First underground
railway opens in London

Laying of the
Transatlantic cable

Alfred Noble
invents dynamite

Alexander Graham
Bell patents telephone

Thomas Edison
patents light bulb

Canadian-Pacific
railway opens

Eiffel Tower
completed in Paris

Wilhelm Rontgen
discovers X-rays

First Zeppelin airship
launched in Germany

Guglielmo Marconi transmits
wireless signals across the Atlantic

Completion of Aswan Dam on the Nile

First successful flight by the Wright Brothers

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Uncle Tom's Cabin

Gustave Flaubert,
Madame Bovary

John Stuart Mill,
On Liberty

Charles Darwin,
The Origin of
Species

Charles
Dickens,
Great
Expectations

Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace (Part 1)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Crime and Punishment

First performance
of Richard Wagner's
opera Das Rheingold

George Eliot,
Middlemarch

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

First part of Oxford
English Dictionary
is completed

Last Impressionist
exhibition in Paris

Stephen Crane, The
Red Badge of Courage

Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

Georges Melies, A Trip to the Moon

Anton Chekov, The Cherry Orchard

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic

Second Republic dissolved in France.
Napoleon III takes power as emperor

Britain and France join Crimean War

Crimean War ends

American Civil War
begins (1861-1865)

Emancipation of
Russian serfs

Abolition of slavery
in United States

President
Abraham
Lincoln
assassinated

King of Prussia becomes Emperor
Wilhelm I of a united Germany

Britain buys Suez Canal

Germany signs
alliance with
Russia and
Austria

New Zealand becomes
first country to
grant women the vote

Beginning of Dreyfus
affair in France

Spanish-American War. America
gains Philippines and Puerto Rico

Boxer Rebellion in China
suppressed by foreign intervention

Death of Queen
Victoria
(1819-1901)

Gustave Courbet
independently exhibits
outside the Exposition
Universalle, Paris

Charles Baudelaire,
The Painter of Modern Life

Edouard Manet and others
exhibit at the Salon des Refuses

Albert Memorial completed
in Hyde Park, London

Monet and Renoir paint at
La Grenouillere, near Paris

Metropolitan Museum,
New York, is founded

Vendome Column destroyed
during Paris Commune

First Impressionist
exhibition, Paris

Statue of Liberty
is unveiled
in New York

Van Gogh and Gauguin
paint in Arles

Paul Gauguin
departs for Tahiti

Gustav Klimt and
others found
Vienna Secession

Russo-Japanese War
ends, Russia defeated

Finland is the first country
to give women the vote

Mahatma Gandhi begins
campaign of non-violent
resistance in South Africa

NAACP
established
in USA

U.S. Supreme
Court breaks
up Standard Oil

The Titanic
strikes an
iceberg
and sinks

Beginning of
First World
War (1914-1918)

Mahatma Gandhi
returns to India

Revolu-
tion in
Russia

U.S.
enters
WWI

Worldwide
influenza
epidemic
kills millions

Prohibition in U.S.

Gandhi begins campaign of
civil disobedience in India

Benito Mussolini
comes to power

Adolf Hitler
publishes Mein Kampf

Albert Einstein publishes
paper on special theory of relativity

Henry Ford begins
mass production
of the Model T car

First airplane flight
across the English Channel

First successful
parachute jump

Henry Ford develops first
moving assembly line in Detroit

Completion of Panama Canal

First major use of poison
gas as weapon at
Second Battle of Ypres

Hugo Junkers develops
first fighter plane

Alexander Graham Bell makes
first transcontinental telephone
call from New York to San Francisco

Invention of the
first armoured
vehicle: the tank

First successful
helicopter flight

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Birth of Indian cult
leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Marcel Proust,
A la recherche du temps perdu (Volume 1)

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Igor Stravinsky,
The Rite of Spring

Charlie Chaplin begins making films

D.W. Griffiths,
The Birth of a Nation

James Joyce
publishes
Ulysses in Paris

George Gershwin completes
Rhapsody in Blue

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

The Fauves exhibit at the Salon d'Automne, Paris

German Expressionist group Die Brucke is founded in Dresden

Picasso and Braque
begin to develop
Synthetic Cubism

Marinetti publishes
Futurist Manifesto

Expressionist group
Der Blaue Reiter
founded in Munich

Marcel Duchamp
creates his
first Readymade

The Armory Show
in New York

Kazimir Malevich
launches
Suprematism

Dada movement
launched in Zurich

Theo van Doesburg
launches De Stijl

Russian Imperial
Academy abolished

Walter Gropius founds
the Bauhaus School

Hans Prinzhorn,
The Artistry of
the Mentally Ill

Andre Breton
publishes
Surrealist
Manifesto

Exposition Internationale
des Arts Decoratifs, Paris

First Neue Sachlichkeit
exhibition, Mannheim

Stock Market Crash
leads to Great Depression

Adolf Hitler comes
to power in Germany

Germany invades
Poland
Starts WWII
(1939-1945)

