Modern history timeline
Wars, treaties and turning points of the 20th and 21st centuries.
143 events, oldest first.
Timeline of Modern history
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1800
The White House is first occupied
John Adams moved in while the building was still unfinished.
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1803
The Louisiana Purchase
It doubled the size of the United States for about 3 cents an acre.
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1805
The Battle of Trafalgar
Nelson was killed by a French marksman during his greatest victory.
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1811
The Luddites start smashing machines
They took their name from a mythical leader, 'General Ned Ludd'.
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1812
Napoleon retreats from Moscow
Of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who invaded Russia, only a small fraction made it back.
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1814
British troops burn Washington
The White House was gutted and later repainted, though its name is older than the fire.
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1814
The London Beer Flood
A burst vat sent a wave of more than a million litres of beer through the streets.
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1814
The Star-Spangled Banner is written
Francis Scott Key wrote it after watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry.
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1815
The Battle of New Orleans
It was fought after the peace treaty had been signed - the news hadn't reached America yet.
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1815
The Congress of Vienna redraws Europe
The peace it created lasted, with few major wars, for about a century.
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1819
Bolívar wins the Battle of Boyacá
The victory secured the independence of what is now Colombia.
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1819
The Peterloo Massacre
Cavalry charged a peaceful crowd of reform campaigners in Manchester.
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1821
The Greek War of Independence begins
The poet Lord Byron joined the cause and died in Greece three years later.
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1834
The Houses of Parliament burn down
J. M. W. Turner watched the blaze and painted it.
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1836
The Battle of the Alamo
The Alamo was a former Spanish mission in San Antonio, Texas.
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1836
The Boers set out on the Great Trek
Thousands of Dutch-speaking settlers left the Cape Colony by ox wagon.
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1838
The Cherokee are forced west on the Trail of Tears
Thousands died during the forced removal from their homelands.
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1839
The First Opium War begins
Britain fought partly to keep selling opium to China.
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1841
Thomas Cook runs his first tour
It was a one-day rail trip for about 500 temperance campaigners.
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1842
Hong Kong Island is ceded to Britain
Britain handed Hong Kong back to China 155 years later.
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1843
Brunel's SS Great Britain is launched
It was the first iron-hulled, propeller-driven ship to cross the Atlantic.
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1845
Texas joins the United States
It had been an independent republic for nearly ten years.
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1845
The Irish Famine begins
Through death and emigration, Ireland's population fell by about a quarter.
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1848
Queen Victoria's Christmas tree is published
A newspaper picture of the royal family's tree made Christmas trees fashionable in Britain.
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1848
The California Gold Rush begins
The find at Sutter's Mill drew around 300,000 people to California.
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1848
The Mexican-American War ends
Mexico lost about half its territory, including California.
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1850
The Taiping Rebellion begins in China
Its leader claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus.
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1851
The Australian gold rush begins
Australia's population nearly tripled within a decade.
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1851
The Great Exhibition opens in London
Visitors paid a penny to use George Jennings' flushing public toilets.
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1852
Britain's first pillar box is installed
Novelist Anthony Trollope, then a Post Office official, championed them.
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1853
Commodore Perry arrives in Japan
His 'black ships' forced Japan to end more than two centuries of isolation.
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1853
The Crimean War begins
It was one of the first wars covered by newspaper correspondents and photographers.
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1854
Florence Nightingale arrives in Crimea
Soldiers called her 'The Lady with the Lamp' for her night rounds of the wards.
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1854
Miners rebel at the Eureka Stockade
The short battle is often seen as the birth of Australian democracy.
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1854
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Tennyson's poem about the disastrous cavalry charge was published within weeks.
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1857
The Indian Rebellion breaks out
Afterwards, the British Crown took control of India from the East India Company.
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1858
Brunel's Great Eastern is launched
It was so big it took three months to get it into the water.
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1858
The Great Stink hits London
The stench from the Thames finally pushed Parliament to fund a modern sewer system.
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1859
Big Ben's great bell first rings
The bell cracked within months and has rung with a slightly different tone ever since.
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1859
The Battle of Solferino
The suffering Henri Dunant saw there inspired him to found the Red Cross.
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1860
Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand
His red-shirted volunteers conquered Sicily and Naples for a united Italy.
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1860
The Pony Express begins
Riders carried mail about 3,000 km in ten days, but the service lasted only 18 months.
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1861
Italy is unified
Only a small minority of Italians spoke standard Italian at the time.
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1861
The American Civil War begins at Fort Sumter
Nobody was killed in the bombardment that started the war.
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1863
The Battle of Gettysburg
It was the largest battle ever fought in North America.
