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Assassination of Archduke Franz and his wife
him and his wife were gunned down. He was next in line for the Austro-Hungarian throne. Ferdinand had not been particularly liked in aristocratic circles. -
Alexander Graham Bell makes first transcontinental telephone call.
Bell repeated the words of his first ever telephone call in March 1876. AT&T, the telephone company that had bought Bell's phone company in 1899, built the line and began investigating the possibility of a transcontinental line in 1908. They began constructing the line in 1913 and completed it June 1914. -
German U-boats sink Lusitania
Germany justified the attack by stating, correctly, that the Lusitania was an enemy ship, and that it was carrying munitions. Wilson subsequently sent a strongly worded note to the German government the first three similar communications demanding that it cease submarine warfare against unarmed merchant ships. Faced with overpowering size and strength of British Royal Navy at the outset of World War 1. -
Albert einstein proposes his general theory of relativity.
Eisnteins theory is embodied in his famous equation E=mc squared. Although light photons have mass they have energy. Einsteins theory says that even pure energy has to behave in some ways like mass -
Woodrow Wilson reelected as president.
The 1916 Republican National convention was held in Chicago between June 7 and 10. A major goal of partys bosses at the convention was to heal bitter split within party that occured 1912. In that year Theodore roosevelt boltecRepublican party and owned its own political party. -
Battles of verdum and Somme claim millions of lives
This battle was fought on the Western Front between the German and French armies, on hills north of verdun-sur-meuse. The German strategy in 1916 was to inflict mass casualties on the French, a goal which had been achieved in Russia in 1914–1915, to weaken the French Army to the point of collapse. -
Russia with draws from the war
Russia entered the war in 1914 badly prepared. Only nine years earlier, in 1905, a series of revolts and uprisings resulted in the tsar having to concede some power and form a parliament. -
U.S. declares war on Germany
At 8:30 on the evening of April 2 1917, President Wilson appeared before a joint session of Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany in order to make the world safe for democracy.In January 1917, Germany renewed its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare that it had abandoned in 1915 after the sinking of the Lusitania. -
Selective service act sets up the draft.
By the guidelines set down by the Selective Service Act, all males aged 21 to 30 were required to register for military service. At the request of the War Department, Congress amended the law in August 1918 to expand the age range to include all men 18 to 45, and to bar further volunteering.The biggest difference between the draft established by the Selective Service Act of 1917 and the Civil War draft was that a substitute could no longer be hired to fight in a man’s place -
President Wilsonproposes the league of Nations.
It was the first international organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace.The diplomatic philosophy behind the League represented a fundamental shift from the preceding hundred years. The League lacked its own armed force and depended on the Great Powers to enforce its resolutions -
Bolsheviks establish a communist regime in Russia
In the Second Party Congress vote, the Bolsheviks won on the majority of important issues, hence their name.They ultimately became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.The Bolsheviks came to power in Russia during the October Revolution phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917 -
Sedition act
Though the legislation enacted in 1918 is commonly called the Sedition Act, it was actually a set of amendments to the Espionage Act. Therefore many studies of the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act find it difficult to report on the two acts separately. -
World War 1 ends.
First World War or the Great War, was a global war centered in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. More than 9 million combatants and 7 million civilians died as a result of the war, a casualty rate exacerbated by the belligerents' technological and industrial sophistication, and tactical stalemate. -
World wide influenza
It infected 500 million people across the world. Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill juvenile, elderly, or already weakened patients in contrast, the 1918 pandemic predominantly killed previously healthy young adults. -
Congress approves 19th amendment.
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.