Milestones Of The Century

Around a globe that grew increasingly smaller as the decades passed, events piled upon significant events, making this 100-year span the most intense in human history. At right, a gallery of the century's political markers, and below, the decades as seen through other perspectives

1900 Boxer Rebellion against foreigners in China

1901 President McKinley is assassinated; Teddy Roosevelt takes over

1901 Queen Victoria dies after 64-year reign

1902 Boer War ends in South Africa

1904 Japan attacks Port Arthur, Russo-Japanese War begins

1914 Assassination of Yugoslav Archduke Ferdinand triggers World War I

1916 The Irish rise up against the British in the Easter Rebellion

1917 Lenin leads Russia into revolution

1918 Americans and British celebrate the end of World War I

1920 Women in the U.S. get the vote

1922 Benito Mussolini forms Fascist government in Italy

1923 Adolf Hitler leads the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich

1924 Lenin dies; Trotsky and Stalin vie for power

1929 U.S. stock-market crash leads to a worldwide economic crisis

1929 The Vatican becomes an independent state

l932 Mohandas Gandhi announces he will fast unto death for India's untouchables

1935 U.S. Social Security Act passed

1936 Miles of middle-American farmland turn into a dust bowl

1936 Francisco Franco plunges Spain into civil war

1937 Japan invades China

1938 Turkey's President Mustafa Kemal "Father of the Turks," dies

1939 Germany invades Poland and starts World War II

1940 F.D.R. reelected President for a third term

1941 The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. joins the war

1945 The U.S. drops atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

1945 The American flag is raised on Iwo Jima

1948 Communists seize Czechoslovakia

1953 Queen Elizabeth II is crowned

1956 Hungarian revolt is crushed by Soviet troops

1957 Blacks try to integrate Little Rock, Ark., high school

1958 Nikita Khrushchev becomes Soviet General Secretary

1958 Charles de Gaulle elected Premier of France

1959 Fidel Castro seizes power in Cuba

1960 Seventeen new African nations are created

1963 John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas

1968 Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy are assassinated

1968 Soviet troops invade Czechoslovakia putting an end to "Prague Spring"

1968 Communists in Vietnam launch the Tet Offensive on the South

1969 The U.S. and U.S.S.R. start talks on disarmament (SALT 1)

1972 U.S. and Vietnam reach a peace accord

1974 Richard Nixon resigns from office amid Watergate scandal

1976 Israeli commandos raid Entebbe Airport to free a plane hijacked by Palestinians

1979 The Shah of Iran is overthrown, and the Ayatullah Khomeini takes charge

1979 Camp David Middle East peace treaty is signed

1982 Britain and Argentina go to war over the ownership of the Falkland Islands

1983 Benigno Aquino is assassinated on his return to the Philippines

1983 U.S.S.R. shoots down Korean Airlines Flight 007

1985 Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the leader of the Soviet Union

1989 The Berlin Wall is brought down as communism loses its hold

1991 Desert Storm is launched to end Iraq's occupation of Kuwait

1991 Boris Yeltsin takes control of the Soviet Union, which breaks up into independent free states

1992 Yugoslav federation breaks up and internecine strife erupts

1992 The U.S. sends peacekeeping troops to Somalia

1994 Nelson Mandela becomes President of South Africa

1995 Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated

1997 Britain hands over Hong Kong to China