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1864
Clifton Suspension Bridge opens in Bristol
Brunel designed it but died five years before it was finished.
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1865
Britain's 'Red Flag Act' is passed
Someone had to walk 60 yards ahead of steam road vehicles, carrying a red flag.
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1865
Lee surrenders at Appomattox
The surrender was signed in the parlour of a private house.
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1867
Canada becomes a self-governing dominion
Its first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, was born in Glasgow.
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1867
Cattle drives on the Chisholm Trail begin
Millions of cattle were driven from Texas to Kansas railheads along it.
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1867
Japan's last shogun resigns
Tokugawa Yoshinobu lived until 1913, taking up photography and cycling.
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1867
The US buys Alaska from Russia
Critics mocked it as 'Seward's Folly'; it cost about 2 cents an acre.
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1868
The Meiji Restoration begins in Japan
Japan's capital moved from Kyoto to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo.
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1869
The US transcontinental railroad is completed
A ceremonial golden spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah.
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1871
Germany is unified
The German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
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1871
The Great Chicago Fire
The story blaming Mrs O'Leary's cow was later admitted to be made up by a reporter.
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1871
The Paris Commune takes over Paris
The revolutionary government lasted about two months.
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1876
Custer's Last Stand
Lakota and Cheyenne warriors defeated Custer's cavalry at Little Bighorn.
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1879
The Zulu defeat the British at Isandlwana
It was one of the worst defeats ever suffered by a British army against a local force.
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1881
Pat Garrett shoots Billy the Kid
Billy was only about 21, and became a legend almost immediately.
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1881
The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
The famous shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, lasted about 30 seconds.
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1888
The Jack the Ripper murders
The killer was never identified, and the case is still debated today.
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1894
The Dreyfus affair begins
Émile Zola's open letter 'J'accuse...!' took up the wrongly convicted officer's cause.
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1896
Gold is found in the Klondike
Prospectors had to haul about a tonne of supplies over the mountains.
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1896
The first speeding fine is issued
Walter Arnold was caught doing 8 mph in a 2 mph zone - by a policeman on a bicycle.
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1896
The shortest war in history
The Anglo-Zanzibar War lasted about 38 minutes.
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1898
The Spanish-American War
It lasted less than four months, and Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
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1899
The Second Boer War begins
Arthur Conan Doyle served as a volunteer doctor in the war.
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1900
The Boxer Rebellion
Foreign diplomats in Beijing were besieged for 55 days.
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1901
Queen Victoria dies
She had 42 grandchildren, many of whom married into Europe's royal families.
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1905
Japan defeats Russia in the Russo-Japanese War
It was the first major defeat of a European power by an Asian nation in modern times.
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1910
Halley's Comet causes panic
Some people bought 'comet pills' to protect themselves from its tail.
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1910
The Mexican Revolution begins
Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata became its most famous leaders.
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1912
The Titanic sinks
The ship carried lifeboats for only about half of the people on board.
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1914
The Christmas truce on the Western Front
Enemy soldiers swapped gifts in no man's land and reportedly played football.
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1915
The Gallipoli landings
Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand marks the anniversary.
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1915
The Lusitania is sunk
The loss of the liner helped turn American opinion against Germany.
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1916
The Battle of the Somme begins
Britain suffered about 57,000 casualties on the first day alone.
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1916
The Battle of Verdun begins
It lasted about ten months, one of the longest battles in history.
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1917
The Bolsheviks seize power in Russia
The Winter Palace was taken with far less fighting than later films showed.
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1917
The Halifax Explosion
A munitions ship blew up in the Canadian harbour - one of the largest accidental explosions ever.
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1918
The First World War ends with the Armistice
The ceasefire came into force at 11 a.m. on 11 November.
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1918
The Spanish flu pandemic begins
It probably didn't start in Spain; Spain's uncensored press just reported it most.
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1919
The Treaty of Versailles is signed
It was signed in the Hall of Mirrors, the same room where the German Empire was proclaimed.
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1922
Mussolini's March on Rome
Mussolini himself arrived in Rome by sleeper train.
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1922
The Lincoln Memorial is dedicated
Its statue of Lincoln is about 5.8 metres tall.
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1923
Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch fails
He wrote Mein Kampf during his time in prison afterwards.
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1926
The General Strike in Britain
About 1.7 million workers walked out in support of the miners.
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1932
Australia's 'Emu War'
Soldiers armed with machine guns failed to make much of a dent in the emu population.
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1933
The Reichstag fire
The Nazis used the blaze as an excuse to suspend civil liberties.
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1934
Mao's Long March begins
The Communist army marched roughly 10,000 km in a year.
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1936
The Crystal Palace burns down
The glow from the fire could be seen across eight counties.
