-
from March 4, 1913 to March 4, 1921
-
In an event that is widely acknowledged to have sparked the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is shot to death along with his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on this day in 1914.
-
from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918
-
On August 1, 1914, four days after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany and Russia declare war on each other; the same day, France orders a general mobilization.
-
On May 7, 1915, during World War I (1914-18), a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the Lusitania, a British ocean liner en route from New York to Liverpool, England. Of the more than 1,900 passengers and crew members on board, more than 1,100 died, including more than 120 Americans.
-
The Great Migration created the first large urban black communities in the North. It is conservatively estimated that 400,000 African Americans left the South in 1916 through 1918 to take advantage of a labor shortage in the wake of the First World War. In 1910, the African-American population of Detroit was 6,000.
-
Jeannette Rankin of Montana was elected to the House of Representatives in 1916. Four years after her election, women won the right to vote nationally, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Afterwards, Rebecca Felton of Georgia became the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate in 1922.
-
On January 16, 1917, British code breakers intercepted an encrypted message from Zimmermann intended for Heinrich von Eckardt, the German ambassador to Mexico.
-
The United States enters into the first World War, declaring war on the Central Powers.
-
On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany.
-
The Selective Service Act was enacted May 18, 1917. This authorized the federal government to raise a national army for the American entry into World War I through the compulsory enlistment of people.
-
The Espionage Act of 1917 is a United States federal law passed on June 15, 1917, shortly after the U.S. entry into World War I. It has been amended numerous times over the years. The Espionage Act made it a crime for any person to convey information intended to interfere with the U.S. armed forces prosecution of the war effort or to promote the success of the country’s enemies. Anyone found guilty of such acts would be subject to a fine of $10,000 and a prison sentence of 20 years.
-
On November 6 and 7, 1917 leftist revolutionaries led by Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin launched a nearly bloodless coup d'état against the provisional government.
-
The Fourteen Points was a statement of principles for peace that was to be used for peace negotiations in order to end World War I. The principles were outlined in a January 8, 1918 speech on war aims and peace terms to the United States Congress by President Woodrow Wilson.
-
The 1918 flu pandemic was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus.
-
The Sedition Act of 1918 was enacted May 16, 1918. Itwas an Act of the United States Congress that extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover a broader range of offenses.
-
28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918.
-
Schenck v. United States, is a United States Supreme Court case concerning enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917 during World War I. Almost 2,000 people were accused of violating this law and were put on trial.
-
Senate rejects League of Nations, Nov. 19, 1919. On this day in 1919, the Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I and provided for a new world body, championed by President Woodrow Wilson, called the League of Nations.
-
On Nov. 19, 1919, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles based primarily on objections to the League of Nations. The U.S. would never ratify the treaty or join the League of Nations.
-
Ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote—a right known as woman suffrage. At the time the U.S. was founded, its female citizens did not share all of the same rights as men, including the right to vote.
-
The first Miss America pageant is held in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It is won by Margaret Gorman. It was an activity designed to attract tourists to extend their Labor Day holiday weekend and enjoy festivities in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
-
Warner Brothers Pictures is incorporated. The company's name originated from the four founding Warner brothers Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner. They emigrated as small children with their parents to Canada from Krasnosielc (in Poland). The three elder brothers began in the movie theater business, having acquired a movie projector with which they showed films in the mining towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
-
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was first published in April 1925.The Great Gatsby received mixed reviews and sold poorly. In its first year, the book sold only 20,000 copies. Fitzgerald died in 1940, believing himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. However, the novel experienced a revival during World War II, and became a part of American high school curricula and numerous stage and film adaptations in the following decades.
-
Future Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King is born in his grandfather's house in Atlanta, Georgia.
-
On October 29, 1929, The stock market crashed, also known as Black Tuesday. It hit Wall Street as investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression (1929-1939), the longest economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world up to that time.
