1915
Einstein presents general relativity
After eight years of wrong turns and equations that would not close, Albert Einstein read his theory of gravity as curved spacetime to the Prussian Academy. Mass told space how to bend. Space told mass how to move. Newton had been subtly wrong for two centuries. A new geometry of the universe had appeared.
Armenian genocide begins
On the night of April 24, Ottoman authorities rounded up Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople. What followed across Anatolia was systematic: death marches into Syrian deserts, massacres in villages, children taken. Roughly 1.5 million Armenians perished. The twentieth century had learned a new word, though it would not yet be spoken.
Birth of a Nation released
D. W. Griffith's three-hour epic about the Civil War and Reconstruction portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroic and was screened in the White House to Woodrow Wilson's apparent approval. It was a technical landmark in cinema, and a political and racial catastrophe. The Klan, which had been dead, was revived within months.
Gallipoli landings
British, Australian, and New Zealand troops scrambled ashore under Turkish machine guns on the Dardanelles cliffs. They were supposed to force the straits and knock Ottoman Turkey out of the war. Eight months and half a million casualties later they evacuated, having gained nothing. Mustafa Kemal made his name defending the heights.
Lusitania sunk off Ireland
A German U-boat torpedoed the Cunard liner eleven miles off Kinsale. The ship rolled over and sank in eighteen minutes, taking nearly twelve hundred civilians, including one hundred twenty-eight Americans. Public opinion in the United States turned against Germany. The long road toward American entry into the war had begun.
First Zeppelin raid on Britain
Two German Zeppelins bombed English east coast towns for the first time, killing four civilians in Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn. It seemed like terror from the sky, though the bombs were small and the damage modest. The significance lay in the precedent: civilians in their beds were now legitimate targets. Strategic bombing had an opening chapter.
Italy enters the war
After months of secret negotiation, Italy joined the Entente with the Treaty of London, lured by promised Austrian territory. Italian troops launched an offensive along the Isonzo River and spent three and a half years fighting in mountain snows for almost no ground. Six hundred thousand Italians died for lands that later disappointed them.