1929
Wall Street crashes
On Black Thursday the New York Stock Exchange dropped eleven percent at the opening bell. By the following Tuesday it had lost a quarter of its value. Bankers jumped from windows, not enough to matter. Margin calls rolled out across the country, banks failed, and the roaring twenties curdled into the Great Depression.
Lateran Treaty creates Vatican City
After sixty years of cold war between the Italian state and the Pope, Mussolini signed an agreement with Pius XI granting a tiny Vatican enclave full sovereignty. The Pope became a head of state again, the Church blessed the fascist order, and an awkward marriage began. Saint Peter's courtyard had its own country at last.
Saint Valentine's Day Massacre
In a Chicago garage, men dressed as police lined seven members of Bugs Moran's gang against a brick wall and cut them down with tommy guns. It was Al Capone's work, though Capone was in Florida with an alibi. Prohibition-era gangland violence had reached a spectacle threshold, and America was both horrified and thrilled.
Faulkner publishes The Sound and the Fury
A Mississippi writer nobody had heard of put out a novel told partly through the consciousness of a mentally disabled man, partly in flashbacks and syntactic labyrinths. Readers were bewildered. Twenty years later Faulkner won the Nobel Prize and the book was recognized as one of the central American modernist novels.
Hemingway publishes A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway's novel of an American ambulance driver's love affair during the Italian retreat from Caporetto captured the lost generation's disillusionment in plain, muscular prose stripped of Victorian ornament. The book made Hemingway famous, established him as the foremost American novelist of his generation, and became a template for modern fiction. War literature had found its iceberg style.
Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago
Seven men working for Bugs Moran's North Side Gang were lined up against a garage wall by men in police uniforms and shot with Thompson submachine guns. Al Capone had ordered it from Florida. The slaughter horrified Americans and helped turn public opinion against Prohibition and the gangsters it had enriched.