1922
Mussolini's march on Rome
Some thirty thousand black-shirted Fascists converged on the Italian capital demanding power. The king, frightened of civil war, refused to declare martial law and instead invited Mussolini to form a government. Il Duce arrived by overnight train in a sleeper car, wearing a bowler hat. A new political creature, the fascist strongman ruling a European democracy, had taken power.
Ottoman Empire abolished
The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI, slipped out of the back door of the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul and boarded a British warship for exile. With him went six centuries of Ottoman rule. The following year Mustafa Kemal declared the Republic of Turkey. One of history's longest-lived empires had ended without a state funeral.
Soviet Union declared
In a Moscow theater, delegates from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian republics voted themselves into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Lenin, already ill from strokes, watched from the sidelines. A new kind of state had been born, one that claimed the whole future as its project. It would last sixty-nine years.
Joyce's Ulysses published in Paris
Sylvia Beach's little English-language bookshop issued James Joyce's dense, ribald novel of one Dublin day after publishers in London and New York balked at obscenity laws. Readers found Leopold Bloom eating kidneys, thinking about his wife's infidelity, and walking across a city that was also the inside of a mind. Modernism had its Bible.
Tutankhamun's tomb opened
In the Valley of the Kings, Howard Carter chiseled through a sealed door, held up a candle, and saw, as he put it, wonderful things: gold couches, a chariot, the boy pharaoh's funeral mask. The world fell into a fit of Egyptomania that shaped fashion, architecture, and Hollywood sets for a decade.
BBC founded
The British Broadcasting Company began regular radio transmission from a London rooftop with a single announcer reading the news in evening dress. Within a few years it had become a public corporation charged with informing, educating, and entertaining. A model of publicly funded broadcasting that would be copied around the world had been invented.
Treaty of Rapallo
Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, Europe's two diplomatic pariahs, signed a treaty in an Italian resort town renouncing claims against each other and resuming full diplomatic and trade relations. Western Europe was horrified by the sudden alignment. A quiet German-Soviet military cooperation began, helping both powers train troops, test weapons, and evade treaty restrictions through the 1920s.