1921
Chinese Communist Party founded
Thirteen men, including a young Mao Zedong, met on a houseboat on a Zhejiang lake after being chased from a Shanghai safehouse. They drafted a charter for a Chinese Communist Party. At the time there were perhaps fifty members in the entire country. Within thirty years they would rule a quarter of humanity.
Insulin isolated in Toronto
Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working in a borrowed summer lab, pulled the hormone out of dog pancreases and injected it into a dying diabetic boy. The child sat up. Within a year drug companies were making insulin by the gallon. A disease that had always killed children had become one they could live with.
Tulsa race massacre
After a rumored incident between a young Black man and a white woman in a Tulsa elevator, a white mob burned down the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood, known as Black Wall Street. Perhaps three hundred Black residents were killed and ten thousand left homeless. The massacre was nearly erased from American history for seventy years.
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier dedicated
In Arlington, as at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and Westminster Abbey in London, an unidentified corpse from the Western Front was interred with full military honors. The anonymous body stood in for the millions whose remains had never been found. A new kind of war memorial for a war of unprecedented anonymity had been invented.