy Mutiny or First War of Independence, it was a widespread but unsuccessful rebellion against British rule. The Siege of Cawnpore was a key episode in the Indian Rebellion. The besieged East India Company forces and civilians in Cawnpore were unprepared for an extended siege and surrendered to rebel forces in return for a safe passage. However, their evacuation turned into a massacre, and most of the men were killed. As a rescue force approached Cawnpore, 120 British women and children captured by the Sepoy forces were killed in what came to be known as the Bibighar Massacre, their remains being thrown down a nearby well in an attempt to hide the evidence. The murders greatly embittered the British rank-and-file against the Sepoy rebels and inspired the war cry “Remember Cawnpore!” (See “1526”)

• 1858: The Russian Empire strong-armed China’s Qing dynasty to cede more than a million square kilometres of its vast northeast territory. A treaty was signed (the Treaty of Aigun) between the Russian Empire and the Qing dynasty that established much of the modern border between the Russian Far East and China by ceding much of Manchuria (the ancestral homeland of the Manchu people), now known as Northeast China. From 1850 to 1864, when China was heavily involved in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion, Russia camped tens of thousands of troops on the borders of Mongolia and Manchuria, preparing to make legal Russian de facto control over the Amur River from past settlement. They seized the opportunity when it was clear that China was losing the Second Opium War, and threatened China with a war on a second front

• 1858, June: Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” speech at the Illinois Republican State Convention. “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

• 1859, Aug: The stage was set for the new oil economy by the discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania by Colonel Edwin Drake. It was the first oil well known to tap oil at its source. This, plus the Spindletop discovery in Texas in 1901 led the US into the oil age – the US soon became the world’s leading oil producer. Initially it was the kerosene that was refined from crude which provided a reliable and relatively inexpensive alternative to “coal-oils” and whale oil for feeling lamps. Then the automobile and European industrial development produced exponential oil demand

• 1859, Nov: Charles Darwin publishes his findings which proved that natural selection is the mechanism of biological evolution. The evidence he presented in his book On The Origin of Speciesgenerated great scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion and is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. According to the well-established creationist theory of Darwin’s day (and that he believed before setting out on his journey of 1831-36 to the Galápagos Islands), the exquisite adaptations of many species were compelling evidence that a “designer” had created each species for its intended place in the economy of nature. However his revolutionary theory was that new species arise naturally, by a process of evolution, rather than having been created – forever immutable – by God. Darwin’s (1809-1882) proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science (See “1831-36”)

• 1860: The last ship, the Clotilda, known to import captive Africans to the US – a practice outlawed by the US in 1808 – was set ablaze to hide the crime. Many of the 108 survivors formed a community, Africatown, which still exists near Mobile, Alabama 

• 1860: The foundation of professional nursing was laid by Florence Nightingale with the establishment of her nursing school at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, England, the first secular nursing school in the world. She (1820-1910) first came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organized care for wounded soldiers and significantly reduced death rates by improving hygiene and living standards

• 1860, Nov: Americans (northerners) elected Abraham Lincoln as president – to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government. He was the first Republican president and his victory was entirely due to his support in the North and West. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country

• 1861: Tsar Alexander II (the Liberator-Tsar), freed more than 20 million serfs. This Edict of Emancipation was the first and most important of the liberal reforms enacted during the Tsar’s reign (1855–1881). This affected only the privately owned serfs. The state-owned serfs were emancipated in 1866and were given better and larger plots of land. It was arguably the single most important event in 19th century Russian history. He was assassinated in 1881 (See ”1869”)

• 1861: Richard Jordan Gatling invented the first successful machine gun, the Gatling gun. It was capable of firing 200 gunpowder cartridges in a minute and was fielded by the Union forces during the  American Civil War in the 1860s

• 1861: James Clerk Maxwell theorized about electromagnetism, the basis of all wireless communication

• 1861, April-1865, March: The American Civil War. It was fought between the Union (“the North”) and the Confederacy (“the South”), the latter formed by states that had seceded. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states

• 1861, Sept: Italy becomes a nation-state (known as the Risorgimento). After the downfall of Napoleon there was a redistribution of territories on the Italian Peninsula and secret societies cropped up supporting the unification of Italy. So early 1861 a national government was conceived by Victor Emmanuel, the king of Italy, where he proclaimed the kingdom of Italy as a nation-state

• 1862: Publication of book Les Misérables by Victor Hugo – then the musical. Considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, it is a passionate diatribe. As Hugo says himself, “Social problems go beyond frontiers. Humankind’s wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps.” More than a quarter of the novel is devoted to essays that argue a moral point. The topics Hugo addresses include cloistered religious orders, the construction of the Paris sewers, and the street urchins of Paris. Adaptation of the novel into a musical (and film) which has been running in London since 1985, making it the longest-running musical in the West End and the second longest-running musical in the world

• 1862, May: During the Battle of Puebla, invading French troops were repulsed by a much smaller Mexican force under the command of Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza; thereafter the city was renamed Puebla de Zaragoza, and May 5 (Cinco de Mayo) became a Mexican national holiday. French troops under Élie Frédéric Forey would eventually take the city, but the Mexican victory at Puebla against a better equippedforce provided patriotic inspiration to the Mexicans. The French intervention in Mexico, initially supported by the United Kingdom and Spain, was a consequence of Mexican President Benito Pablo Juárez’s imposition of a two-year moratorium of loan-interest payments from July 1861 to French, British, and Spanish creditors

• 1862, May: President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act whereby the US gave citizens up to 160 acres of public land provided they live on it, improve it, and pay a small registration fee. The Government granted more than 270 million acres of land while the law was in effect. Lincoln grew up on a farm and was a strong proponent of studying farming and agricultural life

• 1862: Pasteurization process discovered by the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur. This process involves heating milk to a particular temperature for a set amount of time in order to remove microorganisms. Diseases prevented by pasteurization can include TB, diphtheria, scarlet fever and brucellosis; it also kills harmful bacterias such as Salmonella. Pasteurization was originally used as a way of preventing wine and beer from souring, and it would be many years before milk was pasteurized. Pasteur (1822-1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and of course pasteurization (which was named after him). His research in chemistry led to remarkable breakthroughs in the understanding of the causes and preventions of diseases, which laid down the foundations of hygiene, public health and much of modern medicine. His works are credited with saving millions of lives through the developments of vaccines for rabies and anthrax. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern bacteriology and has been honoured as the “father of bacteriology” and the “father of microbiology” 

• 1862, Sept: Battle of Antietam during American Civil War. It ended the South’s attempt to take Maryland and possibly Washington itself. (It was the single bloodiest day in the Civil War; more Americans died in that war than in all other US conflicts put together.) In its aftermath, President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation and its outcome may have also influenced Great Britain not to recognize the Confederacy

• 1863, Jan: Slavery in the US was abolished – in the secessionist Confederate states, through the Emancipation Proclamation (Proclamation 95 was an executive order signed by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.) The Proclamation changed the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free

• 1863: Venezuela became the first country to abolish capital punishment for all crimes, including serious offences against the state. San Marino was the first European country to abolish the death penalty, doing so in 1865; by the early 20th century several other countries, including the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Italy had followed suit (though it was reintroduced in Italy under the fascist regime of Mussolini). By the mid-1960s some 25 countries had abolished the death penalty for murder, though only about half of them also had abolished it for offences against the state or the military code. For example, Britain abolished capital punishment for murder in 1965, but treason, piracy, and military crimes remained capital offences until 1998. During the last third of the 20th century, the number of abolitionist countries increased more than threefold. These countries, together with those that are “de facto” abolitionist – i.e., those in which capital punishment is legal but not exercised – now represent more than half the countries of the world

• 1863: The Seventh-day Adventist Church was formally established. It grew out of the Millerite movement in the US during the mid-19th century. It places emphasis on the imminent Second Coming (advent) of Jesus Christ. Much of its theology corresponds to common evangelical Christian teachings, such as the Trinity and the infallibility of scripture. The Church holds the belief that “God created the universe, and in a recent six-day creation made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.”

• 1863, July: The Battle of Gettysburg was fought between Union and Confederate forces, in and around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The battle, which was won by the Union, is widely considered the Civil War’s turning point, ending the Confederacy’s aspirations to establish an independent nation, and the war’s bloodiest battle, claiming some 50,000 combined casualties

• 1863, Nov: President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. He asserted that the nation was born not in 1789, but in 1776, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. He defined the war as dedicated to the principles of liberty and equality for all. He declared that the deaths of so many brave soldiers would not be in vain, that slavery would end, and the future of democracy would be assured, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”. The Address became the most quoted, and important, speech in American history and a turning point in the Civil War

• 1865, Jan: Slavery abolished in the US through the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution. The text of the Amendment (Section 1) read: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” 

• 1865, April: General Robert E. Lee surrenders his Confederate troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, in Appomattox, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War. This event triggered a series of subsequent surrenders across the South, in North Carolina, Alabama  and finally Shreveport, Louisiana, and for the major military operations west of the Mississippi River by June, signaling the end of the four-year-long war

• 1865, April: Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, The assassination occurred at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., only days after the surrender of General Lee. Booth was an American stage actor and a Confederate spy from Maryland. (The US has had four presidents assassinated while in office: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 and John F. Kennedy in 1963.) 

• 1865-77: The period called “reconstruction” that followed the Civil War in the US. Attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war

• 1865, Aug: Joseph Lister was the first person to introduce sterilization procedures into his operating room. He was the founder of antiseptic medicine and a pioneer in preventive medicine. Applying Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of fermentation on wound putrefaction, he promoted the idea of sterilization in surgery using carbolic acid (phenol) as an antiseptic. While his method, based on the use of antiseptics, is no longer employed, his principle – that bacteria must never gain entry into an operation wound – remains the basis of surgery to this day

• 1965, Dec: Founding of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the US by Confederate soldiers. It’s aim: to restore white supremacy. Three separate Klans have existed. It renewed (after being disbanded) in 1915 (the second Klan) to counter what was conceived as a change in the ethnic character of America as a result of immigration, preaching “One Hundred Percent Americanism”. This resulted in the largest surge in membership, peaking in 1924 at four million. The third Klan formed in the late 20th century largely as a reaction to the growing Civil Rights Movement. It committed murders and bombings to achieve its aims. All three movements have called for the “purification” of American society, and are all considered far-right extremist organizations

• 1866, July: First transatlantic telegraph cable was laid from Ireland to Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. The slogan of owner, Atlantic Telegraph Company, was “From two weeks to two minutes!”

• 1866: Gregory Mendel summarized his experiments on breeding peas – and first discerned what genes do. He proved that offspring are not a blend of their parents’ characteristics; instead traits are inherited as discreet and separate units of biological information. (Mendel was a monk from Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire.)

• 1867: Dynamite, blasting explosive, was patented by the Swedish physicist Alfred Nobel. It was one of the most consequential inventions of the Industrial Revolution, transforming the way large-scale infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and bridges were built. It is based on nitroglycerin but is much safer to handle than nitroglycerin alone (See ”1901”)

• 1867, July 1: Canada was formed by an act to create the Dominion of Canada.TheBritish North America Act (BNA), was proclaimed by the British Parliament and it served as Canada’s “constitution” until 1982, when it was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867, when the British Parliament’s authority was transferred to the independent Canadian Parliament. The three British colonies (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada – which was at the time comprised of Canada East or Quebec and Canada West or Ontario) were united as “one Dominion under the name of Canada” and provisions were made that the other colonies and territories of British North America might be admitted. The preamble of Canada’s Constitution Act states: “It shall be lawful for the Queen…to make laws for the Peace, Order, and Good Government of Canada.”

• 1867, Oct: Russia sold Alaska to the US. Imperial Russia needed money after its defeat in the Crimean War, so Czar Alexander II decided to sell it – for US$7.2-million. The Americans were looking for more land. Russian nationalists still complain they were cheated (See “1741” and “1870, July”)

• 1868, Jan: The Meiji Restoration in Japan ended Shogun rule with the old order overthrown, and its centuries of self-imposed isolationism replaced. Although there were ruling emperors before the Meiji Restoration, the events restored practical abilities and consolidated the political system under the Emperor of Japan. The Restoration led to enormous changes in Japan’s political and social structure. This was the beginning of the Meiji era, where Japan rapidly industrialized and adopted Western ideas and production methods (See “1600, Dec”)

• 1868, Dec: The first traffic light in the world was installed in London, England outside the British House of Parliament. Using railway signals as a reference, rail engineer John Peake Knight designed the first traffic light used to control traffic. The design combined three semaphore arms with red and green gas lamps for night-time use, on a pillar, operated by a police constable. At night a red light would command “Stop” and a green light would mean use “Caution”. In 1912, the first electric traffic light was developed in Salt Lake City, Utah. It had two colours, red and green, and a buzzer to provide a warning for colour changes, and in 1914 an electric traffic light featuring green and red illuminated signals (See “1914, Aug”)

• 1869: Leo Tolstoy finished writing his historical novel, War and Peace, a panoramic study of early 19th-century Russian society. He finished Anna Karenina in 1878, a story that takes place against the backdrop of the liberal reforms initiated by Emperor Alexander II. The two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. A Russian writer, he (1828-1910) is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time (See “1861”)

• 1869, May: The first transcontinental railroad across the US (The “Overland Route”), when two railways (the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific) connected in Utah. It had 3,075 km of continuous track between Sacramento and Omaha. This resulted in opening up and rapid growth in the American heartland for settlement, allowing commerce to thrive, away from navigable watercourses for the first time

• 1869, Nov: The Suez Canal opened. This sea-level waterway extends 193 km running north-south across the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt connects the Mediterranean and the Red seas. The canal separates the African continent from Asia, and it provides the shortest maritime route between Europe and the lands lying around the Indian and western Pacific oceans. It is one of the world’s most heavily used shipping lanes. It was dug by enslaved people, financed by France and coveted by Britain. Britain and other European powers would go on to leverage the canal to secure their colonial grip over India, Egypt and the rest of Africa. Egypt finally declared control of the canal in 1956, inviting an invasion by Israel, France and Britain (See “1956, July”)

• 1870, Feb: 15th amendment added to the US constitution guaranteed African American men the right to vote. The amendment complemented and followed in the wake of the passage of the 13th and 14th amendments, which abolished slavery and guaranteed citizenship, respectively, to African Americans

• 1870, July-1871, Jan: The Franco-Prussian War (or Franco-German War) was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia. The conflict was caused primarily by France’s determination to reassert its dominant position in continental Europe, which appeared in question following the decisive Prussian victory over Austria in 1866. The war had a lasting impact on Europe. By hastening German reunification, the war significantly altered the balance of power on the continent, with the new German nation state supplanting France as the dominant European land power

• 1870, July: The Hudson’s Bay Company sold Rupert’s Land to Canada for the fire-sale price of $1.5 million, a fraction of its market value. PM John A. Macdonald saw the Americans were going to make the HBC an offer so he leaned on the British government, which leaned on the HBC, which reluctantly sold the land to Canada. It was large (3.9 million sq kms) – more than twice the size of Alaska, and was more habitable and richer in natural resources. As in 1670, the deal was made without consulting the Métis and First Nations. Talks leading to the transfer spurred Louis Riel to lead a Métis uprising and form the provisional government that would be admitted into Confederation as Manitoba.  (Because of the political disruption of the Red River Rebellion, the transfer from the British Crown, to whom HBC surrendered its territory in 1869, did not come into effect until this date.) (See “1670”)

• 1870: The Jehovah’s Witnesses emerged from the Bible Student movement founded in the late 1870s by Charles Taze Russell, who also co-founded the Zion’s Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in 1881 to organize and print the movement’s publications. The Watch Tower Society is the legal and administrative arm of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Its representatives assert that they have been given insight into the true meaning of the Bible and the unique ability to discern the signs of Christ’s second coming. They have made a series of predictions about Christ’s Second Coming and the advent of God’s Kingdom, each of which has gone unfulfilled (for 1878, 1881, 1914, 1918, 1925 and 1975)

• 1871: Dmitri Mendeleev developed the periodic classification of the elements. Mendeleev, a Russian chemist (1834-1907), found that, when all the known chemical elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic weight, the resulting table displayed a recurring pattern, or periodicity, of properties within groups of elements. He even left gaps in places where he believed unknown elements would find their place

• 1871, Oct: The Great Chicago Fire killed approximately 300 people, destroyed roughly 3.3 square miles of the city including over 17,000 structures, and left more than 100,000 residents homeless. The city improved building codes to stop the rapid spread of future fires and rebuilt rapidly to those higher standards

• 1871, Nov: Henry Morgan Stanley finds Dr. David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika apparently greeting him with the now famous words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”(He had lost contact with the outside world for six years and Stanley was sent out by a newspaper to find him.) Livingstone’s obsession with learning the sources of the Nile River was founded on the belief that if he could solve that age-old mystery, his fame would give him the influence to end the East African Arab-Swahili slave trade

• 1971, Nov: The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) was founded. It is a gun rights advocacy group based in the US. While it was founded to advance rifle marksmanship, the modern NRA became a prominent gun rights lobbying organization. The Revolt at Cincinnati in 1971 has been cited as a turning point in the NRA’s history, marking a move away from the group’s focus on “hunting, conservation, and marksmanship” and towards defending the right to keep and bear arms. Today, the NRA has shed hundreds of thousands of members and large sums of money. It is standing trial for fraud and self-dealing in New York. “The NRA is little more than a shell of itself after hemorrhaging hundreds of millions in legal fees,” said Joshua Powell, a former top NRA official who settled with the state before the trial. The organization’s fall is not a death knell for Second Amendment advocates, but it is a blow

