1900
Planck proposes the quantum
Trying to patch a small crack in the physics of glowing objects, Max Planck suggested energy might come in tiny indivisible packets. He considered it a mathematical trick and disliked the implications. The trick turned out to be the deepest truth of the century, cracking open a strange new physics of probability and uncertainty.
Boxers besiege Beijing legations
Armed with martial-arts mysticism and grievances against foreign missionaries, the Righteous Harmony Society swept into Beijing and cornered diplomats inside the legation quarter. For fifty-five days they held out under fire while an eight-nation army marched from Tianjin. The siege ended, but so did the dying Qing's last illusions of sovereignty over its own territory.
Freud publishes Interpretation of Dreams
A Viennese neurologist insisted the mind harbored a hidden basement where wishes, fears, and forbidden longings dressed themselves in symbols each night. Few bought the book at first. Within twenty years the words unconscious, repression, and Oedipus complex had slipped into ordinary speech, remaking art, literature, and how humans spoke about themselves.
Zeppelin's airship takes flight
Over Lake Constance, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's cigar-shaped behemoth LZ-1 lifted its aluminum frame and canvas skin into the July sky. It flew eighteen minutes and sagged back down, but a new silhouette had entered European imagination. Within a generation these silver giants would drop bombs on London and redefine the meaning of aerial warfare.
Italian king assassinated at Monza
An Italian-American anarchist from Paterson, New Jersey, shot King Umberto I four times at point-blank range in front of his carriage, in revenge for a massacre of workers two years earlier. It was the third assassination of a European head of state in five years. Anarchist terror was becoming a political method across the continent.
Conrad publishes Lord Jim
A Polish-born sea captain writing in his third language put out a novel about a young English officer's moment of cowardice and his long attempt to make amends in a Malay backwater. It was the century's first great meditation on European complicity in the colonial project, though neither author nor readers quite saw it that way yet.
Irish Literary Renaissance begins
W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn announced the formation of what became the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, dedicated to Irish plays by Irish writers. The movement would produce Synge and O'Casey, feed Irish nationalism, and help reinvent a nation's sense of itself in the language its colonizers had imposed.