| 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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