• 1872, March: The world’s first national park was born – Yellowstone National Park in the US. In August 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the act creating the National Park Service. It now includes 430 natural, historical, recreational, and cultural areas throughout the US

• 1872, Nov: The first international soccer game is played on the cricket grounds of Hamilton Crescent in Glasgow. The match between England and Scotland ended in a 0-0 draw

• 1873: The Canadian parliament established a central police force in the west, the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP). (The name subsequently was changed to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP, and which today has jurisdiction in 8 provinces and three territories.) The NWMP operated mostly in Saskatchewan and Alberta and then later on into B.C. (Manitoba was already a province) though central control was always in Ottawa. The NWMP were a significant feature in all of the communities as they grew. The Mounties were sent west partly to prevent the US from taking over Canada’s West, as she had done with Texas and the rest of the south west with wars with Mexico

• 1875, May: The Treaty of the Meter mandated the formation of the BIPM, the present-day International Bureau of Weights and Measures,an intergovernmental organization, under the authority of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM). Initially the scope of the Metre Convention covered only units of mass and length. In 1921, at the sixth meeting of the CGPM, convention was amended to its scope to other fields in physics. In 1960, at the eleventh meeting of the CGPM, its system of units was named the International System of Units (Système international d’unités, abreviated SI) (See “3150 BC”, “1799” and “1960, Oct”)

• 1875: Mary Baker Eddy wrote the book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which outlined the theology of Christian Science. The book became Christian Science’s central text, along with the Bible. In 1879 she and 26 followers were granted a charter in Massachusetts to found the “Church of Christ (Scientist)”. Adherents are commonly known as Christian Scientists

• 1876, March: Alexander Graham Bell invented the first practical telephone and then made the first phone call to his assistant and said “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you”. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885. Bell was awarded the first US patent for the telephone, March 1876. It was Bell who set up a telephone exchange as a subscription service and then leased the phones. Soon by-subscription telephone exchanges sprouted up in the US and Europe and meta networks connecting the various exchanges became economically feasible

• 1876, April: First Indian Act in Canada was passed and imposed upon First Nations by the federal government of the Dominion of Canada. It is the primary document that defines how the Government of Canada interacts with the 614 First Nation bands in Canada and their members. It effectively defined First Nations as dependants and gave Indian Affairs the authority to regulate their lives through various means, including where they lived, by setting aside parcels of reserve lands as part of treaty agreements. But the legislation also included regulations for the surrender of these First Nations reserves. Throughout its long history, the act has been the subject of controversy and has been interpreted in different ways by both Indigenous Canadians and non-Indigenous Canadians. The legislation has been amended many times 

• 1876, June: Battle of the Little Bighorn (or Custer’s Last Stand) was between federal troops led by Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and Northern Cheyenne led by Sitting Bull. Custer and all the men under his immediate command were slain. There were about 50 known deaths among Sitting Bull’s followers. In 1867 Sitting Bull was made chief of the Sioux nation. He was a charismatic Lakota who called for resistance to US expansion

• 1876: The first working four-stroke engine was built by a German engineer, Nicolaus Otto. It used a coal gas-air mixture of fuel

• 1877-78: The Russo-Turkish War was a conflict between the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and a coalition led by the Russian Empire, and including Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro. Fought in the Balkans and in the Caucasus, it originated in emerging 19th century Balkan nationalism. Russia was victorious, but the gains it achieved under the Treaty of San Stefano (1878) were restricted by the Congress of Berlin (1878), imposed by Britain and Austria-Hungary.

• 1877-1879: Great famines ravaged the whole of India, but particularly affected the southern part. It was part of a larger pattern of drought and crop failure across India, China, South America and parts of Africa caused by an interplay between a strong El Niño and an active Indian Ocean Niño that led to between 19 and 50 million deaths

• 1877: The first eyewitness description of the tango, when the African Argentines were seen doing an improvisation of the candombe. It evolved into a dance of intricate steps, sinuous yet sharp, with dramatic turns followed by sudden suggestive pauses, which set up another similar series of steps. As tango began to take root more broadly in Argentina, lyrics became a fundamental part of the songs. The themes of these early works ranged from light and humorous to dark and violent. Other subjects included the city of Buenos Aires and tango itself

• 1878, March: The National Policy was a central economic and political strategy of the Canadian Conservative Party under Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, and many of his successors in high office. It meant that from 1878 until the Second World War, Canada levied high tariffs on foreign imported goods, to shield Canadian manufacturers from American competition. Tariff protection for manufacturers was the rallying cry of Macdonald’s Liberal-Conservative coalition in its successful 1878 general election campaign. PM Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberals, in office from 1873-78, had previously adhered to a policy of tariffs strictly for revenue purposes – around 20% of customs duties on manufactured goods. They’d remained faithful to this non-protectionist policy, despite the economic depression of the 1870s and the failure of the Liberals’ 1874-75 attempt to negotiate a reciprocity or free trade agreement with the US. Over time the National Policy took on a broader meaning in Conservative Party rhetoric, which tended to equate the Policy with its larger development strategies: the Canadian Pacific Railway (1880s); western settlement, including the Dominion Lands Act of 1872 and immigration policy; harbour development; and the subsidization of fast steamship service to Europe and Asia to facilitate the export of Canadian products. The Policy, and its many parts, became the centrepiece of Conservative Party policy for decades, even being espoused by PM R.B. Bennett in the 1930s as fervently as it was by Macdonald in the 1880s. The National Policy was slowly dismantled during the extended tenure of the Liberal Party under Prime Ministers William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis St. Laurent  in the 1940s and 1950s respectively. The Canadian and American economies gradually integrated after WWII. With the signing of the Canada-U.S. Autopact in 1965 the two countries reached a major milestone in economic integration that would continue. In 1989, Canada and the US signed the Free Trade Agreement (See “1987, Oct and “1994, Jan””)

• 1878: The world’s first hydroelectric project powered a lamp in England, and in 1882 the first hydro plants to serve private and commercial customers opened Wisconsin, USA, Ottawa and Niagara Falls, ON

• 1878: The Salem witchcraft trial of 1878 – it was the last witchcraft trial held in the US. An adherent of the Christian Science religion, accused a fellow Christian Scientist of attempting to harm her through his “mesmeric” mental powers. The case was dismissed

• 1879, Jan: The Brothers Karamazov was the last novel written by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Literary critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature. His (1821-1881) literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. His other novels include Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Idiot (1869) 

• 1881-1914: The invasion, annexation, division, and colonization of most of Africa by seven Western European powers during a short period known as New Imperialism (a period of expansion by European powers, the US, and Japan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries). The 10 percent of Africa that was under formal European control in 1870 increased to almost 90 percent by 1914, with only Liberia and Ethiopia remaining independent. Surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap materials, limited competition, and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another inducement for imperialism arose from the demand for raw materials, especially ivory, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, diamonds, tea, and tin. Additionally, Britain wanted control of areas of southern and eastern coasts of Africa for stopover ports on the route to Asia and its empire in India. Inevitably, the scramble for territory led to conflict among European powers, particularly between the British and French in West Africa; Egypt, the Portuguese, and British in East Africa; and the French and King Leopold II in central Africa. Rivalry between Great Britain and France led Bismarck to intervene, and in late 1884 he called a meeting of European powers in Berlin. (See “1884-1885: The Berlin Conference”)

• 1882: Nietzsche published his book The Gay Science.In it hefamously wrote that “God is dead.”  But the philosopher (1844-1900) wasn’t advocating for atheism, he was making an observation: Christianity had lost much of its power in Europe. For centuries, Christian thought was – for better and for worse – the foundation of the continent’s value system. But by the late 19th century, science and scholarship had chipped away at people’s faith. Nietzsche saw two possible outcomes: Either people would despair into nihilism and drift away from any moral principles, convinced life had no meaning, or they would try to find new “religions” elsewhere, namely in mass political movements like fascism or communism, and he shuddered at the thought of the second option. He argued that people had no choice but to forge ahead through nihilism instead. But rather than embrace a meaningless life he offered a way to overcome this nihilism: the “Übermensch.” This is a person who rises above the conventional notions of morality and creates new values that embrace the beauty and suffering of existence

• 1882, May: The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed by the US Congress. It denied US citizenship to Chinese labourers immigrating to the US. (This ten year ban was continuously extended and finally repealed in 1943.) It was the first and only major federal legislation to explicitly suspend immigration for a specific nationality. It started a new era in which the US changed from a country that welcomed almost all immigrants to a gatekeeper one. (See”July, 1923” for the Canadian equivalent.)

• 1883, May: The eruption of Krakatoa, Indonesia. Over 70% of the island of Krakatoa and its surrounding archipelago were destroyed as it collapsed into a caldera. 35,000 people died. Atmospheric pressure spikes reached as far as England, and a cloud of ash bathed an area of 300,000 square miles around the volcano in darkness. The global temperature even dropped, and didn’t return to normal until five years later. The eruption was one of the deadliest and most destructive volcanic events in recorded history

• 1884: Invention of the steam engine by Charles Parsons. It made cheap and plentiful electricity possible and revolutionized marine transport and naval warfare. About 85% of all electricity in the US in 2014 was by use of steam turbines

• 1884, Oct: Greenwich, London was established as the Universal Time meridian of longitude (at the International Meridian Conference), from which all World time zones are based. Sir Sandford Fleming (1827-1915), a Scottish Canadian engineer and inventor is credited with the initial effort that led to the adoption of the present time meridians. This occurred at the 1884 International Meridian Conference. (He also proposed 24 time zones, each an hour wide or 15 degrees of longitude. The conference refused to accept his zones, but by 1929, all major countries in the world had accepted them.) In the late 19th century much of the world’s commerce depended on maritime trading, and most sea charts also used the Greenwich meridian as the primary point of reference. This meridian ran from the North Pole to the South Pole and crossed through Greenwich’s Royal Observatory thus it became the world’s Prime Meridian. Set to 0 degrees longitude, the Prime Meridian is the line upon which Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was established in order set the standard for world time. In 1967, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) was introduced as a GMT equivalent and an updated global time standard

• Note: At the same 1884 conference that GMT was decided, another invisible line, the International Date Line (IDL), was created to demarcate the difference between one calendar day from the next. Set to a 180-degree longitude meridian, the IDL begins at both poles and then zigs-zags around the globe, mostly through a remote section of open ocean

• 1884-85: The Berlin Conference regulated European colonization and trade in Africa, (commonly known as the Scramble for Africa) during the New Imperialism period (a period of colonial expansion by European powers, the US, and Japan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries). The conference contributed to ushering in a period of heightened colonial activity by European powers, which eliminated or overrode most existing forms of African self-governance. The main dominating powers of the conference were France, Germany, Great Britain and Portugal. (Of all of the 15 nations in attendance, none of the countries represented were African.) They remapped Africa without considering the cultural and linguistic borders that were already established. At the end of the conference, Africa was divided into 50 different colonies. The attendants established who was in control of each of these newly divided colonies. They also planned, noncommittally, to end the slave trade in Africa. By 1900, European states had claimed nearly 90 percent of African territory (See “1881-1914”) 

• 1885, Jan: The capture of Khartoum, Sudan and a horrible massacre, after a 10 month siege by Sudanese forces led by Muhammad Ahmad or the Mahdi (“expected one”). They captured the city from its Egyptian garrison, thereby gaining control over the whole of Sudan. Sudan was essential to Egypt’s security. Charles Gordon, the British Governor-General of Sudan was killed and his head paraded; a general massacre followed with 4,000 men killed and the women and children enslaved. Mahdi’s calls for an uprising found great appeal among the poorest communities along the Nile, as it combined a nationalist, anti-Egyptian agenda with fundamentalist religious certainty. (The Mahdi is a messianic figure in Islamic study who is believed to appear at the end of times to rid the world of evil and injustice. He is said to be a descendant of Muhammad who will appear shortly before the prophet Jesus and lead Muslims to rule the world. The Quran places Jesus amongst the greatest prophets, and mentions him with various titles, but it rejects the Christian view of the divinity of Jesus as God incarnate, or the literal Son of God. It denies Jesus as a deity in several verses, and also mentions that Jesus did not claim to be divine.)

• 1885, July: The Canadian government introduced a “head tax” on Chinese moving to Canada. More than 17,000 Chinese immigrants helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway. But by the mid-1880s, when the CPR was completed and the labour was not needed, Canada stated charging for the welcome mat. Canadian PM John A. Macdonald introduced the Chinese Immigration Act forcing every Chinese person to pay $50 to move to Canada. This increased to $100 by 1890 and to $500 from 1903 until 1923, when the tax was abolished. From 1885 to 1923, more than 81,000 Chinese immigrants came to Canada, paying about $23-million in head tax. Chinese immigration to Canada was completely banned  from 1923 until 1947. The law reflected racist anti-immigration feelings at the time

• 1885, Sept: 150 white coal miners killed 28 immigrant Chinese coworkers in Rock Springs, Wyoming as the Chinese miners were perceived to be taking their jobs. The miners were struggling to establish a union but the powerful railway company Union Pacific, had resisted as it was economically beneficial to give preference to hiring Chinese miners, who were willing to work for lower wages than their white counterparts

• 1885, Nov: The British occupied all the area of Burma (present-day Myanmar), making the territory a Province of British India. British rule in Burma lasted from 1824 to 1948, from the successive three Anglo-Burmese wars through the creation of Burma as a Province of British India to the establishment of an independently administered colony, and finally independence. The region under British control was known as British Burma (See “2021, Feb”)

• 1885, Nov: Completion of the transcontinental railway across Canada when the “last spike” was driven into the track at Craigellachie, near Eagle Pass in the interior of British Columbia. It took five years of construction and support from Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada. Some 15,000 Chinese labourers helped build the CPR (in particular the BC section) working in harsh conditions and for half the pay of their White co-workers. In July 1886, Canada’s first transcontinental train arrived in Vancouver (Canadian Pacific Railway) strengthening the connection of BC and the NWT to Canada which they had recently joined (and serving as a bulwark against potential incursions by the US). The hammering of the Last Spike is regarded as one of Canada’s most symbolic events

• 1886, Jan: First patent for a “vehicle powered by a gas engine” applied for by Carl Benz. In July, the first public outing occurred of the three-wheeled Benz Patent Motor Car, model no. 1

• 1886, May: The first glass of Coca-Cola was sold at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta. Dr. John Stith Pemberton, a local pharmacist, produced the syrup and carried a jug of the new product down the street to the pharmacy, where it was sampled, and placed on sale for five cents a glass as a soda fountain drink. Carbonated water was teamed with the new syrup to produce the drink 

• 1887: Invention of an alternating current (AC) induction motor by Nicola Tesla. The AC system he championed and improved remains the global standard for power transmission

• 1887, July: Esperanto was created by Dr. Ludwik L. Zamenhof as a universal second language for international communication. He published his Unua Libro (First Book). Esperanto is the most successful constructed international auxiliary language. Estimates put the number of people who know how to speak Esperanto at around 100,000

• 1888, March: The Blizzard of 1888 led to the creation of the New York subway. This massive blizzard struck the Atlantic coast of the US. As much as 55 inches of snow was dumped in some areas, and New York City ground to a halt. Many people had to seek refuge in hotel lobbies, where temporary beds were put up. As many as 15,000 people were stranded on the city’s elevated trains, and the drifting snow and howling winds also felled telegraph lines, water mains, and gas lines. In the aftermath, the storm was a wake-up call to city planners across the nation. There was a shift toward burying infrastructure underground, including lines of communication and utilities. The blizzard also prompted New York City to begin planning its subway system to replace the exposed high-line trains  

• 1888: Physicist Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves in his lab. He built on the work of the Scottish physicist James Maxwell who formulated the laws of propagation of electromagnetic waves in the famous “Maxwell equations” in 1864

• 1889, March: The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, or International Exposition. Designed by engineer Gustave Eiffel, it was, at the time, the tallest building in the world at 1223 feet – a title it held for 41 years

• 1889: This “Russian flu” is considered as the first pandemic of the industrial era for which statistics have been collected, and may have been a coronavirus pandemic. This planetary event, which raged from 1889 to 1894, started in Turkestan and hit the Russian Empire, before reaching all European countries, the US, and the whole world. Contemporaries were surprised by its high contagiousness as evidenced by attack rates averaging 60% in urban populations, its rapid spread in successive waves circling the globe in a few months by rail and sea, and the tendency of the disease to relapse. Despite its low case-fatality rate, it is estimated to have caused one million deaths worldwide.  Current speculation is that it might have been a coronavirus pandemic

• 1890s: Bloodletting abandoned by modern-style medicine (whether by a physician or by leeches). The practice was based on an ancient system of medicine in which blood and other bodily fluids were regarded as “humours” that had to remain in proper balance to maintain health. The practice of bloodletting began around 3000 years ago with the Egyptians. It is claimed to have been the most common medical practice performed by surgeons from antiquity until the late 19th century

• 1891, Dec: Basketball began with its invention in Springfield, Massachusetts, by a  Canadian. Physical education instructor, James Naismith, created the indoor sport to keep athletes indoors during the winters. He nailed two peach baskets to the railing of the gym balcony 10’ off the ground into which one could score

• 1894, Nov: Nicholas II came to power in Russia upon the death of his father, Czar Alexander III, but the revolutionary socialist movement was growing. In 1905 the Russian Revolution was suppressed, but Nicholas II had to concede major reforms, among them a constitution and the creation of the first Parliament, the Duma 

• 1895, April: China cedes sovereignty over Taiwan to Japan following Chinese defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). Japan rules the island (called Formosa) until 1945. (Taiwan was a province of the Chinese Qing Empire). The Treaty of Shimonoseki ended the First Sino-Japanese War as a clear victory for Japan