France falls to
German invasion

Japanese bombing of Pearl
Harbor brings USA into WWII

U.S.A. drops atomic bombs
to end war in Pacific

United Nations
is established

Charles Lindbergh
makes first non-stop
flight across Atlantic

Philo T Farnsworth
invents television

Penicillin isolated
by Alexander Fleming

Edwin Hubble announces
that the universe is expanding

Empire State Building
is completed

The Richter Scale
completed by
seismologist
Charles Richter

Precursor to first
computer is outlined
by Alan Turing

Jet engine invented
by Frank Whittle

Nylon invented
by WH Caruthers

Xerography invented
by Chester Carlson

First nuclear reactor
built by Enrico Fermi

Microwave oven invented
by Percy Spenser

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

BBC begin radio service

D.H. Lawrence,
Lady Chatterley's Lover

Nation of Islam
founded by Wallace
Ford Muhammad

Aldous Huxley,
Brave New World

Henry Miller,
Tropic of Cancer

Frank Lloyd Wright
builds Falling Water,
Bear Run, PA

Earnest Hemingway,
For Whom the Bell Tolls

Citizen Kane is
released in cinemas

John Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness

George Orwell,
Animal Farm

Precisionist Charles
Sheeler documents
Ford's River
Rouge plant, Michigan

Museum of Modern Art
opens in New York

Nazis close down
the Bauhaus School

Hans Hoffman opens his
art school in New York

Controversy over
Diego Rivera's mural in
Rockefeller Center, NY

Walter Benjamin writes essay
"The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction"

Walker Evans and others document
America as part of New Deal

Nazis stage the "Degenerate
Art" show in Munich

Great powers confront each
other at the Exposition
Internationale, Paris

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
begins teaching at
the School of Design,
Chicago

Matisse begins cut-paper
collage technique

India gains independence
from Britain

Israel becomes independent

Mahatma Gandhi assassinated

Mao establishes People’s
Republic of China

NATO formed

Germany divided into capitalist
West and communist East

Korean War begins

Dwight Eisenhower
becomes US president

Korean War ends

Death of
Joseph Stalin

Suez Crisis

Bus boycott in
Montgomery, Alabama

Treaty of Rome establishes
European Economic Union

Fidel Castro takes
power in Cuba

The transistors is invented
at Bell Telephone Laboratories

Francis Crick and James
Watson discover structure of DNA

US explode first
hydrogen bomb

Contraceptive pill
is invented

Launch of Sputnik I,
first artificial satellite

Theodore Maiman
produces first laser

Anti-Communist HUAC
hearings in Hollywood

JD Salinger,
The Catcher in the Rye

Samuel Beckett,
Waiting for Godot

L. Ron Hubbard forms
Church of Scientology

Edmund Hillary and Tenzig
Norgay scale Mt Everest

JRR Tolkein publishes first
instalments of Lord of the Rings

First performance
of John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger

Jack Keroac,
On the Road

Vladimir Nabokov,
Lolita

Jean Dubuffet causes scandal with
exhibition at Galerie Rene Drouin

Jackson Pollock begins
drip paintings

Alberto Giacometti
holds his first
post-war exhibition

Willem de Kooning’s
first solo exhibition

Barnett Newman
paints Onement I

The Abstract Expressionist
‘Irascibles’ protest against
Metropolitan Museum

Harold Rosenberg,
"The American
Action Painters"

The Independent
Group begin
meeting in London

Robert Rauschenberg,
Erased De Kooning Drawing

Jasper Johns begins
work on Flag

Clement Greenberg,
"American-Type Painting"

Jackson Pollock
dies in car crash

Hard-edged abstraction
debuts in Los Angeles

Survey of post-war
figuration, "New Images
of Man," at MoMA, NY

East German
government builds
Berlin Wall

Cuban missile crisis

John F. Kennedy assassinated

Vietnam War begins

US begins bombing North Vietnam

Malcolm X assassinated

Cultural Revolution
begins in China

Six Day War. Israel defeats
Egypt, Syria and Jordan

Martin Luther King,
Jr. assassinated

Vietnam War protests grow

Yuri Gagarin becomes
first man in space

Broadcast of first transatlantic
television signals via satellite

Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson discover cosmic
background radiation

Christiaan Barnard
completes first successful
heart transplant

Neil Armstrong becomes
first man on moon

Second Vatican Council
liberalises Catholic Church

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

The Beatles,
Sergeant Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band

Jacques Derrida,
Writing and Difference

Roy Lichtenstein
stages his first
Pop art exhibition

Andy Warhol stages his
first Pop art exhibition

Marcel Duchamp retrospective,
Pasadena, CA

Clement Greenberg curates
"Post-Painterly Abstraction"

Joseph Kosuth creates
One and Three Chairs

Survey of Minimalism, "Primary
Structures," at Jewish Museum, NY

Valerie Solanas
shoots Andy Warhol

Survey of Conceptual art,
"Information," at MoMA, NY

Robert Smithson creates
Spiral Jetty