100 Events in Twentieth Century World History Berkeley Undergraduates Really Should Know...
If I am limited to 100, are these the right 100? What other events do you think belong--and which ones would you remove to make space for the ones you prefer?
UPDATE: Adding more is not helpful--I could get up to 1000 easy. If you want to be helpful, you have to recommend swapping one out for each one you swap in...
Yes, they will be on the exam.
| Year | Key Events | |||||||||
| 1896 | William Jennings Bryan [D] loses U.S. election to William McKinley [R] | |||||||||
| 1896 | Large-scale gold mining in South Africa's Witwatersrand | |||||||||
| 1899 | Start of the Boer War | |||||||||
| 1901 | Assassination of McKinley; Theodore Roosevelt becomes President of the United States | |||||||||
| 1905 | U.S. Supreme Court decides Lochner case: Constitution held to enact Herbert Spencers's “social statics” | |||||||||
| 1910 | Start of Mexican Revolution | |||||||||
| 1911 | Overthrow of the Qing Dynasty; declaration of the Chinese Republic | |||||||||
| 1912 | Theodore Roosevelt splits Republican Party; Woodrow Wilson [D] elected President of the United States | |||||||||
| 1914 | Start of World War I: France, Britain, Italy (from 1915), Russia (until 1917), and America (from 1917) vs. Germany, Austria, Turkey | |||||||||
| 1917 | Kerensky's Russian Revolution | |||||||||
| 1917 | Lenin's Russian Revolution in October (really November) | |||||||||
| 1918 | End of World War I; overthrow of the German Emperor (“Kaiser”); establishment of the “Weimar Republic” | |||||||||
| 1919 | Communist uprising in Germany: “Spartikist Rebellion” | |||||||||
| 1919 | Treaty of Versailles to settle affairs after World War I | |||||||||
| 1919 | Jallianwala Bagh Massacre | |||||||||
| 1921 | Lenin adopts the “New Economic Policy”: a small-scale return to the market | |||||||||
| 1922 | Mussolini marches on Rome; establishes first fascist regime | |||||||||
| 1923 | French and Belgian troops occupy Germany's Ruhr Valley to try to force reparations payments | |||||||||
| 1923 | End of German hyperinflation: $1 = 4,000,000,000,000 RM | |||||||||
| 1923 | German World War I General Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler attempt coup--”Beer Hall Putsch” | |||||||||
| 1924 | Death of Lenin | |||||||||
| 1925 | Death of Sun Yatsen | |||||||||
| 1925 | Great Britain returns to the gold standard | |||||||||
| 1926 | General Strike in Great Britain | |||||||||
| 1927 | Chiang Kaishek's Kuomintang double-crosses his Communist allies; massacres in Shanghai | |||||||||
| 1927 | Stalin expels Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev from the Communist Party | |||||||||
| 1928 | Chiang Kaishek launches “Northern Expedition” | |||||||||
| 1928 | Launching of first Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union | |||||||||
| 1929 | Drive to “collectivize” agriculture in the Soviet Union: start of terror-famine in the Ukraine | |||||||||
| 1929 | The Wall Street stock market crash; start of the Great Depression | |||||||||
| 1930 | Gandhi's “Salt March” | |||||||||
| 1931 | German Social Democratic Party rejects proposals to plan a “New Deal” for Germany | |||||||||
| 1932 | Election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States | |||||||||
| 1933 | Adolf Hitler becomes the last Chancellor of Germany's Weimar Republic | |||||||||
| 1933 | Worst year of the Great Depression | |||||||||
| 1934 | Start of Mao Zedong's “Long March” | |||||||||
| 1935 | Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes and congress passes the Social Security Act | |||||||||
| 1935 | Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposes and congress passes the National Labor Relations Act | |||||||||
| 1936 | Francisco Franco attempts to overthrow Spanish Republic: start of Spanish Civil War | |||||||||
| 1937 | U.S. Supreme Court surprisingly declares NLRA constitutional: “the switch in time that saved nine” | |||||||||
| 1937 | Marco Polo Bridge “incident”; start of World War II in Asia | |||||||||
| 1939 | Final victory by Franco in Spanish Civil War | |||||||||
| 1939 | Start of World War II in Europe; Nazi Soviet pact; Nazi invasion of Poland | |||||||||
| 1940 | Fall of Denmark, Norway, France to Nazis | |||||||||
| 1941 | Nazi invasion of Soviet Union | |||||||||