• 1895, Nov: Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-Rays. His discovery was labeled a medical miracle and X-rays soon became an important diagnostic tool in medicine, allowing doctors to see inside the human body for the first time, without surgery

• 1896: Guglielmo Marconi invented wireless as well as the radio. He wasknown for his creation of a practical radio wave-based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi (1874-1937) being credited as the inventor of radio, (although many others have contributed, e.g. James Blake Maxwell established the mathematical basis for propagating electromagnetic waves through space in 1872). Marconi shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics (See also “1901, Dec”)

• 1896, Aug: Gold was discovered at Bonanza Creek in northwest Canada, launching the 1896–99 Klondike (Yukon) Gold Rush.  Placer gold (a deposit of sand or gravel containing gold and found in a stream or riverbed) was found in commercial quantities mainly in the Western Cordillera region, from California to Alaska, subsequently sparking a series of gold rushes. After 1900, no substantive goldfields remained undiscovered. Out of the 100,000 people who set out for the Yukon, only a few hundred made it rich

• 1896: Giacomo Puccini wrote his opera La Bohème. He subsequently wrote Tosca (1900), Madame Butterfly, (1904), and Turandot (1924). Puccini (1858-1924) was regarded as the greatestand most successful proponent of Italian opera after Verdi

• 1897, Oct: Creation of French Indochina. Thiswas a grouping of French colonial territories in Southeast Asia until its demise in 1954. It comprised Cambodia, Laos, the Chinese territory of Guangzhouwan, and three Vietnamese regions. The capital for most of its history (1902–45) was Hanoi

• 1897: The first successful diesel engine was developed by German inventor Rudolf Diesel (his prototype was introduced in 1893) and runs on diesel fuel (both named after him). It is an internal combustion engine in which ignition of the fuel is caused by the elevated temperature of the air in the cylinder due to mechanical compression; thus, the diesel engine is called a compression-ignition engine (CI engine). This contrasts with engines using spark plug-ignition of the air-fuel mixture, such as a gasoline engine. The engines have the benefit of running more fuel-efficiently than any other internal combustion engines plus diesel is safer to store than gasoline

• 1898, April: the Spanish-American War started. The American battleship, Mains, blew up and sank in the harbour of Havana, Cuba, starting the war. The 19th century represented a clear decline for the Spanish Empire, while the US went from becoming a newly founded country to being a medium regional power. The war ended with the Treaty of Paris, negotiated on terms favourable to the US. The treaty ceded ownership of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands from Spain to the US and granted the US temporary control of Cuba

• 1898, July: Canada elected Wilfred Laurier’s Liberal party and had the longest uninterrupted term for a Canadian PM. Laurier would go on to head the government for the next 15 years, the longest uninterrupted term for a Canadian PM. He was a skilful and pragmatic politician with a charismatic personality, who always taught compromise. He was a fervent promoter of national unity at a time of radical change and worsening cultural conflict. Laurier also promoted the development and expansion of the country. He encouraged immigration to Western Canada (he focussed his attention on Ukraine; more than 180,000 came to Canada between 1885 and 1914). He supported the construction of transcontinental railways and oversaw the addition of Alberta and Saskatchewan to Confederation

• 1898, Sept: The Battle of Omdurman (and the last cavalry charge of the British army) was fought during the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan between a British–Egyptian expeditionary force (led by a man who symbolized the British Empire – Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener of Khartoum) and a Sudanese army of the Mahdist Islamic State. (Kitchener had sworn to avenge Major-General Charles George, who was killed at Khartoum in 1885.) Some 35,000–50,000 Sudanese tribesmen, the dervishes, attacked the British lines in a disastrous series of charges. (The dervishes lost 11,000 men with about 16,000 wounded.) The battle is part of British military folklore. Among those present was 23-year-old soldier and reporter Winston Churchill. It is also remembered as the last cavalry charge of the British army 

• 1899, Jan: A secret treaty was signed between Britain and the Sheikdom of Kuwait, called the Anglo-Kuwaiti Agreement of 1899. Under its provisions Britain pledged to protect the territorial integrity of Kuwait in return for restricting the access of foreign powers to the Sheikhdom and regulating its internal affairs. It cemented Britain’s role in the country, including the management of its pearling and oil resources

• 1899: The Superior School of Journalism (École supérieure de journalisme) of Paris was the “world’s first school of journalism”. Intended to give students a broad knowledge of politics and economics, it did not award a separate journalism degree by name until 1910. The University of Missouri School of Journalism also claims the title of “first in the world”, but it did not open until 1908 in Columbia, Missouri

• 1899-1902: South African war (or Boer War): was a conflict fought between the British Empire and the two Boer Republics (the South African Republic and the Orange Free State) over the Empire’s influence in Southern Africa. Many consider the Boer War as marking the beginning of the questioning of the British Empire’s veneer of impenetrable global dominance; this is due to the war’s surprisingly long duration and the unforeseen, discouraging losses suffered by the British fighting the “cobbled-together army” of Boers. Canada sent a contingent of 1,000 volunteers (that came under British financial responsibility.)

• 1899-1901: The Boxer Rebellion in China: was an anti-foreign, anti-colonial, and anti-Christian uprising towards the end of the Qing dynasty, by the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, known as the “Boxers” in English because many of its members had practiced Chinese martial arts, which at the time were referred to as “Chinese boxing”. A total of 136 Protestant missionaries and 53 children were killed, 47 Catholic priests and nuns, 30,000 Chinese Catholics, 2,000 Chinese Protestants, and 200 to 400 of the 700 Russian Orthodox Christians in Beijing were estimated to have been killed. The US was one of the eight foreign powers that crushed the rebellion (See next)

The 20th Century

The 20th century was dominated by significant events that defined the modern era: Spanish flu pandemic, WWI and WWII, nuclear weapons, nuclear power and space exploration, nationalism and decolonization, technological advances, and the Cold War and post-Cold War conflicts. These reshaped the political and social structure of the globe.

• 1900: The global population reaches 1.6 billion (See “1700”, “1800”, “1975”, “2000” “ and “2022, Nov”)

• 1900, July: The first successful rigid airship flight was by the German count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Its first flight lasted for only 18 minutes

• 1900, Aug: The Eight-Nation Alliance (a multinational military coalition) invaded northern China during the Boxer Rebellion, with the stated aim of relieving the foreign legations in Beijing, which was being besieged by the popular Boxer militiamen, who were determined to remove foreign imperialism in China. The allied forces consisted of about 45,000 troops from the eight nations of Germany, Japan (who had most of the troops), Russia, Britain, France, the US, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. (The suppression of the Boxer Rebellion was known as the China Relief Expedition.) The US was able to play a major role in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion largely because of the presence of American forces deployed in the Philippines since the US annexation after the Spanish-American War in 1898. Neither the Chinese nor the quasi-concerted foreign allies issued a formal declaration of war. Issue still perceived negatively by the Chinese  (See “1899-1901”)

• 1900, Sept: The Great Galveston hurricane. It remains the deadliest natural disaster and the worst hurricane in US history. From 6,000 to 12,000 people died on Galveston Island and the mainland. Texas’ most advanced city was nearly destroyed

• 1900, Dec: Max Planck invented quantum theory. He presented his theoretical explanation involving quanta in Berlin. In doing so, he had to reject his belief that the Second Law of Thermodynamics was an absolute law of nature. Planck himself said that, despite having invented quantum theory, he did not understand it himself at first. Nevertheless, he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918 for his achievement

• 1901: Prohibition in Canada was first enacted on a provincial basis in Prince Edward Island. It became law in the remaining provinces during WWI. Prohibition was widely seen at the time as a patriotic duty and a social sacrifice, to help win the war. Most provincial laws were repealed in the 1920s. Unlike in the US, banning booze in Canada was complicated by the shared jurisdiction over alcohol-related laws between Ottawa and the provinces. The provinces controlled sales and consumption

• 1901: The first Nobel Prizes were awarded, five years after Alfred Nobel’s death. His invention of dynamite and several related substances made Nobel a very wealthy man. By the time of his death, he had amassed what was at the time one of the world’s largest private fortunes. In his will, he stipulated that the majority of his personal wealth should be invested in a fund of stable securities and apportioned out every year in the form of prizes recognizing individuals who had “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” The prizes were awarded in five categories: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. In 1968, Sweden’s central bank introduced a sixth Nobel Prize category, economics (See “1867”)

• 1901: Patent filed for a vacuum machine by English inventor Hubert Cecil Booth. His company, the Electric Suction Sweeper Company (later renamed Hoover) released in 1908 the first commercially successful portable vacuum in the US)

• 1901, Sept: An anarchist assassinated US President William McKinley. He shot him twice in the gut while shaking his hand at the Buffalo World’s Fair. His assassin, Leon Czolgosz, had lost his job during the economic Panic of 1893 and turned to anarchism. After McKinley’s shooting, the Secret Service formally became the protector of the President

• 1901, Oct: The first person to successfully take the plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel was a 63-year-old schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor

• 1901, Dec: The first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean is sent by Marconi, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. The message – simply the Morse-code signal for the letter “s”– traveled more than 2,000 miles from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada. (There are some that don’t believe this actually happened and that he made it up.) (See “1896”)

• 1902, June: Australia is the first sovereign nation to grant women the right to vote and the right to run for parliament. (South Australia enfranchised women in 1894, Western Australia did so in 1899.) The self-governing colony of New Zealand granted suffrage to women in 1893

• 1903, June: The Tour de France, an annual men’s multiple-stage bicycle race, was first held. It is the oldest of the cycling Grand Tours and generally considered the most prestigious. The race has been held annually except when it was stopped for the two World Wars. It is primarily held in France

• 1903, June: The Ford Motor Company was officially incorporated in Detroit, Michigan. In May 1904 Rolls-Royce was founded in Manchester, England

• 1903, Dec: Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics (with her husband and with the physicist Henri Becquerel) for their pioneering work developing the theory of “radioactivity” – a term she coined. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields

• 1903, Dec: The Wright brothers made the first sustained, controlled, powered heavier-than-air manned flight at just south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The first flight by Orville Wright, of 120 feet in 12 seconds, was recorded in a famous photograph. In the fourth flight of the same day, Wilbur Wright flew 852 feet in 59 seconds

• 1904-05: The Russo-Japanese War and shocking defeat of Imperial/tzarist Russia by the Japanese and gaining both southern Manchuria and the Korean peninsula. This  is generally considered the first modern war. Repeating rifles, machine guns and fast-firing artillery were new. Japan, angered by diplomatic betrayals and overreaching Russian expansion in Asia, started the war.Russian soldiers found themselves under siege in the barren winter hellscape of Port Arthur, with vulnerable supply lines. The Japanese navy was a modern one with traditions based on Britain’s royal navy – and it was built in England. The Russian Baltic Fleet, which Russian Emperor Nicholas II had sent halfway around the world, was destroyed by Japan at the island of Tsushima. Some familiar rings to the current Russian war with Ukraine emerge

• 1905, Jan: The Russian Revolution of 1905 (also known as the First Russian Revolution). A wave of mass political and social unrest began to spread across the vast areas of the Russian Empire. The unrest was directed primarily against the Tsar, the nobility, and the ruling class. It included worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies. In response to the public pressure, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to go back on his earlier authoritarian stance and enact some reform (issued in the October Manifesto). This took the form of establishing the State Duma, the multi-party system, and the Russian Constitution of 1906. The 1905 revolution was set off by the international humiliation that resulted from the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War

• 1905: Albert Einstein’s papers published on relativity and quantum theory – a revolution driven by physics. In this year (now known as his annus mirabilis or miracle year), Einstein (1879-1955) published four revolutionary scientific papers. He publishes the special theory of relativity; he outlined the theory of the photoelectric effect; he describes the principle of the mass-energy equivalence, the latter now associated with the world’s most famous equation: E=mc2. It changed the world’s understanding of space and time, essentially replacing Isaac Newton’s long-running pioneering theories from 200 years earlier. His theories led to atom bombs and nuclear power, transistors and spaceships, lasers and radar. In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for physics while still living and teaching in his native Germany. Not long after, in 1933, he moved to the US to take a position at Princeton, where he taught until 1945. While his discoveries made him a famous name in the physics community, Einstein is remembered and revered for more than his scientific contributions. Throughout his life, he didn’t shy away from advocating for various social and political issues; throughout his work, he applied creativity, curiosity, humanity, and philosophy to everything he did 

• 1905, Aug: Completion of the first ship’s transit of the Canadian Northwest Passage by Norwegian Roald Amundsen, with a crew of six in the ship Gjøa. From 1903-1905 they traveled via Baffin Bay, the Parry Channel and then south through Peel Sound, James Ross Strait, Simpson Strait and Rae Strait. They spent two winters at King William Island, in the harbour of what is today Gjoa Haven. Their ship cleared the Canadian Arctic Archipelago mid August, 1905, stopped for the winter before going on to Nome, Alaska in 2006. Along the way he determined the location of the North Magnetic Pole and spent time learning from the local Inuit. Note:The first confirmed complete passage, from west to east, of the shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, along the Arctic coasts of Norway and Russia, was made by the Finland-Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, with the Swedish ship Vega in 1877-79 (See “1845, May”)

• 1906: The first commercially produced outboard motor was sold. An American, Cameron B. Waterman, made a machine with an air cooled motor cycle engine connected by way of sprockets to a propellor. He called it an outboard motor. Waterman sold the company in 1915 to Arrow Motor and Machine Co. In 1908, Ole Evinrude produced a motor which clamped on the back of a boat. He then formed the Evinrude Light Twin Outboard Motor Company. In 1921 the Johnson brothers commenced production of a totally new lightweight smooth operating outboard. In 1928 they turned the former Birmingham Automotive Company building in Peterborough into the Canadian Johnson Motor Company. Then Outboard Marine Corporation bought it. The Peterborough factory began assembling motors branded as Johnson, Evinrude and ELTO. Times changed. In 1990 the Peterborough factory shut down and in 2000 OMC filed for bankruptcy

• 1906, April: Mount Vesuvius in Italy erupts, again. Some 200 people were killed. The planned Rome Olympics were held in London as funds were diverted for recovery efforts (See “79 AD”)

• 1906, Aug: A constitutional monarchy was established in Iran and its first parliament was established. King Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar signed the 1906 constitution shortly before his death. The Constitutional Revolution of Iran, took place between 1905 and 1911. The revolution led to the establishment of a parliament in Persia (Iran) during the Qajar dynasty. The revolution opened the way for fundamental change in Persia, heralding the modern era. It was a period of unprecedented debate with a burgeoning press, and new economic opportunities (See “2015, April”)

• 1907: The Triple Entente formed – an alliance among UK, France and the Russian Empire. It occurred after the 1882 Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) offered an ominous threat plus the German army and navy continued to grow in size and power

• 1907: The world’s first synthetic plastic – the beginning of the plastics revolution: the first thermoset material was prepared by Leo Baekeland in New York when his company, General Bakelite, was the first industrial producer of a plastic that was moulded into pieces; this marks the introduction of the Polymer age. Then cellophane was invented in 1908. Then in the interwar years came PVC, cellulose, acetate, polyester, plexiglass, nylon, polystyrene, polyurethanes, polyethylene terephthalate

• 1908, June: The Tunguska event in remote Siberia was the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, though much larger impacts occurred in prehistoric times. The explosion is generally attributed to a meteor air burst: the atmospheric explosion of a stony asteroid about 50–60 metres in size. The object is thought to have exploded at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres rather than having hit the surface. It flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 830 sq mi of forest

• 1908, Oct: A patent was filed for the “synthesis of ammonia from its elements” by Fritz Haber. Ammonia was then first shipped in 1913 and rapidly commercialized. We now live in a world transformed and highly dependent upon the resulting Haber-Bosch process. Haber realized the growing need to replace the nitrogen lost from fields owing to the harvesting of crops. (An irony is also apparent in the process as it provided the raw material for explosives. Haber’s discovery has had a major influence in both World Wars and all subsequent conflicts.) The Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia has been called the most momentous technical advance in history

• 1908, Oct: The era of mass production commences: the Model T Ford was introduced at a cost of $825. In 1911 Henry Ford won a lawsuit against the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers (ALAM) as having no legal claim to the design of his car

• 1910, Oct: October 1910 Revolution in Portugal was the overthrow of the centuries-old Portuguese monarchy and its replacement by the First Portuguese Republic. It was the result of a coup d’état organized by the Portuguese Republican Party

• 1910: Bertrand Russell along with Alfred North Whitehead co-wrote Principia Mathematica, which investigated the logical foundation of mathematics. Russell (1872-1970)  said, after reading John Stuart Mills’s autobiography at age 18, that it liberated him from the last remnants of his earlier childhood belief in Christianity. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought” 

• 1911: The artist Pablo Picasso was recognized as the inventor of Cubism. He is also credited with the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. One of his best-known works, Guernica, is regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. In his Analytical Cubism he broke away from Renaissance tradition, especially from the use of perspective and illusion. For example, they showed multiple views of an object on the same canvas to convey more information than could be contained in a single limited illusionistic view. In his astonishing range and invention, Picasso (1881-1973) was among the 20th century’s greatest artists. He was also an abusive man, with a fondness for much younger women

• 1911: The British Royal Navy switched from coal to oil. While at once a sensible decision (oil has twice the thermal content of coal so boilers could be smaller and ships could travel twice as far), but it gave up Britain’s strategic advantage of having its own coal supplies, much from Wales. It had a global network of coaling stations and it would now become vulnerable to fuel interruptions as much came from Persia. (Interestingly, it was Winston Churchill, in his then role of Navy Secretary, who made the decision.)

