1910
Madero calls for Mexican revolution
From exile in Texas, Francisco Madero issued the Plan of San Luis Potosi and asked Mexicans to rise against the aging dictator Porfirio Diaz. They did, with Pancho Villa riding north and Emiliano Zapata seizing land in Morelos. Ten years of civil war followed. Perhaps a million Mexicans died in the upheaval.
Japan annexes Korea
After five years of gradual strangulation, Japan formally swallowed Korea and abolished its ancient kingdom, ending a dynastic line that stretched back centuries. Korean officials who refused to sign were bypassed. The peninsula became a rice and coal colony for Tokyo for thirty-five years. Resistance ran underground and would shape two Koreas long after the empire fell.
Edward VII dies, George V takes throne
The genial king whose diplomacy had helped knit together the anti-German alliance slipped away at Buckingham Palace. Nine sovereigns rode in his funeral procession, the last great gathering of Europe's royal cousinhood. Within four years most of them would be at war with each other, and three would lose their thrones forever.
Portugal becomes a republic
A two-day revolution in Lisbon overthrew the eight-hundred-year-old Portuguese monarchy and proclaimed a republic. King Manuel II sailed into exile aboard the royal yacht. The First Republic would prove chaotic, passing through forty-five governments in sixteen years before a military coup ended the experiment, ushering in the long authoritarian rule of António de Oliveira Salazar.
Mother Teresa born in Skopje
A girl named Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born to an Albanian family in what was then Ottoman Macedonia. At eighteen she left home to become a Catholic nun and by mid-century was running a mission among the dying of Calcutta. Before her own death in 1997 she would become the most famous Christian of the age.