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Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution marked a period of development in the latter half of the 18th century that transformed largely rural, agrarian societies in Europe and America into industrialized, urban ones. -
French vs Russian Revolution
The Russian revolution took place in 1917 during the World War 1. As a result, the impact of the revolution on Russia was far greater than the impact on France from their revolution. -
Unification of Italy begins
After being 7 separate states for decades, growing nationalist sentiments set the Unification of Italy into motion. For years, secret societies laid the social framework and outlined a plan to finally unite the Italian states. -
Greek War of Independence begins
In the 15th Century, the Fall of Constantinople marked the Ottoman Empire's occupation of Greece. The Greeks initially put up a fight, but the Ottomans with the help of Egyptian armies crushed the revolt until Russia, Britain, and France sent naval squadrons to support the greek revolutionaries. In response to Russia invading the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Adrianople was signed in 1829, officially recognizing Greek independence. -
Irish Potato Famine
In Ireland, a toxic fungi spread amongst potato crops, a primary food source for the Irish. Roughly half of all potatoes in Ireland were ruined, and mass food shortages began to spread across the country. About a million Irish are estimated to have died from complications related to the Great Hunger, and thousands of others had left the country as refugees. The British parliament attempted to rectify this but failed legislatively. The Potato Famine ended in 1852. -
Marx and Engels publish the Communist Manifesto
Communist political philosophers published the crux of their ideology in one single manifesto, hoping to eventually unite the proletariat class. The Communist Manifesto marked the beginning of a more class-conscious European society. -
Revolutions of 1848
Caused largely in part to the influx of liberal political theory, many monarchical nations experienced republican revolutions in attempts to democratize the government. -
Louis-Philippe Abdicates
With insurrection threatening his control over France, Louis-Philippe relinquished his control of the throne thus creating the Second French Republic. -
Crimean War begins
Religious tensions in the Ottoman Empire, specifically towards Christians in Palestine, began to boil over. Russian troops occupied the Danubian Principalities, and the conflict between an alliance of France, Britain, the Ottomans, and Pierdmont-Sardinia. -
Total War
Military conflict in which the contenders are willing to make any sacrifice in lives and other resources to obtain a complete victory, as distinguished from limited war. -
Alexander II emancipates serfs
As political opponents called for more liberal reforms within the Russian empire, Alexander II was forced to take action against increasingly radical groups of protestors. It was in both parties' best interests, as Alexander II needed to grow the size of the Russian military to support future military conquests. -
The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary is created
Under the Hapsburg house, an ethnically diverse dual monarchy was created out of the remnants of the Cisleithanian and Transleithanian states. Austria-Hungary was centrally united under one monarch who acted as king of Hungary and Emperor of Austria. Each respective state contained their own parliaments. -
Germany is unified
Like Italy, long-lasting nationalist sentiments finally fueled the creation of the Kingdom of Germany. However, this unification was largely led by Kaisar Wilhelm II of Prussia, which led to an imbalance of power. -
Berlin Conference
They sought to discuss the partitioning of Africa, establishing rules to amicably divide resources among the Western countries at the expense of the African people. -
Reform Bill of 1884
Any of the British parliamentary bills that became acts in 1832, 1867, and 1884–85 and that expanded the electorate for the House of Commons and rationalized the representation of that body. The first Reform Bill primarily served to transfer voting privileges from the small boroughs controlled by the nobility and gentry to the heavily populated industrial towns. -
Bolshevik Revolution
Leftist revolutionaries led by Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin launched a nearly bloodless coup d'état against the Duma's provisional government -
February Revolution
The first stage of the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which the monarchy was overthrown and replaced by the Provisional Government. -
Russian Civil War began
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party civil war in the former Russian Empire sparked by the overthrowing of the monarchy and the new republican government's failure to maintain stability. -
Woodrow Wilson's 14 points
The Fourteen Points were a proposal made by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in a speech before Congress on January 8, 1918, outlining his vision for ending World War I in a way that would prevent such a conflagration from occurring again. -
Armistice is signed, Germany surrenders WWI
Was the armistice signed at Le Francport near Compiègne that ended fighting on land, sea and air in World War I between the Allies and their last remaining opponent, Germany.