• 1911, May: The Standard Oil Co was ordered to divest itself of its major holdings – 43 companies in all – under the Sherman Antitrust Act. (It was estimated that by 1890, Standard Oil controlled 88 percent of the refined oil flows in the US.) John D. Rockefeller became the richest person in modern history, as the initial income of these individual enterprises proved to be much bigger than that of a single larger company. After dissolution of the Standard Oil empire, eight companies retained “Standard Oil” in their names, but by the late 20th century the name had almost passed into history. For example In 1931 Standard Oil of New York merged with Vacuum Oil Company to form Socony-Vacuum, which in 1966 became Mobil Oil. Standard Oil (Indiana) was renamed Amoco in 1985. Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) changed its name to Exxon in 1972. British Petroleum bought Standard Oil Company (Ohio) in 1987, and in 1998 British Petroleum (renamed BP) merged with Amoco. Exxon and Mobil merged in 1999, and Chevron merged with Texaco in 2001 (See “1982, Jan”)

• 1911, July: The ruins of Machu Picchu, Peru found by Hiram Bingham. Yale University history lecturer and explorer Hiram Bingham, travelling by foot and on mule, made his way from Cuzco, Peru to the Urubamba Valley where he and his team met a farmer who told them of the ruins located atop a nearby mountain at an elevation of 7,800 feet. Dating back to the mid-15th century, this “Sacred City” is thought to have been erected by the ninth ruler of the Incas, Pachacuti, as a summer retreat. It was abandoned in 1533. Some 3,000 stone steps link the destination’s many levels along the Inca Trail (See “1532, Nov” and “1572”)

• 1911, Oct: Overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in China; Dr. Sun Yat-sen (”Father of the Nation”) was elected provisional leader of the Republic (after a series of failed uprisings). Emperor Puyi, had been picked at age 3 by Empress Dowager Cixi to succeed to the Manchu throne so she could continue her decades-long reign as regent, was crowned as China’s last emperor on Dec 2, 1908. He abdicated February 1912, the last of 2,132 years of imperial dynasties, and the 267-year-old Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty.The revolution was the culmination of a decade of agitation, revolts, and uprisings. It marked the beginning of China’s early republican era

• 1911, Dec: Roald Amundsen became the first to successfully reach the South Pole. The team of five men and 16 dogs arrived at the pole on 14 December, a month before Robert Scott’s group (who subsequently perished). Amundsen’s expedition benefited from his careful preparation, good equipment, appropriate clothing, a simple primary task, an understanding of dogs and their handling, and the effective use of skis. In contrast to the misfortunes of Scott’s team, Amundsen’s trek proved relatively smooth and uneventful

• 1912, Jan: Republic of China established following the Xinhai Revolution, which itself began with the Wuchang uprising October 1911, successfully overthrowing the Qing dynasty and ending over two thousand years of imperial rule in China. It lasted from 1912 to 1949 in Chinese mainland; basically the transition time between feudalism and modernization 

• 1912, April: The Radio Act in the US required all radio operators to be federally licensed and all ships to maintain constant radio alert for distress signals. The issue gained importance twelve days later due to the sinking of the Titanic. At the time radio was almost exclusively used for point-to-point communication, and the three major categories of stations were maritime, transoceanic, and amateur

• 1912, April: The “unsinkable” Titanic sank. On its maiden voyage, a luxury British steamship, at the time the world’s largest ocean liner, sank after striking an iceberg, leading to the deaths of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. The ship was found in 1985 about 640 kms off Newfoundland, split in two but upright in 3,750 metres of of water

• 1912: The Gramophone Company set 78 rpm as their recording standard for gramophone records

• 1913: Oskar Barnack made the first 35 mm film and then the first-ever Leica camera, called the Ur-Leica. His O-series production camera was offered to the public in 1925; it was equipped with a lens that had five glass elements, known as the 50 mm Elmar Anastigmat. This led to the creation of the supremely good lenses of today, the most precise of modern consumer durables, and similar to the smartphone. (Euclid’s Optics, written in 300 BC laid the groundwork for Ptolemy’s theories brought to the science of astronomy, and advanced theories of refraction and reflection that have not changed much to this day.) (See “300 BC”, “150 AD” and “1826”)

• 1913: The first moving assembly line was used to build an automobile – the Ford Model T. Henry Ford also introduced a third shift and profit sharing – and a much cheaper car

• 1913: The first home electric refrigerator invented by American Fred W. Wolf, which featured a refrigeration unit on top of an icebox. Mass production of domestic refrigerators began in 1918 when William C. Durant introduced the first home refrigerator with a self-contained compressor. (The reality is that food storage and preservation has always been a necessary part of human existence.) (See “1748”)

• 1913, Nov: British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst delivered her famous “Freedom or Death” speech to a crowd of supporters in Hartford, Connecticut. Her powerful speech, considered one of the most important of her career, justified using militant tactics to agitate for women’s rights

• 1913, Dec: The first central bank, the Federal Reserve System, was founded in the US to enhance the stability of the American banking system by managing the currency and monetary policy. The enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, after a series of financial panics (particularly the panic of 1907) led to the desire for central control of the monetary system in order to alleviate financial crises

• 1914, April: The Komagata Maru incident where a group of people from India attempted to immigrate to Canada, but most were denied entry and forced to return to Calcutta. There, the Indian Police attempted to arrest the group leaders. A riot ensued, and they were fired upon by the police, resulting in the deaths of 22 people. The passengers comprised Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, all Punjabis and British subjects. Of the 376 passengers, 24 were admitted to Canada, but the other 352 were not allowed to disembark in Vancouver, and the  Japanese steamship Komagata Maruwas forced to leave Canadian waters. This was one of several incidents in the early 20th century in which exclusion laws in Canada and the US were used to exclude immigrants of Asian origin. Two Canadian PMs have since apologized for the incident, acknowledging discriminatory, racist and exclusionary legislation

• 1914, May: Establishment of Western Canada’s first commercial oil field: the Calgary Petroleum Products Co crews struck (in the Ding-man No. 1 well) a gasoline-like substance

• 1914, June: The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated. The heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife Sophie, were shot to death by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I

• 1914, July:Start of World War I (the Great War).The Austro-Hungarian empire declares war on Serbia. Serbia appealed to its traditional ally, Russia, while Austria turned to the foolish German Emperor Wilhelm II, who thought a brief war might distract growing discontent at home and break the encirclement of Germany by Russia and France. He declared war on them both. When German armies invaded Belgium, Britain and its empire allied with France and Russia. Result: four years of carnage; 20 million dead. The Russian economy collapses; riots break out. (Though the Central Powers lost the war after the US joined the Allies, Adolf Hitler bides his time and plotted revenge.) (See “1919, June”)

• 1914, Aug: Opening of the Panama Canal. It is one of the two most strategic artificial waterways in the world, the other being the Suez canal. Ships sailing between the east and west coasts of the US, which otherwise would be obliged to round Cape Horn in South America, shorten their voyage by about 8,000 nautical miles using the canal. From its opening until 1979, the Panama Canal was controlled solely by the US, which built it. In 1979 control of the canal passed to the Panama Canal Commission, a joint agency of the US and the Republic of Panama, and complete control passed to Panama in 1999 

• 1914, Aug: The world’s first electric traffic light is installed in Cleveland, Ohio. It featured green and red illuminated signals facing each side of a four-way intersection. It was manually operated from an elevated control booth. Six years later, an innovative police officer from Detroit added “yellow” to the system (See “1868, Dec”)

• 1915, April: Charlie Chaplin’s first performed his famous screen persona in the feature film “The Tramp”. Chaplin  (1889-1977) was considered one of the most important figures in the history of the film industry. While English, he rose to fame in the era of silent film in America, and then ultimately became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, The Tramp. His career spanned more than 75 years, from his childhood in the Victorian era until his death. His films were characterized by slapstick combined with pathos, typified in the Tramp’s struggles against adversity

• 1915, April: The Armenian Holocaust: a systematic genocide commenced against the Armenian minority in Turkey. TheOttoman authorities arrested and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders from Constantinople. At the orders of Talaat Pasha (chairman of the Union and Progress Party, which operated a one-party dictatorship in the Ottoman Empire, and later on became Prime Minister during WWI) an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916 along with the forced Islamization of Armenian women and children (See “1923, Oct”)

• 1915, April: The Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium was the first major battle fought by Canadian troops in the Great War. It left 6,500 Canadians dead, wounded or taken capture. The untested Canadians distinguished themselves as a determined fighting force, resisting the horror of the first large-scale poison gas attack (chlorine gas) in modern history. The ghastly losses from trench warfare forced prime minister Robert Borden to raise Canada’s total military commitment to 500,000, representing 6.25% (one in 16) of Canada’s population of eight million. By the end of the war, even more served, but not before conscription was enacted and the country nearly torn apart

• 1915, May: Sinking of the RMS Lusitania,a UK-registered ocean liner. It was torpedoed by a German Navy U-boat. 761 people survived out of the 1,266 passengers and 696 crew aboard. The sinking turned public opinion in many countries against Germany. It also contributed to the decision of American entry into the War two years later 

• 1915, Nov: Explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, got trapped in the pack ice and sank in the Antarctic stranding he and his crew on floating ice in the Weddell Sea. All of the crew survived her sinking and eventually landed on the remote Elephant Island. Shackleton realized that help needed to be sought, so he plus his captain Frank Worsley and four others set off in a lifeboat, named James Caird. In what must be among the greatest sea voyages ever recorded, they navigate 1,330 km from Elephant Island across the stormy South Atlantic Ocean to South Georgia Island, eventually finding a whaling station after a 65 km trek. He rescued his men four months later (See “1916, Aug”)

• 1915, Dec: General theory of relativity published by Albert Einstein. It is the current description of gravitation in modern physics. Einstein’s theory of gravity provided a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time. Out was Newton’s idea, which had reigned for nearly two centuries, of masses that appeared to tug on one another. Instead, Einstein presented space and time as a unified fabric distorted by mass and energy. Objects warp the fabric of spacetime like a weight resting on a trampoline, and the fabric’s curvature guides their movements. With this insight, gravity was explained. Widely acknowledged as a theory of extraordinary beauty, general relativity has often been described as the most beautiful of all existing physical theories. It also opened up some dramatic concepts: the idea that the cosmos is expanding, plus the thought that it could collapse and come to an end, and even that there might be other universes (See “1687, July”) 

• 1916, Feb-Dec: The Battle of Verdun was fought on the Western Front in France. The battle was the longest of WWI. It lasted 302 days, the longest and one of the most costly in human history. It has been calculated that the French suffered 377,231 casualties and the Germans 337,000, a total of 714,231 and an average of 70,000 a month. The battle came to symbolize the determination of the French Army and the destructiveness of the war 

• 1916, April: Easter rebellion in Dublin, Ireland. British troops put down the insurrection and the leaders were all executed. This fuelled the Irish cause and the government collapsed

• 1916, July-Nov: The Battle of the Somme turned into one of the most bitter, deadly and costly battles in human history (sound familiar; see Battle of Verdun), as British forces suffered more than 57,000 casualties (including more than 19,000 soldiers killed) on the first day of the battle alone. By the time the Battle of the Somme ended, more than 3 million soldiers on both sides had fought in the battle, and more than 1 million had been killed or wounded

• 1916, Aug: Ernest Shackleton’s 4 1/2 month journey to get help for his men.128 days after he leaves his men, Shackleton (and Frank Worsley) returned to Elephant Island aboard a Chilean naval ship to rescue the remaining members of his expedition, all 22 of whom survived (See “1915, Nov”)

• 1916, Oct: The first birth control clinic opens in America (in Brooklyn, New York). For the first time in American history, women can receive organized instruction in birth control. After only 10 days, Margaret Sanger’s clinic is raided by the vice squad and shut down. She is arrested and all the condoms and diaphragms at the clinic are confiscated

• 1916-1928: The Warlord Era in China – a period in the history of the Republic of China when control of the country was divided among former military cliques of the Beiyang Army (a large army of the Qing Dynasty) and other regional factions. The Era ended in 1928 when the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek officially unified China through the military campaign (called “Northern Expedition”) launched by the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT), marking the beginning of the Nanking decade 

• 1917, Jan: Germany’s decision to begin unrestrictive submarine warfare in the Atlantic backfired. It drew the US into WWI, ensuring Germany’s ultimate defeat

• 1917, Feb-1922: The Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution ending the Romanov dynastic rule and the Russian Empire,and Russia withdraws from WWI. (Also called the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution, it was the first of two revolutions which took place in Russia in 1917.) A period of political and social revolution that took place in the former Russian Empire that saw Russia abolish its monarchy and adopt a socialist form of government following two successive revolutions and a bloody civil war. Long-standing discontent with the monarchy resulted in mass demonstrations and violent armed clashes with police and gendarmes, the last loyal forces of the Russian monarchy. Then Tsar Nicholas II abdicates In February ending the Romanov dynastic rule and the Russian Empire. The birth of communism was under Lenin’s leadership. Russia withdrew from WWI, effectively abandoning allies (including Canada) and prolonging the conflict for them. In some parts of Russia, no one was in control, and enormous suffering and loss of life among the civilian population resulted. It was not until 1920 that most of the fighting finally ended and Lenin and his followers could focus on turning Russia into a communist state. Two years later, the Communists gave the nation a new name – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union

• 1917, March: The first pilotless aircraft flew under control. Remotely controlled pilotless aircraft were designed to attack the Zeppelins during World War I using a radio control system developed at the Royal Flying Corps secret Experimental Works. These were precursors to the modern day drone 

• 1917, April: The US declares war on Germany, under President Woodrow Wilson, who had campaigned on a platform of peace. It was influenced by the revelation that Germany had promised America territory to Mexico in return for attacking the US if it entered the war

• 1917, Oct: Miracle of Fátima in Portugal. Three Catholic shepherd children reported a prophecy that prayer would lead to an end to the Great War, and that on 13 October of that year the Virgin Mary (referred to as Our lady of Fátima), would appear and perform miracles. In 2017, Pope Francis approved the recognition of a miracle involving two of the children which paved the way for their canonization 

• 1917, Oct: Violinist Jascha Heifetz played for the first time in the US, at Carnegie Hall, NYC, and became an immediate sensation. Trained in the Russian classical violin style in St. Petersburg, he (1901-1987) was regarded as the greatest violin virtuoso since Paganini. Fritz Kreisler, another leading violinist of the twentieth century, said after hearing Heifetz’s debut, “We might as well take our fiddles and break them across our knees.” 

• 1917, Nov: The Balfour Declaration was UK support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. It was in the form of a public letter from UK’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. Palestine was then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration represented the first public expression of support for Zionism by a major political power. The term “national home” had no precedent in international law, and was intentionally vague as to whether a Jewish state was contemplated. The British government acknowledged in 1939 that the local population’s wishes and interests should have been taken into account, and recognized in 2017 that the declaration should have called for the protection of the Palestinian Arabs’ political rights. The Declaration indirectly led to the emergence of Israel and is considered a principal cause of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, often described as the world’s most intractable conflict

• 1917, Nov: The October Revolution (or the Great October Socialist Revolution or Bolshevik Revolution) was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key moment in the larger Russian Revolution of 1917-1923. It was the second revolutionary change of government in Russia in 1917. It took place through an armed insurrection in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg). It was the precipitating event of the Russian Civil War. The October Revolution followed and capitalized on the February Revolution earlier that year, which led to the abdication of Nicholas II and the creation of a provisional government (which remained unpopular, especially because it was continuing to fight in WWI.) The victorious Soviet Union viewed Revolution Day as a validation of their ideology, and the triumph of the worker over capitalism (See “1917, Feb”)

• 1917, Nov: Vladimir Lenin served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. He (1870-1924) was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. A controversial and highly divisive historical figure, Lenin is viewed by his supporters as a champion of socialism, communism, anti-imperialism and the working class, while his critics accuse him of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship that oversaw mass killings and political repression of dissidents

• 1917, Dec: Cheka, the first of a succession of Soviet secret-police organizations known for conducting the Red Terror, was established by the highest executive authorities of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) – the Sovnarkom. By late 1918, hundreds of Cheka committees had sprung up in the RSFSR at all levels. Ostensibly set up to protect the revolution from reactionary forces, i.e. “class enemies” such as the bourgeoisie and members of the clergy, it soon became the repression tool against all political opponents of the communist regime. At the direction of Vladimir Lenin, the Cheka performed mass arrests, imprisonments, torture, and executions without trial. In 1921, the Troops for the Internal Defence of the Republic (a branch of the Cheka) numbered at least 200,000. They policed Labour camps, ran the Gulag system, conducted requisitions of food, and put down rebellions and riots by workers and peasants and mutinies in the Red Army (See “1918-1960, Jan” and “1923, Nov”)

• 1917, Dec: The biggest human-made blast, until then, devastated Halifax, Nova Scotia. A French munitions ship, the SS Mont-Blanc, collided with a Belgian relief ship. Most of Halifax and Dartmouth were levelled when it exploded. Almost 2,000 people were killed and 9,000 injured by the shock wave, fire and tsunami

• 1918, Jan: Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) declared independence. Officials in Kyiv had founded the UPR, a state in union with Russia. Eventually Lenin took the UPR by force. But the strength of Ukrainian national identity compelled him to create a socialist Ukrainian republic, and to allow the use of the Ukrainian language. In 1922 Ukraine became one of the four founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – or Soviet Union

