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Stock Market Crash
The stock market crash of 1929 was the beginning of the Great Depression. Anyone who bought stocks in mid-1929 and held onto them saw most of his or her adult life pass by before getting back to even. -
Japan Seizes Manchuria
When Manchuria was invaded by the Kwantung Army of the Empire of Japan immediately following the Mukden Incident. The Japanese established a puppet state called Manchukoku, and their occupation lasted until the end of WWII. -
FDR is elected president
This was the first election in the United States since 1876 in which the Democratic candidate won a majority of the popular vote. -
Hitler is named Chancellor of Germany
The year 1932 had seen Hitler's meteoric rise to prominence in Germany, spurred largely by the German people's frustration with dismal economic conditions and the still-festering wounds inflicted by defeat in the Great War and the harsh peace terms of the Versailles treaty. -
Hitler defies the Treaty of Versailles
Hitler also dispatched some troops to fight in Spain for Franco's revolutionaries, showing his resolve to support Fascist regimes. -
Italy invades Ethiopia
The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was initiated in the month of October 1935. It was a brief colonial war that is also remembered in history as the second Italo-Abyssinian war. Mussolini, who was the leader of Italy, had his eye set on annexing Ethiopia into Italy’s newly created colony of East Africa. Although the Italian military was successful in occupying Ethiopia, the Abyssinians did not capitulate or surrender to the Italian forces. -
France militarizes the Rhineland
The remilitarization of the Rhineland by the German Army took place on 7 March 1936 when German military forces entered the Rhineland. This was significant because it violated the terms of the Locarno Treaties and was the first time since the end of World War I that German troops had been in this region. -
Japan seizes French Indo-China
The Japanese Invasion of French Indochina, also known as the Vietnam Expedition, was a move by the Empire of Japan in September 1940, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, to prevent China from importing arms and fuel through French Indochina, via the Sino-Vietnamese Railway from the port of Haiphong through Hanoi to Kunming in Yunnan. -
Civil War erupts in Spain
The Spanish Civil War broke out with a military uprising in Morocco on July 17, triggered by events in Madrid. Within days, Spain was divided in two: a "republican" or "loyalist" Spain consisting of the Second Spanish Republic. -
Japan invades China
The Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States. -
Anschluss 1 Feb 1938
The Anschluss, also known as the Anschluss Österreichs, was the occupation and annexation of the German Republic Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938. -
Mussolini takes power in Italy
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism. -
Munich Conference
The Munich Pact was an agreement permitting the Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The Sudetenland were areas along Czech borders, mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe without the presence of Czechoslovakia. Today, it is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement toward Nazi Germany. The agreement was signed in the early hours of 30 September 1938. -
Kristallnacht 9 Nov 1938
Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of co-ordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938, carried out by SA stormtroopers and civilians. German authorities looked on without intervening. The attacks left the streets covered with broken glass from the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues. -
U.S. Neutrality Act
The Neutrality Acts were laws that were passed by the United States Congress in the 1930s, in response to the growing turmoil in Europe and Asia that eventually led to World War II. They were spurred by the growth in isolationism and non-interventionism in the US following its costly involvement in World War I, and sought to ensure that the US would not become entangled again in foreign conflicts. -
Nazi-Soviet Pact
In the 1930s Joseph Stalin became increasingly concerned that the Soviet Union would be invaded by Germany. Stalin believed the best way to of dealing with Germany was to form an anti-fascist alliance with countries in the west. Stalin argued that even Adolf Hitler would not start a war against a united Europe. -
Germany invades Poland
The Invasion of Poland, also known as the September Campaign or 1939 Defensive War in Poland and the Poland Campaign in Germany, was an invasion of Poland by Germany, the Soviet Union, and a small Slovak contingent that marked the start of World War II in Europe. -
Phony War
The Phoney War was a phase early in World War II in the months following Britain and France's declaration of war on Germany in September 1939 and preceding the Battle of France in May 1940 that was marked by a lack of major military operations by the Western Allies against the German Reich. -
Churchill is Elected Prime Minister in England
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the head of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Sovereign, to Parliament, to their political party and ultimately to the electorate. -
Miracle at Dunkirk
The Dunkirk evacuation, commonly known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, code-named Operation Dynamo by the British, was the evacuation of Allied soldiers from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, France, between 26 May and the early hours of 3 June 1940, because the British, French and Belgian troops were cut off by the German army during the Battle of Dunkirk in the Second World War. The evacuation was ordered on 26 May. -
06/25/1940 France Surrenders
Hitler unleashes his blitzkrieg invasion of the Low Countries and France with a fury. Within three weeks, a large part of the British force, accompanied by some of the French defenders, is pushed to the English Channel and compelled to abandon the continent at Dunkirk. -
07/10/1940 Battle of Britain
On this day in 1940, the Germans begin the first in a long series of bombing raids against Great Britain, as the Battle of Britain, which will last three and a half months, begins. -
03/11/1941 Lend-Lease Act
Lend-Lease was the program under which the United States of America supplied the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, Free France, and other Allied nations with materiel between 1941 and 1945. It was signed into law on March 11, 1941, a year and a half after the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 but nine months before the U.S. entered the war in December 1941. -
08/14/1941 Atlantic Charter
The Atlantic Charter was a pivotal policy statement first issued in August 1941 that early in World War II defined the Allied goals for the post war world. It was drafted by Britain and the United States, and later agreed to by all the Allies -
12/07/1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor
The attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters and the Battle of Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941