Was the armistice signed at Le Francport near Compiègne that ended fighting on land, sea and air in World War I between the Allies and their last remaining opponent, Germany. -
Treaty of Versailles is signed
On June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris, France. The treaty was one of several that officially ended five years of conflict known as the Great War—World War I -
Bloody Sunday Massacre
The shooting of unarmed civilians by tsarist soldiers in St Petersburg in January 1905 -
Stalin becomes General Secretary of the USSR
Grigory Zinoviev successfully had Stalin appointed to the post of General Secretary in March 1922, with Stalin officially starting in the post on 3 April 1922. -
Fascism growing in Italy
The ideology is associated with a series of two political parties led by Benito Mussolini: the National Fascist Party (PNF), which ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, and the Republican Fascist Party that ruled the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945. -
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression between 1929 and 1939 that began after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagion began around September 4, 1929, and became known worldwide on Black Tuesday, the stock market crash of October 29, 1929. -
Second Spanish Republic
The Spanish Republic (Spanish: República Española), commonly known as the Second Spanish Republic (Spanish: Segunda República Española), was the form of government in Spain from 1931 to 1939. -
Holocaust
To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitler’s “final solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition under the cover of World War II, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland. -
Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. -
Germany invades Poland
Germany invaded Poland to regain lost territory and ultimately rule their neighbor to the east. The German invasion of Poland was a primer on how Hitler intended to wage war–what would become the “blitzkrieg” strategy. -
World War II
Over the next six years, the conflict would take more lives and destroy more land and property around the globe than any previous war. Among the estimated 45-60 million people killed were 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps as part of Hitler’s diabolical. -
Pearl Harbor Attack
Surprise aerial attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on Oahu Island, Hawaii, by the Japanese that precipitated the entry of the United States into World War II. -
Siege of Leningrad ends
On January 27, 1944, Soviet forces permanently break the Leningrad siege line, ending the almost 900-day German-enforced containment of the city, which cost hundreds of thousands of Russian lives. The siege began officially on September 8, 1941. -
Cold War
The open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The Cold War was waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and had only limited recourse to weapons. -
Potsdam Conference
The Big Three—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (replaced on July 26 by Prime Minister Clement Attlee), and U.S. President Harry Truman—met in Potsdam, Germany, from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to negotiate terms for the end of World War II. After the Yalta Conference of February 1945, Stalin, Churchill, and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had agreed to meet following the surrender of Germany to determine the postwar borders in Europe. -
Nazi Germany surrenders to the Allied Forces
On May 7, 1945, the German High Command, in the person of General Alfred Jodl, signs the unconditional surrender of all German forces, East and West, at Reims, in northeastern France. -
Atomic bomb on Hiroshima
The United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively. The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict. -
Berlin Blockade
The Berlin Blockade was an attempt in 1948 by the Soviet Union to limit the ability of the United States, Great Britain and France to travel to their sectors of Berlin, which lay within Russian-occupied East Germany. -
Israel is created
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation on the same day. -
Marshall Plan begins
The Marshall Plan was a U.S.-sponsored program designed to rehabilitate the economies of 17 western and southern European countries in order to create stable conditions in which democratic institutions could survive in the aftermath of World War II. It was formally called the European Recovery Program. -
Arms Race
An arms race occurs when two or more countries increase the size and quality of military resources to gain military and political superiority over one another. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is perhaps the largest and most expensive arms race in history; however, others have occurred, often with dire consequences. -
Korean War
The war, begun on June 25, 1950, between North Korea, aided by Communist China, and South Korea, aided by the United States and other United Nations members forming a United Nations armed force: truce signed July 27, 1953. -
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. -
Space Race
After World War II drew to a close in the mid-20th century, a new conflict began. Known as the Cold War, this battle pitted the world’s two great powers–the democratic, capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union–against each other. -
Warsaw Pact is formed
The Warsaw Treaty Organization, officially the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, commonly known as the Warsaw Pact, was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland. -
The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict.
In 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in an armed revolt that overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The US government distrusted Castro and was wary of his relationship with Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union. -
Berlin Wall is built
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989 as well as encircling and separating West Berlin from East German territory. Construction of the wall was commenced by the German Democratic Republic on 13 August 1961. -
Prague Spring
The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization and mass protest in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. -
USSR invades Afghanistan
The Soviet–Afghan War was a conflict wherein insurgent groups known collectively as the Mujahideen, as well as smaller Marxist–Leninist–Maoist groups, fought a nine-year guerrilla war against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Army throughout the 1980s, mostly in the Afghan countryside. -
Collapse of the Soviet Union
Gorbachev's decision to loosen the Soviet yoke on the countries of Eastern Europe created an independent, democratic momentum that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and then the overthrow of Communist rule throughout Eastern Europe. -
EU is established
European Union (EU), Organization of European countries, formed in 1993 to oversee their economic and political integration. It was created by the Maastricht Treaty and ratified by all members of the European Community (EC), out of which the EU developed.