• 1918, March: Leon Trotsky was appointed the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs for the Soviet Union and led the negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I. Trotsky (1879-1940) embraced Marxism in 1896. In 1898, he was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia, but in 1902 escaped to London, where he met Lenin and wrote for Iskra, the paper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). The RSDLP split in 1903 into Bolsheviks (“majority”) and Mensheviks (“minority”) factions, with the Bolshevik faction eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After the February Revolution of 1917 which overthrew the tsar, Trotsky returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played an important role in the October Revolution which overthrew the Provisional Government. In the struggle for power following Vladimir Lenin’s death, however, Joseph Stalin emerged as victor, while Trotsky was removed from all positions of power and later exiled (1929). He remained the leader of an anti-Stalinist opposition abroad until his assignation by a Stalinist agent

• 1918, March: A peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, in what is now Belarus, was signed by the new Russian government, now under Lenin’s leadership. By 1917, participation in WW I had resulted in disaster for the tsar’s armies and government. The nation’s casualties were much higher than those of any other country, and its economy was in shambles. Germany knew that Russian Communists, known as Bolsheviks, had long opposed the war and were eager to make peace. Lenin believed that Russia must end its participation in the war so that the nation could focus on building a communist state based on the ideas of Karl Marx. Lenin had no say in the terms of that treaty; the Germans imposed it by threatening to resume their attacks on Russia if the agreement was not signed immediately. Under the treaty, Russia had to turn over several territories to Germany: Finland, Russian Poland, Estonia, Livonia, Courland (now part of Latvia), Lithuania, Ukraine, and Bessarabia. In addition, the Bolsheviks had to give much of the southern part of Russia to what was still the Ottoman Empire, controlled by Turkey. In all, the treaty forced Russia to give up about 30% of its territory

• 1918-19: Spanish flu (or Great Influenza epidemic), was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. The earliest documented case was March 1918 in Kansas, USA, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history (after the Black Death bubonic plague of 1346–1353)

• 1918-1960, Jan: A system of forced labour camps, the Gulag, existed in the Soviet Union where it was recognized as a major instrument of political repression. In 1918–1922, the agency was administered by the Cheka, followed by the GPU (1922–1923), the OGPU (1923–1934), later known as the NKVD (1934–1946), and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in the final years. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. By the end of 1940, the population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5 million. The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or they died soon after they were released. The writer and prominent Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. The system was officially abolished when the remains of its administration were dissolved by Nikita Khrushchev. The legal practice of sentencing convicts to penal labour continues to exist in the Russian Federation, but its capacity is greatly reduced (See “1917, Dec” and “1923, Nov”)

• 1918, July: The Russian Imperial Romanov family (Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Alexandra, and their five children) were shot and bayoneted to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky on the orders of the Ural Regional Soviet in Yekaterinburg. Also murdered that night were members of the imperial entourage who had accompanied them. The bodies were taken to the Koptyaki forest, where they were stripped, mutilated with grenades to prevent identification, and buried. The Romanovs and their servants had been imprisoned in the Alexander Palace before being moved to Tobolsk, Siberia, in the aftermath of the October Revolution. They were next moved to a house in Yekaterinburg. The Soviet Union did not acknowledge the existence of these remains publicly until 1989 during the glasnost period. No written document has been found which proves Vladimir Lenin or Yakov Sverdlov (chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from 1917 to 1919) ordered the executions; however, they endorsed the murders after they occurred

• 1919, Jan-June: Paris Peace Conference was the formal meeting of the victorious Allies after the end of WWI to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers. Dominated by the leaders of Britain, France, the US and Italy, it resulted in five treaties that rearranged the maps of Europe and parts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands, and also imposed financial penalties. As a result of Russia withdrawing from WWI, effectively abandoning its allies, the Bolshevik regime was not recognized by allied governments, nor were Bolshevik leaders invited to peace negotiations at Paris that resulted in the Treaty of Versailles. The Conference imposed various settlements on the defeated powers, notably the Treaty of Versailles (June 29, 1919). Germany and the other losing nations had no voice in the Conference’s deliberations; this gave rise to political resentments that lasted for decades (See “1914, July”)

• 1919, May: The May Fourth Movement was a Chinese anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement which grew out of student protests in Beijing on May 4. Students gathered in front of Tiananmen to protest the Chinese government’s weak response to the Treaty of Versailles decision to allow Japan to retain territories in Shandong (East China) that had been surrendered to Germany after the Siege of Tsingtao in 1914. (The siege was the first encounter between Japanese and German forces, the first Anglo-Japanese operation of the war, and the only major land battle in the Asian and Pacific theatre during World War I.) 

• 1919, June: Treaty of Versailles ended the war (WWI) between Germany and the Allied Powers (France, UK, Russia, Italy, Japan, and the US). It was the most important of the peace treaties. The other Central Powers on the German side (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria) signed separate treaties.Although the armistice of November 11 1918 ended the actual fighting, it took six months of Allied negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. The treaty required Germany to disarm, make ample territorial concessions, and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. (Article 231, which became known as the War Guilt clause, was future subject of great debate – and in part became the cause of WWII.) (See “1914, July”) 

• 1919, June: The first non-stop transatlantic flight made by British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown. They flew a modified First World War Vickers Vimy bomber from St. John’s, Newfoundland to Clifden, Ireland

• 1920, Jan: The League of Nations founded. It was the first worldwide intergovernmental organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded by the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. The main organization ceased operations on 20 April 1946 but many of its components were relocated into the new United Nations (See “1945, April”)

• 1920, Jan: The US went dry regarding sale of alcohol – to 1933: a nationwide constitutional law, the Volstead Act, prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. Speakeasies, or blackmarket drinking dens, became popular  

• 1920, Aug: Women “won” right to vote in US. The Nineteenth Amendment is ratified

• 1920, Aug: The “Ponzi scheme or “pyramid scheme” was an investing scam invented by Charles Ponzi. Money from a constant stream of new investors is used to pay off earlier investors while simultaneously enriching the scheme’s creator. In eight months in 1920, Ponzi raked in an estimated $15 million ($220 million today) by persuading thousands of Bostonians that he could make them rich. The scheme made him infamous when the scheme adopted his name. He was eventually convicted on federal charges of mail fraud and served 3½ years in prison. Upon parole, he was convicted of state charges, getting out in 1934. At that time, he was deported to his native Italy

• 1920, Sept: Mahatma Gandhi launches campaign of non-violent resistance in India. It was one of Gandhi’s first organized acts of large-scale of satyagraha, or “holding firmly to truth”. Gandhi’s planning of the non-cooperation movement included persuading all Indians to withdraw their labour from any activity that “sustained the British government and also economy in India,”including British industries and educational institutions

• 1920, Oct: The Iraqi revolt against the British sought independence from British rule. Itconsisted of mass demonstrations, including protests by embittered officers from the old Ottoman Army, against the British who published the new land ownership and the burial taxes. The objectives of the revolution were independence from British rule and the creation of an Arab government

• 1920, Nov: Ireland partitioned into two self-governing polities, the north-eastern counties forming “Northern Ireland” while the largest part of the country formed “Southern Ireland” but to remain part of the UK

• 1920, Dec: The 1920 Haiyuan, China earthquake was one of the worst disasters in China (in the Ningxia province) by death toll, as approximately 250,000 died

• 1920s: Latex transformed condoms into what they are today. They now have a very high tensile strength. America and European nations became open to contraception after World War II. The discovery of AIDS as a sexually transmitted disease in the 1980s brought about the popularity of condoms for prevention of sexually transmitted diseases as well as a contraceptive

• 1921, May: The Tulsa, USA race riot was a two-day-long white supremacist massacre. A heavily armed white mob killed hundreds of Black residents and burned much of Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood neighbourhood (at the time one of the wealthiest black communities in the US) to the ground. The killing and destruction made it one of the worst racist terror attacks in US history. After the massacre, officials set about erasing it from the city’s historical record. Police records vanished. Victims were buried in unmarked graves. Newspaper articles about it were removed before the pages transferred to microfilm

• 1921, July: Founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). A study group led by two Peking University professors met to discuss Marxism. This led to the intellectuals officially founding the CCP in July. They received training by representatives of the Comintern, the Soviet Union’s international organization. The Soviet representatives reorganized both the Nationalist Party (GMD) led by Sun Yat-sen and the CCP into Leninist parties1921, May:

• 1921, Dec: The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed, ending British rule in most of Ireland and creating the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland remained within the United Kingdom. The agreement was between the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and representatives of the Irish Republic that concluded the Irish War of Independence. This was a guerrilla war fought in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 between the Irish Republican Army (IRA, the army of the Irish Republic) and British forces: the British Army, along with the quasi-military Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its paramilitary forces the Auxiliaries and Ulster Special Constabulary (USC). It was part of the Irish revolutionary period 

• 1922, Feb: Irish writer, James Joyce, publishes the modernist novel, Ulysses. It isconsidered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement.” The book was chosen number one of Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels published during the 20th century. Joyces’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was #4

• 1922, Oct: Fascist leader Benito Mussolini forms government in Italy after three years of unrest. He was commissioned by King Victor Emmanuel III to form a new government after leading the March on Rome. He then establishes an authoritarian system

• 1922, Oct: The Anglo-Iraqi Treatywas designed to allow for Iraqi self-government while giving the British control of Iraq’s foreign policy. It was intended to conclude an agreement made at the Cairo Conference of 1921 to establish a Hashemite Kingdom in Iraq. The treaty protected the “economic rights” of British nationals. In particular regarding owning 50% of the Turkish Petroleum Company, an enterprise the British were well represented in through Anglo-Persian (which later would be called British Petroleum). (Also the Germans, who were the principal capitalists in Iraq before WWI, were eliminated.)

• 1922, Nov: Discovery of King Tut’s tomb in Egypt from 1323 BCprovided vast amounts of evidence for the art and culture of the period 

• 1922, Dec: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was born with Joseph Stalin in charge. Initially, the new nation only had four members: the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Transcaucasian Soviet republics. Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1953) and premier of the Soviet state (1941–53); by the 1930s he consolidated power to become a dictator. During the quarter of a century preceding his death, Stalin as dictator probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. He industrialized the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and forcibly collectivized its agriculture

• 1923: WRGP, then W2XB, was started as the world’s first television station, broadcasting from the General Electric facility in Schenectady, NY. It was popularly known as “WGY Television”. Television became available in crude experimental forms in the 1920s, but only after several years of further development was the new technology marketed to consumers. After WWII, an improved form of black-and-white television broadcasting became popular in the UK and the US, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion. In the mid-1960s, colour broadcasting was introduced in the US and most other developed countries. Since 2010, with the invention of smart television, Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through streaming video services services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, iPlayer and Hulu. In 2013, 79% of the world’s households owned a television set

• 1923, April: The Ego and the Ids paper published by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. It is an analytical study of the human psyche outlining Freud’s (1856-1939) theories of the psychodynamics of the id, ego and super-ego, which is of fundamental importance in the development of psychoanalysis 

• 1923, July 1: The Canadian federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. This discriminatory law halted virtually all immigration of people of Chinese origin to Canada for a quarter of a century. For many Chinese Canadians, July 1 was known as “Humiliation Day.”

• 1923, Sept: The Great Kanto Earthquake hit the Japanese island of Honshu, with a magnitude of 7.9. It devastated Tokyo and the city of Yokohama, killing 142,000 people. The earthquake triggered fires that burned many buildings, likely because in 1923, people cooked over an open flame, and the quake struck while people were preparing lunch. The high winds after the hit, caused by a typhoon that passed off the coast spread the flames and created horrifying firestorms. Since the earthquake snapped water mains, the fires were not extinguished until September 3, after about 45 percent of Tokyo burned

• 1923, Oct: Frederick Banting and John Macleod, co-discoverers of insulin, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. It was one of the fastest honouring of a discovery in the history of the awards. This was one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in history, which went on to save millions of lives around the world and triggered a century of diabetes discoveries. Diabetes in its severe form, which often struck children, was a horrible disease. Patients expelled excess sugar via their urine, lost weight and strength, suffered many other complications, eventually fell into a coma and then died. This is resolved by insulin, that regulates blood sugar levels. In 1921 a team at the University of Toronto began trying a new experimental approach suggested by Dr. Frederick Banting, a Canadian surgeon. Banting shared the honours and award money with his colleague, Charles Best. As an aside: In January 1923, Banting, James Collip (a biochemist who joined the group to work on purifying insulin) and Best were awarded US patents on insulin and the method used to make it. They all sold these patents to the University of Toronto for $1 each. Banting famously said, “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.” 

• 1923, Oct: Turkey was declared a Republic. The caliphate was abolished March 1924, and all members of the Ottoman dynasty were expelled from Turkey. The process was one of the  reforms following the replacement of the Ottoman Empire with the Republic of Turkey. A full republican constitution was adopted on April 20, 1924. It retained Islam as the state religion, but in April 1928 this clause was removed, and Turkey became a purely secular republic. It has been a member of NATO since 1952, although concerns over human rights and rule-of-law issues have suspended EU accession (See “2016, July”)

• 1923, Nov: The forced labour camp of Solovki served as a prototype for the Russian Gulag (a system of forced labour camps). It was set up on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea as a remote and inaccessible place of detention, primarily intended for socialist opponents of Soviet Russia’s new Bolshevik regime. Its remote situation made escape almost impossible and in Tsarist times the monastery in which it was housed had been used, on occasion, as a political prison by the Russian imperial administration (See “1918-1960, Jan” and “1917, Dec”)

• 1924, Jan: Vladimir Lenin dies. He was the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924 

• 1924, Jan: The first Olympic Winter Games were held in Chamonix, France at the foot of Mount Blanc

• 1924, April: The Royal Canadian Air Force was formed. During WWI Canadian pilots were part of the British Royal Air Force. By the end of WWII the RCAF would be the fourth-largest air corps among the Allies, with about 250,000 members

• 1924, July: The World Chess Federation was founded in Paris, France. (It is referred to by its French acronym, FIDE.) In 1950 it established a system of titles, conferring the titles of Grandmaster and International Master on 27 players. Mikhail Botvinnik started an era of Soviet dominance in the chess world which stood almost uninterrupted for more than a half-century. This was driven mainly through the Soviet government’s politically inspired efforts to demonstrate intellectual superiority over the West. Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was only one non-Soviet champion, American Bobby Fischer (champion 1972–1975). Note: chess has an ancient history. The earliest texts referring to the origins of chess date from the beginning of the 7th century. The oldest known chess manual was in Arabic and dates to about 840 AD

• 1925, Jan: Benito Mussolini created a totalitarian single-party state in Italy. In a speech Mussolini gave to the Italian parliament, Il Duce (as he styled himself) asserted his right to supreme power and effectively became the dictator of Italy

• 1925: Julius Lilienfeld patented (in Canada) the concept of a transistor. His idea was making an all-electric gateway, a device that would allow a low-voltage electrical current, by the employment of a substance then known as a semiconductor, to control a very-much-higher-current flow, and either to switch it on and off at will or to amplify it – all without moving parts or exorbitant cost. His scheme was entirely conceptual; no such device could be made with the technology and materials available at that time (See “1947, Dec”)

• 1925: Hitler publishes Mein Kampf (“My Struggle“), an autobiographical manifesto, after being released from prison. The book lays out the ideological program Hitler established for the Holocaust, by identifying the Jews and “Bolsheviks” as racially and ideologically inferior and threatening, and “Aryans” and National Socialists as racially superior 

• 1925, July: Scopes Monkey Trial: a teacher charged with teaching the theory of evolution. A high-school teacher, John T. Scopes, was charged with violating state law by teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The trial’s proceedings helped to bring the scientific evidence for evolution into the public sphere while also stoking a national debate over the veracity of evolution. Just prior the Tennessee legislature had passed the Butler Act, which declared unlawful the teaching of any doctrine denying the divine creation of man as taught by the Bible. World attention focused on the trial proceedings, which promised and delivered confrontation between fundamentalist literal belief and liberal interpretation of the Scriptures. William Jennings Bryan (a populist Democrat who ran for president three times) led for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defence. The judge limited the trial to the single question of whether Scopes had taught evolution, which he admittedly had; Scopes was convicted and fined $100. Tennessee prevented the teaching of evolution in the classroom until the Butler Act’s repeal in 1967. Bryan won the case but hurt his cause. He and the movement he represented, which attacked the empirical findings of science, became the object of ridicule

• 1926, Oct: Escape artist, Harry Houdini, died from a blunt trauma likely causing an appendicitis. He wasa Hungarian-American magician and stunt performer noted for his escape acts that included chains, ropes slung from skyscrapers, straitjackets under water, and having to escape from and hold his breath inside a sealed milk can with water in it. Houdini (1874-1926) presented himself as the scourge of fake spiritualists. As President of the Society of American Magicians, he was keen to uphold professional standards and expose fraudulent artists

• 1926, Nov: The Commonwealth of Nations (the “Commonwealth”) established through the Balfour Declaration. This is a political association of member states, the vast majority of which are former territories of the British Empire. It declared the United Kingdom and the Dominions to be “autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.” The current Commonwealth of Nations was formally constituted by the London Declaration in 1949, which modernized the community and established the member states as “free and equal”.  As of 2022 this is a political association of 56 member states

• 1927: The first quartz clock was developed by a Canadian-born engineer, Warren Marrison. It uses the vibrations of a quartz crystal. The switch over from mechanical clocks begins. (Seiko introduced the first quartz wristwatch in 1969.)

