1936
Spanish Civil War begins
Army officers led by Francisco Franco rose against the elected Republic, expecting a quick coup. Instead Spain split in half and bled for three years. Germany and Italy sent bombers to Franco; Stalin sent tanks and commissars to the Republic; thirty-five thousand volunteers from around the world came to fight fascism with rifles.
Italian East Africa proclaimed
Mussolini proclaimed the creation of Italian East Africa from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia to a cheering crowd. Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Italian Somaliland were joined under one viceroyalty. The fascist colonial project had reached its apex. It would all be gone within five years when British and Ethiopian forces drove the Italians out.
Stalin's Great Terror begins
Old Bolsheviks were put on trial in Moscow on fantastical charges, confessed after torture, and were shot in the back of the head. Over the next two years perhaps seven hundred thousand Soviet citizens were executed and millions more sent to camps. Stalin was making sure no conceivable rival would ever survive him.
Keynes publishes General Theory
John Maynard Keynes argued that market economies could get stuck in depressions and only government spending could lift them out. The book was dense, contradictory, and brilliant, and within a decade it had remade economic policy across the Western world. For fifty years governments would spend their way out of slumps in his name.
Berlin Olympics showcase Nazi Germany
Hitler built a stadium for a hundred thousand and invited the world to watch his racial utopia. The embarrassment was Jesse Owens, an African American sprinter who won four gold medals on the Fuhrer's track. Leni Riefenstahl's cameras made a film both beautiful and chilling. Three years later the stadium's soldiers were in Poland.
Abdication crisis
King Edward VIII of Britain told his country by radio that he could not continue the office of king without the help of the woman I love, Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American. His younger brother, who hated the spotlight and stammered, became George VI. The monarchy had survived its first modern tabloid scandal.
Edward VIII abdicates
After the British government refused to accept his planned marriage to the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson, Edward VIII abdicated in a radio broadcast. I have found it impossible, he said, to carry on without the help and support of the woman I love. His younger brother, the stammering George VI, became king, reluctantly.