| 1941 | Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor | |||||||||
| 1942 | “The End of the Beginning”: Battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, “Operation Torch”, and—most of all--”Operation Uranus”: Stalingrad | |||||||||
| 1944 | Bretton Woods conference: agreement to found the IMF and World Bank | |||||||||
| 1945 | Yalta and Potsdam Conferences shape post-World War II world; Germany partitioned | |||||||||
| 1945 | Labour Party first wins majority in British House of Commons | |||||||||
| 1945 | Death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Harry S Truman becomes President of the United States | |||||||||
| 1945 | U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki | |||||||||
| 1947 | Harry S Truman begins the Cold War with the “Truman Doctrine” | |||||||||
| 1947 | Britain grants independence to India and Pakistan | |||||||||
| 1947 | George Marshall proposes the “Marshall Plan” | |||||||||
| 1948 | Stalinist coup in Czechoslovakia | |||||||||
| 1948 | Stalin expels Yugoslavia from the Cominform | |||||||||
| 1949 | Proclamation of the People's Republic of China | |||||||||
| 1950 | Stalin slips Kim Il Sung's leash: the Korean War begins | |||||||||
| 1951 | Treaty of Paris creates the European Coal and Steel Community | |||||||||
| 1954 | U.S. Supreme Court decides Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KS | |||||||||
| 1956 | ||||||||||
| 1956 | Israel, France, and Britain attack Egypt | |||||||||
| 1956 | Hungarian revolt against the Soviet Union | |||||||||
| 1957 | Treaty of Rome creates the European Economic Community of “the six” | |||||||||
| 1958 | Mao Zedong launches Great Leap forward | |||||||||
| 1959 | Lushan Plenum in China: “Disgrace” of Marshal Peng Dehuai | |||||||||
| 1961 | Construction of Berlin Wall | |||||||||
| 1962 | Cuban Missile Crisis | |||||||||
| 1963 | Assassination of John F. Kennedy; Lyndon Johnson becomes President of the United States | |||||||||
| 1964 | Civil Rights Act in the United States | |||||||||
| 1964 | Overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev; replacement by Leonid Brezhnev | |||||||||
| 1964 | Gulf of Tonkin “incident” off coast of Vietnam | |||||||||
| 1964 | Barry Goldwater runs for President on a non-RINO platform: destruction of Republican congressional power | |||||||||
| 1965 | Lyndon Johnson uses overwhelming congressional majorities for Medicare, Medicaid, Voting Rights Act | |||||||||
| 1965 | Overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia; massacres of Indonesian Communists (and many others); rise of Suharto | |||||||||
| 1966 | Mao Zedong launches Cultural Revolution | |||||||||
| 1973 | First “Oil Shock”: Syria and Egypt attack Israel on Yom Kippur | |||||||||
| 1974 | Resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon | |||||||||
| 1975 | Fall of South Vietnam | |||||||||
| 1975 | Indira Gandhi declares “emergency” | |||||||||
| 1975 | Death of Mao Zedong | |||||||||
| 1978 | The “Southern Expedition” of Deng Xiaoping | |||||||||
| 1979 | Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain | |||||||||
| 1979 | Khomeini's Iranian Revolution | |||||||||
| 1981 | Ronald Reagan becomes President of the United States | |||||||||
| 1982 | The “Volcker Deflation”: deepest post-World War II global recession (until now) | |||||||||
| 1985 | Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union: “glasnost” and “perestroika” | |||||||||
| 1985 | Rajiv Gandhi takes first steps toward dismantling the License Raj | |||||||||
| 1989 | Fall of the Berlin Wall | |||||||||
| 1989 | Tien an Men Square massacre | |||||||||
| 1991 | End of the Soviet Union | |||||||||
| 1993 | William J. Clinton becomes President of the United States—only the second Democratic president since 1968 | |||||||||
| 1993 | U.S., Canada, and Mexico ratify NAFTA | |||||||||
| 1994 | Mexican peso crisis | |||||||||
| 1998 | East Asian financial crisis | |||||||||
| 1999 | Vladimir Putin becomes Acting President of the Russian Federation | |||||||||
| 2000 | Collapse of the dot-com bubble | |||||||||
| 2001 | George W. Bush becomes President of the United States | |||||||||
| 2008 | Failures of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG; start of largest post-World War II economic recession | |||||||||