• 1927: The world’s first televised speech and first long-distance television transmission after the British Broadcasting Corporation is founded, and the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System – later CBS – is formed. Pictures of Herbert Hoover, US Secretary of Commerce, are transmitted 200 miles from Washington D.C. to New York. Philip Farnsworth patents the first electronic TV system

• 1927, April: The Shanghai massacre was the violent suppression of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organizations and leftist elements in Shanghai by forces supporting General Chiang Kai-shek and conservative factions in the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party or KMT led by founder Sun Yat-sen). 5,000 Communists were massacred. Following the incident (commonly known in China as The April 12 Incident), conservative KMT elements carried out a full-scale purge of Communists in all areas under their control. The purge led to an open split between left-wing and right-wing factions in the KMT, with Chiang Kai-shek establishing himself as the leader of the right-wing faction based in Nanjing, in opposition to the original left-wing KMT government based in Wuhan 

• 1927, May: Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris, a distance of 5,800 km, flying alone for 33.5 hours in his aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis. Although not the first transatlantic flight, it was the first solo transatlantic flight, the first nonstop transatlantic flight between two major city hubs, and the longest by over 3,000 km. It is known as one of the most consequential flights in history

• 1927, Aug-1949, Dec: The Chinese Civil War was fought between the Kuomintang-led government of the Republic of China and forces of the Chinese Communist Party. Armed conflict continued intermittently during this period, and ending with Communist control of mainland China. The war is generally divided into two phases with an interlude. From August 1927 to 1937, the KMT-CCP Alliance collapsed during the Northern Expedition, and the Nationalists controlled most of China. From 1937 to 1945, hostilities were mostly put on hold as the Second United Front fought the Japanese invasion of China with eventual help from the Allies of WWII, but even then co-operation between the KMT and CCP was minimal and armed clashes between them were common. The civil war resumed as soon as it became apparent that the Japanese defeat was imminent, and the CCP gained the upper hand in the second phase of the war from 1945 to 1949, generally referred to as the Chinese Communist Revolution. The Communists gained control of China and established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, forcing the leadership of the Republic of China to retreat to the island of Taiwan (See “1949, Oct”)

• 1928: The cartoon character, Mickey Mouse, first appeared, created by the Walt Disney Company. The studio’s catalog of animated features is among Disney’s most notable assets, with the stars of its animated shorts – Mickey and Minnie, of course, but then came Donald Duck, Daisy Duck, Goofy and Pluto becoming recognizable figures in popular culture and mascots for the company as a whole

• 1928, Aug: The Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed outlawing war between the nations that signed, including France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. With the signing of the Litvinov Protocol in Moscow February 1929, the Soviet Union and its western neighbours, including Romania, agreed to put the Kellogg–Briand Pact in effect. The world was eager to maintain peace, and the pact was signed by 15 nations initially, followed by 47 additional countries in the following years. Signatories of the “Paris Pact” (the act’s nickname) were to renounce war as a national policy and settle disputes by peaceful means. While acts of aggression were outlawed, self-defence was permitted, which led to the pact’s eventual downfall. What’s more, there weren’t any real legal consequences for violations, and nations soon began justifying international aggression as self-defence, and without any repercussions, beginning with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, China, in 1931. Although the pact failed to prevent World War II, it remains in effect today, and its goals are still relevant 

• 1928, Sept: Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming plus a method of mass production. It was one of the world’s first antibiotics. It was discovered by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming and marks a true turning point in human history – when doctors finally had a tool that could completely cure their patients of deadly infectious diseases. Fleming was knighted for his scientific achievements in 1944. It took til 1940 for Dr. Howard Florey to figure out the required fermentation tanks and sophisticated chemical engineering that characterize the actual antibiotic production. Postscript: we’ve since overprescribed antibiotics which has given bacteria more opportunity to develop resistance. Many of our antibiotics are becoming less effective, and few new ones are emerging

• 1929, Feb: The Lateran Treaty recognized Vatican City as an independent state under the sovereignty of the Holy See. The Italian government also agreed to give the Roman Catholic Church financial compensation for the loss of the Papal States. (During the Renaissance, the papal territory expanded greatly and the pope became one of Italy’s most important secular rulers as well as the head of the Church. At their zenith, the Papal States covered most of the modern Italian regions of Lazio – which includes Rome, Marche, Umbria and Romagna.) In 1948, the Lateran Treaty was recognized in the Constitution of Italy as regulating the relations between the state and the Catholic Church. The treaty was significantly revised in 1984, ending the status of Catholicism as the sole state religion

• 1929: Discovery of Alberta’s tar sands. A chemist, Karl Clark, perfected a way to extract oil from the gummy, tarred earth of Alberta’s Athabasca basin using hot water. That breakthrough and the fact that Canada sits on the third-largest oil reserve in the world led to the energy-intensive mining of the oil sands decades later

• 1929: The human sex hormone estrogen is isolated and identified by Dr. Edward Doisy at St. Louis University

• Late 1920s: By this period, the world’s population had hit two billion. It reached three billion around 1960 and then four billion around 1975. It has doubled since then (See “1700”, “1800”, “1900”, “1975” and “2022, Nov”)

• 1929, Sept: Start of the Great Depression, a severe worldwide economic depression between 1929 and 1939, that began after a major fall in stock prices in the US. The economic contagion began around September 4, 1929 and led to the stock market crash of October 24 (which became known worldwide as Black Thursday). The subsequent Great Depression was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century

• 1930: The Rastafari (or Rastafarianism), religious and political movement, begun in Jamaica in the 1930s and was adopted by many groups around the globe (there are an estimated 700,000 to one million Rastafari). It combines Protestant Christianity, mysticism, and a pan-African political consciousness. It is an Abrahamic religion that is classified as both a new religious movement and a social movement. Rastas believe in Jah, which is another name for God according to the Old Testament of the bible. Although commonalities exist between Rastafarianism and Judeo-Christian principles, they are also distinctly different. Many Rastas believe that the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie I, crowned in 1930, is the Second Coming of Christ who returned to redeem all Black people. Rastas espouse the idea that the present age will come to an apocalyptic end

• 1930, July: Inaugural tournament of the FIFA World Cup for soccer. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) is the global governing body of the sport of soccer. The championship has been awarded every four years since

• 1930, Aug: A resolution is passed favouring limited acceptance of birth control at the world assembly of Anglican bishops. This resolution is a watershed for the Protestant Church 

• 1930, Dec: The Roman Catholic Church opposes birth control. It makes its first definitive statement on the subject – Pope Pius XI issues an encyclical titled Casti Canubi (Of Chaste Marriage) calling birth control a sin, and opposing birth control by any artificial means. In 1951, Pope Pius XII announces that the Church will sanction the use of the rhythm method as a natural form of birth control. Previously, the only option approved by Rome was abstinence. In 1968 Pope Paul VI reveals his decision on the pill in an encyclical titled Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life). He ignores the recommendations of the Papal commission on birth control and states unequivocally that the Church remains opposed to all forms of birth control except the rhythm method

• 1931-1939: The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies. Cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperatures combined with warmer tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures to create conditions in the atmosphere that turned North America’s breadbasket into a dust bowl. In addition, the widespread conversion of the land by deep plowing and other soil preparation methods to enable agriculture eliminated the native grasses which held the soil in place and helped retain moisture during dry periods. Furthermore, cotton farmers left fields bare during winter months, when winds in the High Plains are highest, and burned the stubble as a means to control weeds prior to planting, thereby depriving the soil of organic nutrients and surface vegetation. This catastrophe intensified the economic impact of the Great Depression in the region

• 1931: Englishman Frank Whittle invented the jet engine; it took 10 years to have it operable, and a new age of jet propulsion was born. French and German prototypes were developed but the technical skills in Europe at the time were not up to the task. The US pursued almost no research until the 1940s. Jet engines are beasts of extreme complexity bound up within a design of simplicity. Whittle’s brainwave was to employ a gas turbine as an engine that instead of driving a propeller at the engines’s front (which he thought was outmoded) would thrust out a powerful jet of air from the engine’s rear. He was awarded a patent in 1931 for “Improvements Relating to the Propulsion of Aircraft and Other Vehicles”. Fast forward to May 1941 when his engine was successfully tested in a plane – and a new age was born, jet propulsion (See “1941, May”)

• 1931, Feb: The first container ship in the world was launched. It was called the Autocarrier, owned by Southern Railway UK. It had 21 slots for containers of Southern Railway (See “1955, Nov”)

• 1931, April: The Empire State Building was completed. It was the world’s tallest building until the first tower of then World Trade Centre in 1970. An international cultural icon, it has been featured in more than 250 television series and films since the film King Kong was released in 1933. The building’s size has become the global standard of reference to describe the height and length of other structures. A symbol of New York City, the building has been named as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World

• 1931, July: 21 Kashmiri Muslim protesters were killed by the Dogra state forces of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir (straight north of India) after refusing to disperse outside the main jail of the capital city where a man was being held and tried on charges of sedition. The incident reflected a complicated clash of Hindus and Muslims with the ethnic cleansing of Hindus commencing with the arrival of Muslim rule in the region of Kashmir. It is suggested that this event is the most important day in the annals of contemporary Kashmir. From this point the struggle for independence and freedom in the most modern sense started openly. Kashmir was a state where a Hindu minority ruled over a Muslim majority. Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan, not India; that it didn’t was the result of the Maharaja Hari Singh 

• 1931, Sept: Japanese invasion of Manchuria (northeast China). The true beginning of another “great” war. It was an escalation in a long running struggle with Russia – first Tsarist, then Soviet – over control of Manchuria and its key ports and railways. At the war’s end in February 1932, the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo

• 1931, Dec: Statute of Westminster 1931 is an act of the UK Parliament that removed nearly all of the British parliament’s authority to legislate for Canada. The Act sets the basis for the relationship between the sovereign states (i.e. Dominions – Canada was termed a “dominion”) that has Charles III as its Monarch. As the statute removed nearly all of the British parliament’s authority to legislate for the Dominions, it was a crucial step in the development of the Dominions as separate states. The British parliament did retain the power to amend Canada’s constitution at the request of Canada. That authority remained in effect until the Constitution Act, 1982, which transferred it to Canada, the final step to achieving full sovereignty (See “1982, April” and “1987, April”)

• 1932: Adolph Huxley published Brave New World. It wasset in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy. The novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society 

• 1932, March: Opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge the largest steel arch bridge on the planet. It is a steel through arch bridge spanning Sydney Harbour from the central business district to the North Shore. The view of the bridge, the harbour, and the nearby Sydney Opera House is widely regarded as an iconic image of Sydney, and of Australia itself

• 1932, Oct: A national system of non-compulsory work camps was set up in Canada. It was administered by the Department of National Defence. In exchange for their work on various military projects for a 20-cent daily allowance, men would be fed, clothed and sheltered until the economy recovered; it was not for women

• 1932, Nov: US elects Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president against the backdrop of the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s election ended the era of Republican dominance in presidential politics that lasted from the beginning of the Civil War in 1860 to the middle of the Great Depression in 1932

• 1932-33: Stalin’s Russia caused a man-made famine (the Holodomor) in Soviet Ukraine resulting in 3.5 to 5 million victims (some estimates go from 7 to 10 million). The origins of the famine lay in the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property, and sometimes housing to collective farms, and they deported so-called kulaks – wealthier peasants – as well as any peasants who resisted collectivization altogether. Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages. Ukrainians were forcibly deprived of their grain and food; whole villages were depopulated, and the grain which should have fed Ukrainians was sold internationally. The Holodomor (Ukrainian for “death by starvation”) has been recognized by Ukraine alongside 15 other countries, as a genocide against the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet regime 

• 1933, Jan: Nazi takeover of Germany; Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party. By March the Enabling Act basically gave him free rein as a dictator (plus he shut down all competing radio, newspapers & newsreels) 

• 1933, Feb: The burning of the Reichstag (parliament) building in Berlin. This was a turning point in the Nazi party establishing power in Germany. They used it to justify the declaration of emergency powers and suppress the Communists on whom the fire was blamed. The day after the event, Hitler began his dictatorship by suspending the political and personal rights of all German citizens 

• 1933, March: The New Deal was launched by President Franklin Roosevelt (the longest-serving US president), which provided relief for the unemployed, farmers, youth and the elderly. The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority (as well as the party that held the White House for seven out of the nine presidential terms from 1933 to 1969) with its base in progressive ideas, the South, and the newly empowered labor unions, and various ethnic groups

• 1933: Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astronomer, was the first to use the viral theorem to postulate the existence of unseen dark matter (a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe). It is now speculated that around 95% of the universe cannot be “seen”, as it is in the form of both dark matter and dark energy. “Dark” because they don’t absorb or emit light  

• 1933, Dec: The repeal of prohibition on alcoholic beverages in the US was accomplished with the passage of the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution. In 1919, Congress had passed the Volstead Act, the popular name for the National Prohibition Act, which banned alcohol. The production, importation, and distribution of alcoholic beverages however was taken over by criminal gangs, which fought each other for market control in violent confrontations. Canada never had a country-wide ban

• 1934, June: The US Securities and Exchange Commission was created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. It is an independent agency of the US federal government. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market manipulation. It was given the power to regulate the stock exchanges, prohibit manipulative trading practices, and regulate corporate disclosures

• 1934: The Motion Picture Production Code was applied to most motion pictures released by major studios in the US from 1934 to 1968. This was a set of industry guidelines for the self-censorship of content.The code prohibited profanity, suggestive nudity, graphic or realistic violence, sexual persuasions and rape. It was known as the Hays Code. Enforcement became weaker and weaker owing to the combined impact of TV, foreign film influences and certain controversial directors pushing the boundaries, plus the courts. The code was discontinued in 1968 and replaced by a film rating system by the Motion Picture Association of America

• 1934, Sept: USSR became a member of the League of Nations. It was expelled in December 1939 for invading Finland

• 1934-35: The Long March in China. This was actually three retreats, rather than one single march, undertaken by the red Armies to escape from the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) army. The march established Mao Zedong’s leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. It allowed the army to reach a base from where they grew and eventually defeated the Nationalists in the struggle to control mainland China

• 1935: The US passed the National Labor Relations Act which confirmed workers’ rights to organize and to bargain with employers collectively. It also defined unfair labour practices. The Act (called the Wagner Act) gave workers a unified voice in American politics and levelled the playing field between them and employers (the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act). It established the federal government as the regulator and ultimate arbiter of labour relations. The Wagner Act has been described as the most important piece of labour legislation enacted in the US in the 20th century 

• 1936: The Universal Turing machine was invented by Alan Turing. It can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Despite the model’s simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algorithm. After WWII he designed the Automatic Computing Engine, one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. Turing (1912-1954), an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst and philosopher is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. He was never fully recognized in Britain during his lifetime because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act (See “1941”)

• 1936, Aug: Olympics held in Berlin, Germany. Hitler saw the games as an opportunity to promote his government and ideals of racial supremacy and antisemitism. Ironically a black American athlete, Jesse Owens, the most successful athlete at the Games, was credited with “single-handedly crushing Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy” (See “776 BC” and “”2008, Aug”)

• 1936, Aug-1938, March: The Great Purge was Soviet General Secretary Stalin’s campaign to solidify his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the state by eliminating his rivals by the use of imprisonment and execution. Scholars estimate the death toll for the Great Purge to be roughly 700,000. (Called also the Great Terroror the Year of ’37). In particular, the purges were designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky. They occurred with the most prominent feature being show trials of leading Bolshevik party members. However, a considerable proportion of the country’s population was affected as well. The purges themselves were largely conducted by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the secret police of the USSR. The NKVD began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks, government officials, and regional party bosses. Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The NKVD widely utilized imprisonment, torture (a great number of accusations were based on forced confessions under torture), violent interrogation, and arbitrary executions to solidify control over civilians through fear

• 1936, Nov: The BBC began transmitting the world’s first public TV service from Alexandra Palace in north London. The prohibitive cost of TV sets limited the number of viewers to 20,000

• 1936, Dec: King Edward VIII abdicated his throne as a result of his desire to marry a divorced woman. American socialite, Wallis Simpson, who was divorced from her first husband and was in the process of divorcing her second was perceived to be politically, morally and socially unsuitable as a prospective queen consort. It was widely assumed by that she was driven by love of money or position rather than love for the King. He was succeeded by his brother Albert, who became George VI

• 1936-39: Spanish Civil War, where the Republicans who were defending the legitimate government were fighting the right-wing insurgents led by General Francisco Franco. It became a “dress rehearsal” for WWII. The Nationalists won the war and ruled Spain until Franco’s death in 1975

• 1937: Joseph-Armand Bombardier patented the snowmobile – a vehicle on caterpillar tracks, steered by skis. Bombardier, a Québécois mechanic from Valcourt, Quebec, developed a propeller-driven sled in 1922. This was the first of many vehicles that could travel over snow. It was Bombardier’s sprocket wheel and track system, though, that defined the first snowmobile in 1935. This design made the vehicle practical. In 1958, Bombardier built a prototype for a small snowmobile with a lighter engine. Production of this recreational model began in 1958 under the Ski-Doo trademark. His success transformed his company from a small family workshop to a publicly traded multinational corporation. This type of snowmobile, about the size of a motorcycle, became very popular in snowy climates. Several manufacturers currently make personal snowmobiles under various brand names. 

• 1937, April: The Basque town, Guernica, was destroyed: Nazi and fascist pilots acting for General Franco’s rebel Nationalist forces destroyed this Basque town. The attack gained controversy because it involved the bombing of civilians by a military air force. Seen as a war crime by some historians, and argued as a legitimate attack by others, it was one of the first aerial bombings to capture global attention

• 1937, May: The Hindenburg zeppelin caught fire in New Jersey while attempting to moor, killing 36 people, 35 of them passengers out of 97 on this German commercial passenger-carrying airship. This spelled the end of airships as commercial vehicles. (The airship category included a variety of dirigibles such as zeppelins which have a rigid structure, and blimps, which completely collapse when deflated.)

