| 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 | Khruschchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Joseph Stalin | |||||||||
| 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 | |||||||||
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