Two world wars, decolonisation and the technologies that made the present. These articles cover the century within living memory.
A sea-level plan, yellow fever and bankruptcy stopped the French in 1889. The United States finished a lock canal in 1914 on a treaty signed for Panama by a Frenchman.
· 1914Rifleman William Eve's diary says soldiers 'played football' on December 25, 1914; the National Archives' review of unit war diaries records no such match.
· 1914The April 25, 1915 landing was the first major action of Australia's and New Zealand's own forces; 8,709 Australians and 2,779 New Zealanders died there.
· 1915Balfour's letter to Lord Rothschild, approved by the Cabinet and dated November 2, 1917, set beside the McMahon letter of 1915, the 1922 mandate and 2017.
· 1917A French munitions ship and a Norwegian steamer collided in Halifax's Narrows on December 6, 1917; the official register closed with 1,631 dead.
· 1917The New Zealand steamer Talune carried influenza to Western Samoa in November 1918. American Samoa's quarantine held, and Western Samoa lost a fifth of its people.
· 1918A molasses tank in Boston's North End burst on January 15, 1919, killing 21. In 1925 auditor Hugh W. Ogden held its owner responsible, not anarchists.
· 1919On March 1, 1919, 33 Korean leaders read a declaration of independence at the Taehwagwan and surrendered; students marched from Tapgol Park and Korea rose.
· 1919Signed June 28, 1919, it took Germany's land and army and fixed its liability; Germany called it a Diktat, Keynes Carthaginian, the U.S. Senate refused it.
· 1919Sèvres (1920), signed by the sultan's ministers, partitioned Anatolia; Ankara drove Greece from Smyrna, ended the sultanate and won Lausanne in 1923.
· 1923Moscow cut Turkestan, Bukhara and Khorezm into republics named for nationalities in 1924-25, on Stalin's definition of a nation, and revised them to 1936.
· 1924The Butler Act banned teaching evolution in Tennessee schools. The 1925 Scopes trial ended in a $100 fine, reversed in 1927 on a jury technicality.
· 1925Gandhi's letter of March 2, 1930 told Lord Irwin he would 'disregard the provisions of the salt laws.' The march left March 12; a pact came in March 1931.
· 1930The Covenant bound members to cut all trade with an aggressor. Against Italy they applied it in part, left oil and Suez open, and offered Rome a slice.
· 1935Groves's top-secret memorandum of July 18, 1945 put the Trinity blast at 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT; Los Alamos remeasured it as 22.1 kilotons in 2016.
· 1945The Enola Gay released Little Boy at 8:15:15 on August 6, 1945. The US Strategic Bombing Survey counted 70,000 dead; the City of Hiroshima counts 237,000.
· 1945A Bedouin shepherd found seven scrolls in a Qumran cave in 1947. A 1954 Wall Street Journal advertisement offered four of them for sale.
· 1947Britain set June 1948 as the deadline on February 20, 1947; the June 3 plan cut it to August 15; commissions formed June 30 signed the line on August 12.
· 1947An IAEA table printed in 1998 counts 456 Soviet nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk from August 29, 1949; the site closed in August 1991, a date the UN kept.
· 1949Frank Kingdon-Ward was camped at Rima in Tibet when the August 15, 1950 earthquake struck. Catalogues give 8.6 to 8.8; no single death toll exists.
· 1950A coded cable told The Times of the first Everest ascent, and the paper printed it on the coronation morning, June 2, 1953.
· 1953The surge of January 31–February 1, 1953 was later rated a 300-year level. The Delta Committee set a 10,000-year standard; Britain capped defenses at 1953.
· 1953The armistice text says no nation is a signatory. Lt. Gen. William K. Harrison Jr. and Gen. Nam Il signed it at Panmunjom at 10 a.m. on July 27, 1953.
· 1953Dulles to Eisenhower, March 1, 1953; the embassy's "Mosadeq victor" cable of August 16; a decree dated August 13. What the 2017 FRUS volume prints.
· 1953