• 1937, July: Aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared somewhere over the Pacific (during a flight to circumnavigate the globe). She was an American aviator who set many flying records and championed the advancement of women in aviation. Her plane (the Lockheed 10-E Electra) wreckage was never found. In 1933 she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, and the first person ever to fly solo from Hawaii to the US mainland. (Some December 2023 grainy sonar images of what looks like a plane 4,800 metres deep around Howland Island, a mid-Pacific atoll between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii have invigorated interest in the mystery of what happened to her.)

• 1937, July: Japan declared war on China and the Marco Polo Bridge conflict. This occurred between Chinese and Japanese troops near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing, which developed into warfare between the two countries that was the prelude to the Pacific side of World War II. This war, coinciding with WWII, is the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). (The Chinese often refer to it as the Eight Year War of Anti-Japanese Resistance.)

• 1937 on to 1941: Significant changes were evolving in Japan that were pushing the county away from being a status quo power to being a revisionist power (just a few years ahead of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy). Manchuria (See “1931, Sept”), the decision to defy world opinion and leave the League of Nations in the same year (1933/34) as Hitler’s Germany did, the notification in 1935 that Japan would no longer consider itself as being bound by the Washington and London naval treaty restrictions, the adhesion to the Anti-Comintern Pact and the large-scale invasion of China proper in 1937, and the various efforts to push the West out of East Asia. Then in July 1941 the US (supported by the British and Dutch) froze all Japanese commercial assets, essentially cutting off Japan’s consumption of oil. They could either buckle under or strike out to gain its needed energy supplies and other vital war materials. Accepting second-class status was inconceivable to this generation of Japanese leaders

• 1937, Dec: The Rape of Nanjing: over a period of six weeks, Imperial Japanese Army forces brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of people (including both soldiers and civilians) in the Chinese city of Nanking (or Nanjing). The horrific events are also known as the Nanking Massacre; between 20,000 and 80,000 women were sexually assaulted. Nanking, then the capital of Nationalist China, was left in ruins 

• 1937, Dec: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first full-length animated feature film in motion picture history. (This is traditionally animated where each frame is drawn by hand). It was produced by Walt Disney Productions and was the first Disney animated feature film. It had been said that in no other medium has a single company’s practices been able to dominate aesthetic norms to such an overwhelming extent

• 1938: American electronic television sets were released commercially

• 1938: Teflon became one of the best-known synthetic materials. This is the commonly known brand name of Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE)-based composition. Discovered by a spin-off company from Dupont

• 1938, Sept: The Munich Pact, that abandoned Czechoslovakia to Germany – five months later, the Nazis violated the Pact. Germany had to seize Czechoslovakia to stay ahead in the arms race with the other powers. (Czechoslovakia was the world’s 7th largest manufacturer of arms, for example.) P. M. Neville Chamberlain of Britain, who was inclined to a policy of appeasement towards Hitler, announced, ironically, he had achieved “peace in our time”. It however just whetted Hitler’s territorial ambitions. This is often referred as a example of both naivety and a lesson “to be invoked”

• 1938, Nov: Night of Broken Glass (or Kristallnacht). Hitler ordered massive Nazi attacks on Jewish persons and property throughout Germany (the pretext being the assassination of a German diplomat by a German-born Polish Jew living in Paris). Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust 

• 1939, Aug: A secret speech was allegedly given by Joseph Stalin justifying the Soviet strategy to promote military conflict in Europe. The historicity of this is still the subject of academic debate. The speech was apparently given to members of the Politburo (the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) wherein he justified the Soviet strategy to promote military conflict in Europe, which would be beneficial for the future territorial expansion of the Communist system. The strategy included Soviet-Nazi collaboration and the suggestion of what has become the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 

• 1939, Aug: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Hitler-Stalin Pact), which made the two dictators allies. It was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union enabled those powers to partition Poland between them. They marked out their “spheres of influence” across Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. Stalin covertly partnered with Hitler to re-arm Nazi Germany. Note: in today’s Russia, it is forbidden to study, in an unbiased  manner, this early period of WWII (1939–1941), when this Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was in force, when as said the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland, the Baltic countries and invaded Finland. Those who “identify” the similarities in the policies of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during that period face the possibility of a large fine or arrest. The full historical truth about WWII is dangerous for todays Kremlin. Starting with its very name, which back in Soviet times was supplanted and replaced by the “Great Patriotic War,” which began only in 1941, many military archives from that period are still kept highly classified. Russia has erased from its history books the fact that Stalin signed this “non-aggression pact” in 1939 with Nazi German. But Hitler double-crossed Stalin, attacked his army then spent years and millions of lives trying to drive the Russians back to Moscow and conquer the rest of Russia. That world war was caused by two treacherous leaders who signed their deal in order to enslave or eliminate millions of people who lived in between them. Then they ended up destroying one another (See “1940, June”, “1954, Apr” and “1990, March”)

• 1939, Sept 1: World War II begins. German forces under the control of Adolf Hitler bombard Poland on land and from the air. The UK & France declared war on Germany Sept 3. The war involved the vast majority of the world’s countries – including all of the great powers – forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. It resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians

• 1939, Nov: The Winter War (or the First Soviet-Finnish War), between the Soviet Union and Finland; it ended after 3 1/3 months with the Moscow Peace Treaty. Despite superior military strength the Soviet Union suffered severe losses and initially made little headway. The League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the organization on December 14, 1939

• 1940: The cartoon character, Bugs Bunny, first appeared in “A Wild Hare”. He was shrewd, irreverent, quick-witted and outspoken. “What’s up, Doc?” entered our vocabulary, with the voice of Mel Blanc. Also along came Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig

• 1940, April: German forces invaded Denmark and Norway. Denmark surrendered on the day it was invaded. British and French troops fought briefly in Norway, but by 10 June the country had fallen fully under German control. The Germans had a dual objective of safeguarding their iron ore supplies from Sweden, which shipped out of Norwegian ports, and preventing the Royal Navy from controlling the North Atlantic by blockading German shipping in its own ports

• 1940, May, June: At the port of Dunkirk, the largest amphibious evacuation undertaken in any wartime conditions enabled the British Army to regroup and fight again. In the last week of May 1940, most of the British, a large French contingent and some Belgian soldiers were trapped by the German army in a small area around Dunkirk. Over a period of nine days, the Royal Navy’s fighting ships, merchant transport vessels and small civilian boats of all kinds plied the waters to and from Dunkirk under frequent and intense German attacks from land, sea and air. By the end of the day on June 4, 338,226 British and Allied troops had been rescued and landed in England

• 1940, May: The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police). The order to execute captive members of the Polish officer corps was secretly issued by the Soviet Politburo led by Joseph Stalin. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be “intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials”. In the 1990s, the Soviets accepted responsibility for the massacres, but refused to classify it as a war crime or as an act of mass murder

• 1940, May, June: A German assault on north-west Europe, known as the Battle of France, resulted in the capture and subjugation of France, one of western Europe’s greatest military nations for the past three centuries (and also three other countries – Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium). It also witnessed the retreat of the British Army and its evacuation home from Dunkirk and other western French ports. It seemed that the German Luftwaffe followed by paratroops, tank columns, and assault forces had given Germany an unbeatable combination. It was a dark time in the history of Europe

• 1940, June: The Soviet Union invaded and occupied the three independent Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact wth Nazi Germany as “constituent republics” and annexed them in August. In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and within weeks occupied these Baltic territories. The Soviet Union recaptured these states in 1944. During the 1944-1991 Soviet occupation many people from Russia and other parts of the former USSR were settled in the three Baltic countries, while the local languages, religion and customs were suppressed. This colonization included mass executions, deportations and repression of the native population

• 1940, June: The Italian dictator, Mussolini, opportunistically declared war on Britain and a falling France. He was cagily neutral in September 1939 but by June 1940 felt the conflict would soon end. Under Mussolini’s successor Pietro Badoglio, Italy capitulated to the allies in September 1943. In October 1943, the Kingdom of Italy officially joined the Allied Powers and declared war on its former Axis partner Germany

• 1940, June: British PM Winston Churchill delivered a powerful speech in the House of Commons following the Battle of Dunkirk. With the Allies heroically evacuated from Dunkirk, an invasion of Britain by Nazi Germany was a distinct possibility. Churchill needed to rally the nation, and he did. “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” 

• 1940, June:  France surrendered to the Germans on June 22. The terms of the Armistice allowed the southern half of France, except the extreme south-east (which was occupied by Germany’s ally, the Italian Army) and the Atlantic seaboard, to remain under French civil administration. France also retained her colonies in North Africa and elsewhere, but in every other respect France became a puppet state of Germany (See “1944, Aug”)

• 1940, July: Philippe Pétain served as head of the collaborative regime of Vichy France. He helped to transform the French Third Republic into the French State or Vichy France, an authoritarian regime that collaborated with the Axis. After Germany and Italy occupied and disarmed France in November 1942, Pétain’s government worked very closely with the Nazi German military. The wartime Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of jews constituted the ultimate betrayal of the republic. After the war, Pétain was tried and convicted for treason. He was originally sentenced to death, but due to his age and WW I service his sentence was commuted to life in prison

• 1940, Aug: Permanent Joint Board of Defence established between Canada and the US. This senior advisory body on continental military defence of North America was approved by US president Franklin Roosevelt and Canada’s PM William L. Mackenzie King. The board consists of both Canadian and American military and civilian representatives

• 1941, Jan: US President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his Four Freedoms speech, where he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people “everywhere in the world” ought to enjoy. His intention was to provide a rationale for why the US should abandon the isolationist policies that emerged from WWI. The speech coincided with the Lend-Lease Act, which promoted Roosevelt’s plan to become the “arsenal of democracy” and support the Allies (mainly the British) with much-needed supplies and it established what would have been the ideological basis for America’s involvement in WWII, all framed in terms of individual rights and liberties that are the hallmark of American politics. The four freedoms, in his words, are: “First, the freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want – which means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants. The fourth is freedom from fear – which means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point…that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbour.” 

• 1941, March: The Lend-Lease Act was enacted by the US which allowed them to remain technically neutral while supporting their European allies. The US supplied the UK, the Soviet Union, France, Republic of China, and other Allied nations with food, oil, and materiel between 1941 and 1945. The aid was given free of charge on the basis that such help was essential for the defence of the US. A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $770 billion in 2024) worth of supplies was shipped, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the US. In all, $31.4 billion went to the UK. Neutrality had been enshrined in the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s. It was a decisive step away from non-interventionist policy and toward open support for the Allies. To quote FDR after he signed the Act into law, “And so our country is going to be what our people have proclaimed it must be – the arsenal of democracy…Never, in all our history, have Americans faced a job so well worth while.”

• 1941: The main focus of Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician, was in cracking the German ‘Enigma’ code. He worked at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where top secret work was carried out to decipher the military codes used by Germany and its allies. The Enigma was a type of enciphering machine used by the German armed forces to send messages securely. Although Polish mathematicians had worked out how to read Enigma messages and had shared this information with the British, the Germans increased its security at the outbreak of war by changing the cipher system daily. This made the task of understanding the code even more difficult. He went on in 1942 to working with the ‘Lorenz’ cipher machine which enciphered German strategic messages of high importance. The ability of Bletchley to read these contributed greatly to the Allied war effort, particularly during the Battle of the Atlantic where allied convoys could be directed away from the U-boat ‘wolf-packs’ (See “1936”)

• 1941, May: Frank Whittle’s jet engine invention was successfully tested in a plane – and a new age was born, jet propulsion. It was not until January 1944 that the British public was told of the new invention. “Jet Propelled Aeroplane” said the Times. “Success of British Invention. After years of experiments Britain now has flying a fighter aeroplane propelled by a revolutionary type of power unit, the perfection of which represents one of the greatest steps forward in the history of aviation. The new system, known as jet propulsion, does away with the need for an orthodox engine and also for an air-screw.” (See “1931”)

• 1941, May: The Anglo-Iraqi War (the “Thirty Days War”) was a British-led Allied military campaign during WWII against the Kingdom of Iraq under Rashid Gaylani, who had seized power in the 1941 Iraq coup d’état, with assistance from Germany and Italy. The campaign resulted in the downfall of Gaylani’s government, the re-occupation of Iraq by the British, and the return to power of the Regent of Iraq, a British ally. Iraq’s oil was of supreme importance for the Allied war effort. The war stirred a large section of the Arab world against the British. During the war the Mufti declared jihad against Britain 

• 1941, June: Germany led the European Axis powers in an invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), opening the Eastern Front, the largest land theatre of war in history. The Germans sent around 110 divisions eastward. What stopped it? First, the weather (very early onset of extreme frosts and snow – the coldest winter, ironically since Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, and with German troops still clad in summer uniforms); secondly, the Red Army fought back sufficiently to slow the Germans down; and thirdly Russia threw more troops into the fight 

• 1941, Aug; The Atlantic Charter was signed – by Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (off the coast of Newfoundland) that set out American and British goals for the world after the end of World War II

• 1941, Sept-1944, Jan: The siege of Leningrad, one of the most lethal in world history, lasted for 900 days. This was a prolonged military blockade undertaken by the Axis powers against the Soviet city of Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg ). The city survived, with heroic resistance. It was possibly the costliest siege in history due to the number of casualties which were suffered throughout its duration. It has sInce been determined that it was Hitler’s ultimate plan to raze Leningrad 

• 1941: Synthetic rubber development was pushed forward by WWII. Industry, government and academia collaborated in the US to replace natural rubber mostly from SE Asia with synthetics

• 1941, Oct: President Roosevelt approved the atomic program called the Manhattan Project, a research and development undertaking that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the US with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. (Back in 1939 there were fears that a German atomic bomb project would develop one first. A letter, signed by Albert Einstein, was delivered to President Franklin D. Roosevelt which warned of the potential development of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type”. It urged the US to take steps to acquire stockpiles of uranium ore and accelerate the research into nuclear chain reactions.) The mission to design and build the first atomic bombs was given to the Los Alamos Laboratory, also known as Project Y. This was a secret laboratory operated by the University of California. The Manhattan Project grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion. (In 1942 Canada built the secret Montreal Laboratories to help develop nuclear weapons through the Manhattan Project.)

• 1941, Dec 7: Japanese fighter planes surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, a US naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii, where they managed to destroy/damage 20 American naval vessels, including eight battleships, and over 300 airplanes. Over 2,400 US personnel were killed

• 1941: Dec 8: The US declared war on Japan. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed a joint session of the US Congress “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

• 1941, Dec 11: Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, declared war against the United States

• 1941-1945: The Holocaust – the genocide of European Jews during World War II – taking place. Between these dates, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some 6 million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through labour in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka in occupied Poland

• 1942, Jan: The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be deported to occupied Poland and murdered 

• 1942, Feb: The fall of Singapore to the Japanese. This massive blow to English prestige was called by Churchill “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”. This was followed by…

• 1942, March: The fall of Rangoon to the Japanese and the occupation of Burma (Myanmar). This inadvertently promoted the cause of Burmese nationalism.  It has been said that Burma suffered more from the effects of war than any other part of South-East Asia. Before the war Burma had been the biggest exporter of rice in the world. It was recaptured by the British 14th Army as WWII entered its final stages, in May 1945

• 1942: The phrase “modern synthesis” coined. Thiswas the early 20th-century synthesis of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel’s ideas on heredity into a joint mathematical framework. Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis 

• 1942: The first successful and safe open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) was designed during the German occupation of France, by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Émile Gagnan. It was a twin hose system known as the Aqua-Lung. Their system combined an improved demand regulator with high-pressure air tanks. This was patented in 1945

• 1942, Aug: The Allies launched a major raid on the French coastal port of Dieppe which was a disaster. Operation Jubilee was the first Canadian Army engagement in the European theatre of the war, designed to test the Allies’ ability to launch amphibious assaults against Adolf Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” More than 900 Canadian soldiers were killed, and thousands more were wounded and taken prisoner

• 1942, Aug-1943, Feb:The Battle of Stalingrad, where over one million perished. Russians consider it to be one of the greatest battles of their Great Patriotic War, and most historians consider it to be the greatest battle of the entire conflict. It stopped the German advance into the Soviet Union and marked the turning of the tide of war in favour of the Allies (See “1943, Feb”)

• 1942, Oct to 1943, April: First major land offensive against Japan, since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, on and around the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific theatre. The campaign marked the Allies’ transition from defensive operations to offensive ones and effectively allowed them to seize the strategic initiative. They went on to secure a base in the Solomon Islands for attacks on Japanese strongholds in Rabaul, Saipan, and Iwo Jima as the noose closed around Japan’s home islands

• 1942, Nov: Operation Torch was an Allied invasion of French North Africa. It was the first mass involvement of US troops in the European-North African Theatre, and saw the first major airborne assault carried out by the US

• 1943, Jan: The Casablanca Conference finalized the Allied strategic plans against the Axis powers and the promulgation of the policy of demanding “unconditional surrender” from the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. The discussions were held between US President Franklin Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill. Stalin could not attend as he was preoccupied with the Russian defence of Leningrad. (See “1941, Sept-1944, Jan”) What the leaders ordained in Casablanca largely came about

• 1943, Feb: Russian troops retook Stalingrad and captured nearly 100,000 German soldiers, though pockets of resistance continued to fight in the city until early March. Most of the captured soldiers died in Russian prison camps, either as a result of disease or starvation. The loss at Stalingrad was the first failure of the war to be publicly acknowledged by Hitler. It put Hitler and the Axis powers on the defensive, and boosted Russian confidence as it continued to do battle on the Eastern Front in WW II. Stalingrad led to the death of 750,000 Soviet and 850,000 Axis forces. And more civilians died in the battle of Stalingrad than in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. In the end, many historians believe the Battle at Stalingrad marked a major turning point in the conflict. It was the beginning of the march toward victory for the Allied forces of Russia, Britain, France and the US (See “1942, Aug-1943, Feb”)

• 1943: The Bengal Famine resulted in an estimated 2 million deaths in the Bengal province of British India – present-day Bangladesh (range from 800,000 to 3.8 million). Causes were attributed to government policies, war-time disruption of food distribution, cyclones, floods). War-time colonial policies exacerbated the crisis

• 1943, March: The Battle of the Atlantic was the single biggest battle of the Atlantic Campaign, and nearly succeeded in cutting England off. Germany came closest to winning the Battle of the Atlantic during the harrowing month of March 1943, sinking 97 ships in 20 days and leaving a besieged Britain with a bare few weeks of food and supplies. Two Allied convoys and their naval escorts, more than 100 ships in all, found themselves beset by dozens of German submarines. Had Germany been able to cut off Britain’s supplies, that would have been it. Churchill would have had to come to terms. But by this time development of long-range versions of the B-24 Liberator bomber made it possible to give crucial air support to convoys all the way across the Atlantic, and American shipyards were turning out Liberty Ships far faster than German U-boats could sink them. Allied radar technology and tactics had advanced as well. By May 1943, sinkings of Allied ships dropped dramatically, while sinkings of U-boats soared

• 1943, March: Acoustic torpedoes were developed nearly simultaneously by the US Navy and the Germans. They could latch onto the sound of a ship’s propellers. They proved to be an effective weapon against surface ships as well as serving as an anti-submarine weapon. (The mature example is the loitering munition: a drone-missile hybrid, employed by both sides in Ukraine in 2022, which can be sent to wander an area until it detects a suitable target.)