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1936
The Jarrow March
Around 200 unemployed men walked about 450 km from Jarrow to London.
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1936
The Spanish Civil War begins
Volunteers from dozens of countries, including George Orwell, went to fight.
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1937
The Hindenburg airship disaster
Remarkably, 62 of the 97 people on board survived.
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1938
The Munich Agreement is signed
Chamberlain returned waving a paper promising 'peace for our time'.
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1939
The Second World War begins
Britain and France declared war two days after Germany invaded Poland.
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1940
The Battle of Britain
Churchill said of the RAF pilots: 'Never was so much owed by so many to so few.'
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1940
The Dunkirk evacuation
Hundreds of civilian 'little ships' helped rescue more than 330,000 troops.
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1941
Germany invades the Soviet Union
Operation Barbarossa was the largest invasion in history.
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1941
Pearl Harbor is attacked
The attack brought the United States into the Second World War.
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1942
The Battle of Midway
US codebreakers knew where the Japanese fleet would strike.
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1943
The Battle of Stalingrad ends
It is often seen as the turning point of the war in Europe.
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1945
The Nuremberg trials begin
They were the first international trials for war crimes.
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1948
Gandhi is assassinated
He was killed in Delhi less than six months after India's independence.
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1948
The Empire Windrush docks in Britain
It brought hundreds of Caribbean migrants to help rebuild post-war Britain.
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1950
The Korean War begins
It was the first major war fought under the United Nations flag.
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1953
Joseph Stalin dies
His guards were reportedly too afraid to enter his room after he collapsed.
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1956
The Hungarian Uprising
Soviet tanks crushed the revolt after less than three weeks.
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1956
The last Union veteran of the American Civil War dies
Albert Woolson died in 1956, the year Elvis Presley first topped the charts.
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1956
The Suez Crisis
Pressure from the US forced Britain and France to withdraw.
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1958
China's Great Leap Forward begins
It led to one of the deadliest famines in history.
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1961
The Bay of Pigs invasion fails
The CIA-backed landing in Cuba collapsed within three days.
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1963
President Kennedy is assassinated
He was shot while riding in an open-top car in Dallas.
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1966
China's Cultural Revolution begins
Schools and universities were closed for years.
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1967
The Six-Day War
Israel took the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights in under a week.
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1968
London Bridge is sold to an American businessman
Robert McCulloch rebuilt it, stone by stone, in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
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1968
Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated
The night before, he had said, 'I may not get there with you.'
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1968
Soviet tanks crush the Prague Spring
Czechoslovakia's reforms had promised 'socialism with a human face'.
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1973
An Arab oil embargo hits the West
Some countries banned Sunday driving to save fuel.
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1975
The fall of Saigon
Helicopters evacuated people from rooftops as the city fell.
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1977
France carries out its last execution by guillotine
The final guillotining in France took place the same year Star Wars came out.
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1979
The Iranian Revolution
The Shah fled, and Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris.
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1979
The Three Mile Island nuclear accident
It was the most serious nuclear accident in US history.
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1980
Solidarity is founded in Poland
It began at the Gdańsk shipyard and grew to around 10 million members.
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1982
The Falklands War
The conflict between Britain and Argentina lasted 74 days.
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1986
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster
The nearby city of Pripyat has been abandoned ever since.
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1989
The Exxon Valdez oil spill
Millions of litres of oil polluted the coast of Alaska.
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1989
The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia
Within weeks, playwright Václav Havel became president.
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1991
The Gulf War
Retreating Iraqi forces set hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells on fire.
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1995
The Dayton Agreement ends the Bosnian War
It was negotiated at an air force base in Ohio.
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1997
Hong Kong is handed back to China
China promised 'one country, two systems' for 50 years.
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1997
Princess Diana dies in Paris
Her funeral was watched by an estimated 2.5 billion people.
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2003
Concorde makes its final commercial flight
It had flown passengers for 27 years.
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2008
Lehman Brothers collapses
It was the largest bankruptcy in US history.
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2010
The Arab Spring begins
It started in Tunisia after a street vendor's protest.
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2010
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill
Oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days.
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2010
Thirty-three trapped Chilean miners are rescued
They had spent 69 days underground.
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2011
The Fukushima nuclear disaster
It was triggered by a tsunami after a huge earthquake off Japan.
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2014
Russia annexes Crimea
Most of the world's governments did not recognise the annexation.
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2018
The Thai cave rescue
Twelve boys and their football coach were brought out after 18 days.
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2019
Fire ravages Notre-Dame de Paris
The cathedral reopened in 2024 after a huge restoration.
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2021
The Ever Given blocks the Suez Canal
The stuck ship held up hundreds of vessels for six days.
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