• 1943, July: Allied bombing of the German city of Hamburg. Code named Operation Gomorrah, it created one of the largest firestorms raised by the Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Forces in WWII killing an estimated 37,000 civilians and wounding 180,000 more in Hamburg, and virtually destroying most of the city

• 1943, July: The Allies invaded Sicily and took it from the Axis powers (Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany). It began with a large amphibious and airborne operation, followed by a six-week land campaign, followed in September by the invasion of the Italian mainland (the Italian Campaign). This led to Mussolini’s overthrow and to Italy’s surrender. On the Western Front of WWII, Italy was the most costly campaign in terms of casualties suffered by infantry forces of both sides 

• 1943, Nov: The Cairo Conference outlined the Allied position against the Empire of Japan during World War II and made decisions about postwar Asia. The Conference established China’s status as one of the four world powers, which was of great political and strategic significance to China. It also stated that “Korea shall become free and independent”. It was held in Cairo, Egypt, between the United Kingdom, China, and the US.

• 1943, Nov: Tehrān Conference held where the chief discussion centred on the opening of a “second front” in western Europe. Present were US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British PM Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. Stalin agreed to an eastern offensive to coincide with the forthcoming Western Front, and he pressed the western leaders to proceed with formal preparations for their long-promised invasion of German-occupied France. Though the settlement for Germany was discussed at length, all three Allied leaders appeared uncertain; their views were imprecise on the topic of a postwar international organization; and, on the Polish question, the western Allies and the Soviet Union found themselves in sharp dissension. On Iran, they were able to agree on a declaration guaranteeing the postwar independence and territorial integrity of that state and promising postwar economic assistance

• 1944, Feb: It was shown that the DNA extracted from a strain of bacteria transmitted inheritable transformations. BiochemistOswold Averyextracted DNA from a strain of bacteria, mixed it with another strain to prove this. Avery and his associates suggested that DNA, rather than protein as widely believed at the time, may be the hereditary material of bacteria, and could be analogous to genes and/or viruses in higher organisms

• 1944, May: Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar nation – roughly 200,000 people – from its homeland. The deportation is remembered as “the Exile”, an event of brutal dispossession and mass death. Thousands of the deportees died over the course of the journey from inhumane conditions, lack of water and food, and vicious treatment by Stalin’s NKVD. Thousands more perished from hunger, exposure, and disease in “special settlement camps” in Central Asia and Siberia, where they languished for nearly half a century. It was ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide ordered by the Soviet leader, Stalin. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea. The deportation was formally recognized as a genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Canada

• 1944, June 6: Operation Overlord, also known as D-Day, commencing the liberation of France. Some 156,000 American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches under Nazi control along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified coast of France’s Normandy region. The invasion was one of the largest amphibious military assaults in history. Also on that day the American, British, Canadian and other Allied air forces put an astonishing 11,590 planes into the air. There had been nothing like it in world history, nor has there been since. By late August 1944, all of northern France had been liberated, and by the following spring the Allies had defeated the Germans. The Normandy landings have been called the beginning of the end of war in Europe

• 1944, June: The first wave of US Marines landed on Saipan, in the Mariana Islands, and America burst right through Japan’s vital perimeter. This seizure was critical because it was from swiftly built air bases on those islands that the USAAF could directly attack the Japanese homeland. It was central, a true turning point

• 1944, July: The Bretton Woods Agreement was negotiated by delegates from 44 countries at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The principal goals were to create an efficient foreign exchange system, prevent competitive devaluations of currencies, and promote international economic growth. The Agreement also created two important organizations – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in which the US dollar was the common currency of exchange.(Canada was a founding member of the Bretton Woods system.) While the Bretton Woods System was dissolved in the 1970s, both the IMF and World Bank have remained pillars for the exchange of international currencies

• 1944, Aug: The liberation of Paris when the German garrison surrendered. Along with American troops under the Supreme Allied Commander himself, Dwight D. Eisenhower, General Charles de Gaulle of the French Army arrived to assume control of the city as head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic. Paris had been occupied by Nazi Germany since the signing of the Armistice of 22 June 1940, after which the Wehrmacht occupied northern and western France 

• 1944, Dec: Hitler orders a last gasp offensive in the Ardennes region of Belgium hoping to shatter the American line

• 1945, Jan: Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula-Oder Offensive. This was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland where more than a million people were murdered as part of the Nazi’s “final solution” to the Jewish question 

• 1945, Jan: China’s Mao Zedong and Chou En-Lai requested a meeting in person to establish a working relationship with US President Franklin Roosevelt, that never took place. This fact became known in 1972 from declassified documents released in that same year, the year Richard Nixon had become the first US president to ever visit mainland China and then meet with Mao Zedong. But apparently Mao’s request never made it to Roosevelt. It is one of the great “ifs” and harsh ironies of history: 27 years, two wars and x million lives later, after immeasurable harm wrought by the mutual suspicion and phobia of two great powers not on speaking terms, and then Nixon finally closing the gap in 1972. The American special envoy to China at the time, Patrick Hurley, who favoured maintaining unqualified US support for Chiang, decided not to forward it to Washington. At the time, the prospect of civil war was looming in China, with Mao, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, squaring off against Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Nationalist Party, also known as the Kuomintang. The Chinese Communists “wanted to convince President Roosevelt that they, not the Kuomintang, represented the future of China,” wrote historian Barbara Tuchman. They felt “that if they could reach Roosevelt they could make this clear.” If American leaders had “established relations on some level with the People’s Republic, permitting communication in a crisis,” rued Tuchman, “our history, our present and our future, would have been different.” Indeed, she wrote, “We might not have come to Vietnam.” (See “1949, Oct” and “1972, Feb”)

• 1945, Feb: Yalta Conference. Thiswas the meeting of the heads of government of the US, the UK, and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe. The aim of the conference was to shape a postwar peace that represented not only a collective security order but also a plan to give self-determination to the liberated peoples of Europe, including the demilitarization, democratization and denazification of Germany. It was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. Yalta obligated the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan within three months after Germany’s surrender, in exchange for territorial concessions and Soviet influence in post-war Manchuria. At Yalta the Soviets agreed to join the UN because of a secret understanding of a voting formula with a veto power for permanent members of the Security Council, which ensured that each country could block unwanted decisions. Other countries in Central and Eastern Europe were occupied and converted into Soviet-controlled satellite states (the people’s Republic of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovak, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, East Germany). Stalin also did not honour his promise of free elections for Poland

• 1945, Feb: An iconic photo is published of a US flag being raised on Iwo Jima. The photo doesn’t show the savagery of the fighting where Japanese troops fought to the death in the Pacific War. Of the six Marines profiled by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning image, three would die in the subsequent battle 

• 1945, Feb: The bombing of Dresden, Germany. It also became a moral cause célèbre, and brought up questions regarding “being justified as a strategic target” or “not proportionate to military gain”. This was a joint British and American attack; in four raids 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres of the city centre. Up to 25,000 people were killed. An RAF memo issued to airmen on the night of the attack gave some reasoning: “The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”

• 1945, March: American bombing of Tokyo with incendiary bombs – a deliberate choice as so many structures in the city were made of wood. It is the single most destructive bombing raid in human history. 16 square miles of central Tokyo were destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless 

• 1945, April: The United Nations charter adopted; begins operations shortly after, but has flaws that must be corrected. The UN was established after WWII with the aim of preventing future world wars, succeeding the League of Nations, which was characterized as ineffective. It is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. It is the world’s largest and most familiar international organization. Initially it had 51 member states; membership is now 193, representing almost all of the world’s sovereign states. The United Nations currently is verging on dysfunction, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state (See “1920, Jan”)

• 1945, April: The largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theatre of WWII took place on the island of Okinawa. The battle was the bloodiest in the Pacific, with around 50,000 Allied and 84,000–117,000 Japanese casualties. Post Okinawa, an even larger amphibious force against the Tokyo region 550 km away was planned. Two atomic bombs eliminated the need

• 1945, April: The Battle for Berlin by the Soviet Red Army from the east. There are horrific stories of rape by Russian soldiers of the German women (a taboo subject in Russia even today); it is believed they raped up to two million German women. Old women and children were not exempt. The Soviet command turned a blind eye to it all and many officers were complicit. Counter stories of German soldiers raping Russian women also abound

• 1945, April 30: Adolf Hitler died by suicide via gunshot in the Führerbunker in Berlin after it became clear that Germany would lose the Battle of Berlin. Mussolini was executed five days before

• 1945, May: The Mauthausen Concentration camp in Austria was liberated by American troops. Its inmates were the last of all concentration camp prisoners to be freed by the Allies

• 1945, May 8: The surrender of the Third Reich in Berlin. The day before, Germany had signed another surrender document close to it with the Allies in Reims in France, but it was not recognized by the Soviet Union for enforcement, so another document was needed to sign 

• 1945, June: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) was established. Alsocalled the World Court, it is the only international court that adjudicatesgeneral disputes between nations. Established in the aftermath of World War II, the ICJ was conceived of as the judicial arm of the United Nations. It was given the authority to issue advisory opinions on matters between states, but the power to enforce its rulings ultimately lay with the Security Council, which remained subject to its members’ veto power. The court was devised as a linchpin of the emerging liberal international order, in which states were considered members of an international community bound by certain rules. Writing in 1945, the Harvard Law professor and international law advocate Manley Hudson laid out his vision for the new court. This concept of a global set of laws “is more than a juridical concept, it is a moral precept which serves as the foundation for friendly relations among peoples.” It is one of the six organs of the United Nations (UN), and is located in The Hague, Netherlands. The ICJ is the successor of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), which was established in 1920 by the League of Nations. After WWII, the League and the PCIJ were replaced by the United Nations and ICJ, respectively. The Statute of the ICJ, which sets forth its purpose and structure, draws heavily from that of its predecessor, whose decisions remain valid

• 1945, July: The first successful explosion of an atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico (a culmination of the top-secret US Manhattan Project led by theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer). Days later, US President Harry Truman informs Soviet leader Joseph Stalin of his plans to use an atomic weapon on Japan. (Stalin already knew about the bomb – through a spy at Los Alamos; as well the Soviets had a nuclear weapons program under way.) (See “1941, Oct”; “1945, Aug”)

• 1945, July: The Potsdam Declaration was a statement that called for the surrender of all Japanese armed forces. It was issued by US President Harry Truman, UK PM Winston Churchill, and Chairman of China Chiang Kai-shek. It called upon Japan to surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction.” Japan dismissed the declaration (they were unwilling to yield unless Emperor Hirohito was allowed to remain in power, a condition Truman had rejected.)

• 1945, Aug: The first use of atomic bombs on two cities in Japan: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 75,000 people were killed in the first attack (Aug 6) and an estimated 40,000 in the second (Aug 9); an estimated 100,000 subsequently did die slowly, of radiation poisoning. These bombs (the first a uranium bomb; the second a plutonium bomb) remain the only nuclear attacks in history, and were the cumulation of the most secret wartime project in history: the Manhattan Project. Japan was unwilling to surrender unconditionally. Japan refused to surrender even after multiple firebombing campaigns such as the bombing of Tokyo in March. Another reason why the US dropped the atomic bombs – and, specifically, the second one on Nagasaki – has to do with the Soviet Union. On August 8, 1945, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, as agreed to by Joseph Stalin during the Tehran and Yalta conferences in 1943 and 1945, respectively, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. It is possible that US President Harry Truman ordered the atomic bomb to be dropped on Nagasaki not only to further force Japan to surrender but also to keep the Soviets out of Japan by displaying American military power. Distrust and a sense of rivalry had been built up between the two superpowers that ultimately culminated in the Cold War

• 1945, Aug: The Japanese surrender ended the Second World War. The emperor of Japan, Hirohito, settled the dispute between those advocating surrender and those insisting on a desperate defence of the home islands against an anticipated invasion by the Allied Powers, in favour of those urging peace. He broke the precedent of imperial silence on August 15, when he made a national radio broadcast to announce Japan’s acceptance of the Allies’ terms of surrender. In a second historic broadcast, made on January 1, 1946, Hirohito repudiated the traditional quasi-divine status of Japan’s emperors

• 1945, Aug: Soviet invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (officially the State of Manchuria – northeastern China). It was the largest campaign of the 1945 Soviet-Japanese War, which resumed hostilities between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Empire of Japan after almost six years of peace. The Soviets and Mongolians ended Japanese control of Manchukuo, northern Korea, and the Kuril Islands. The defeat of Japan’s army, along with the two Atomic bombs, helped bring about the Japanese surrender and the termination of World War II 

• 1945, Sept: Chalk River is the history of nuclear in Canada: the Zero Energy Experimental Pile (ZEEP) reactor, housed at Chalk River went online. American, British, French and Canadian scientists collaborated on the design. It was the first operational nuclear reactor outside of the US. A small, prototype reactor, it was built to demonstrate that uranium and heavy water could be used for nuclear fission and that plutonium could be produced and extracted from the process for military applications. ZEEP was also the basis for the National Research Experimental reactor, or NRX. But by the time these reactors were online, the war was over and Canada was starting to explore peaceful uses for nuclear fission. Isotopes were only ever a part of the National Research Universal Reactor’s  (NRU) work. It played a key role in neutron physics research, and helped to develop the CANDU model reactors generating commercial electricity in Ontario, New Brunswick and around the world. In 2011, the Harper government sold off the part of AECL that made CANDU reactors to SNC Lavalin. The remaining part, including the Chalk River Laboratories, would be turned into a public-private partnership. Chalk River’s new chapter is taking its research in several directions: finding the next generation of medical isotopes, researching hydrogen as a clean source of energy and the development of small, safe modular reactors (See “1952, Dec”)

• 1945, Sept: Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk for the Soviet embassy to Canada, defected with 109 documents on the USSR’s espionage activities in the West. In response, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, called a royal commission to investigate espionage in Canada. Gouzenko exposed Soviet intelligence’s efforts to steal nuclear secrets as well as the technique of planting sleeper agents. The “Gouzenko Affair” is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War, with historian Jack Granatstein stating it was “the beginning of the Cold War for public opinion” and journalist Robert Fulford writing he was “absolutely certain the Cold War began in Ottawa”. Gouzenko’s actions were described as having “awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage”. Canada played an important part in the early research with nuclear bomb technology, being part of the wartime Manhattan Project along with the US and UK. That kind of vital information could be dangerous to Canadian interests in the hands of other nations

• 1945, Sept: Korea was divided into two occupation zones. The US administered the southern half of the peninsula and the Soviet Union took over the area north of the 38th parallel. At the end of WWII, the Japanese on the Korean peninsula – which Japan had held as a colony since 1910 – surrendered to US in the south and the Soviet Union in the north. At the same time, a government was also set up in North Korea, with Kim Il-sung taking the position of premier of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) in September 1948. In December 1948, the United Nations recognized the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea) government but not that of North Korea 

• 1945, Nov: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded. It now has 193 member states and 12 associate members. It is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) and its founding mission, which was shaped by WWII. It is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture.  It operates in five major program areas: education, natural sciences, social/human sciences, culture and communication/information. UNESCO sponsors projects that improve literacy, provide technical training and education, advance science, protect independent media and press freedom, preserve regional and cultural history, and promote cultural diversity. One important program is the establishment and securing of World Heritage Sites of cultural and natural importance

• 1945, Nov-1946, Oct: The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany for carrying out invasions of other countries and atrocities against their citizens in WWII – the true beginning of international criminal law. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) tried 21 of the most important surviving leaders of Nazi Germany in the political, military, and economic spheres, as well as six German organizations. The purpose of the trial was not just to convict the defendants but also to assemble irrefutable evidence of Nazi crimes, offer a history lesson to the defeated Germans, and delegitimize the traditional German elite. Four organizations were ruled to be criminal: the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SS (the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party), the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), and the SD (the intelligence agency of the SS). Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death. Seven defendants were sent to prison. Controversial at the time for their retroactive criminalization of aggression, the trials’ innovation of holding individuals responsible for violations of international law is considered “the true beginning of international criminal law”