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Timeline: 1921 to 1930

1921 Russia's Marxist government signs trade agreements with Britain, Germany, Norway and Austria. Membership in the Communist Party reaches 730,000, tripling what it was in 1919. Famine spreads in the Volga region and is to last into the next year.

1921 Mongolian nationalists ask Russian Bolshevik forces for help against anti-communist (White) Russian troops. A Mongolian People's Party is formed and acquires political power, with the country's Buddhist leader as a figurehead.

1921 The use of radio broadcasting to influence the masses begins in the Soviet Union. A powerful station broadcasts for a few hours every day. Receivers are expensive and owned by few people, and the programs are broadcast to places where people gather. The programs are described as "spoken newspapers."

1921 South Africa's white government creates the Natives Land Act, preventing blacks from holding land except in specially designated reserves.

1921 Britain gives Ireland dominion status, except for six counties in the north which remain within the United Kingdom. And Britain gives Egypt independence, except for the Suez Canal, which Britain continues to control.

1922 Britain has its first radio station.

1922 The world is amazed by RCA radio-faxing a photograph across the Atlantic Ocean in six minutes.

1922 The British in India arrest Gandhi and sentence him to six years in prison.

1922 The British in Kenya arrest the leader of the East African Association, Harry Thuku.

1922 With tanks and aerial bombardment, Italian forces move deeper into Libya's interior, beginning an eight-year war.

1922 In Italy, Mussolini seeks respectability and entry into parliamentary politics, disturbing many in his movement who dislike politicians. King Victor Emmanuel appoints him prime minister. Mussolini forms a cabinet of fascists and nationalists, and he is granted "temporary" dictatorial powers.

1922 The hormone insulin is discovered and used to treat diabetes.

1922 In Japan, a communist party is formed.

1922 Harvard University's president, A.L. Lowell, advocates restricting Jewish applicants to his university. The Chamber of Commerce in Sharon Connecticut urges owners not to sell to Jews.

1922 The Bolshevik Red Army wins. The civil war winds down, but famine is widespread. In December, Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia and the Transcaucasus are joined together in the founding of the Soviet Union.

1923 In Massachusetts the homicide rate is eleven times that of Scotland's. An African-American show called "Runin' Wild" introduces the Charleston, a dance seen by whites as cheerfully impudent. In North Dakota a law is passed making dancing illegal on the Sunday.

1923 In Southwest Africa, now under a League of Nations mandate, the Khoikhoi (Hottentot) and Herero peoples rebel against white South Africa's domination. South Africa attacks them with airpower.

1923 Inflation makes Germany's money almost useless. Adolf Hitler and former general Ludendorff seize Munich's city government. Their coup is crushed by the military. Four policemen and fourteen of Hitler's supporters - mostly youths - die. Hitler promised to shoot himself if his coup failed, but he reconsiders. Ludendorff and Hitler - war veterans - are released. Hitler, who is less a national hero than Ludendorff, is to stand trial.

1923 An earthquake strikes Tokyo. Around 106,000 persons die or disappear and 502,000 are injured. Hordes of people, made homeless by the quake and fires, roam the city. They were without food and water. They include the city's Koreans. Pacts of Japanese attack and murder the Koreans - men, women and children - wherever they can find them. Police round up labor leaders, socialists, communists and anarchists.

1923 U.S. President Warren Harding commutes the ten-year prison sentence of the socialist and former presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who has been in prison for the last four years for an anti-war speech he had made in 1918. Harding disturbs some anti-Communists by inviting Debs to the White House, where he shakes Debs' hand and says that he had always wanted to meet him.

1923 The Soviet Union becomes a formal entity - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Since '22, Lenin has been incapacitated by a stroke.

1924 Lenin dies. The Soviet government is dominated by the Communist Party, and in theory the ultimate power within the Communist Party is the Party Congress, a large body that selects the Central Committee, which selects members of the Party's top body, the Politburo. The most influential member of the Politburo is Joseph Stalin, who barely manages to hang-on against rumors of conflict with Lenin.

1924 The first winter Olympics are held in Chamonix, France.

1924 Ho Chi Minh, a member of France's Communist Party, travels from Moscow to Canton (Quangjour), where he becomes an assistant to Maichel Borodin, the Soviet Union's advisor to Sun Yat-sen. From Canton, Ho begins directing rebel activities in his native Vietnam, still ruled by the French.

1924 The British release Gandhi from prison.

1924 Hitler is released from prison after 8 1/2 months of comfort and book writing. He has made a name for himself.

1924 Via radio, Calvin Coolidge become the first U.S. president to put political speechmaking into people's homes. Into people's living rooms by a radio station in Chicato come the National Barn Dance.

1924 The United States ends its eight-year occupation of the Dominican Republic.

1924 France begins its withdrawal from Germany's Ruhr and returning to Germany its normal communications and transport connections. In elections, Communist seats drop from 65 to 45. The National Socialist (Nazi) Party drops from 32 seats to 14. The winners are the rightist Nationalist Party, with the largest representation in parliament.

1924 New law in the United States effectively ends Asian immigration to the United States. Japan declares May 26, the effective date of the legislation, a day of national humiliation.

1925 Immigration to the United States from Italy drops to from 56,246 in 1924 to 6,203. Immigration from Britain is down from 59,490 in 1924 to 27,172.

1925 In Germany, President Ebert, a Social Democrat, dies. Germans elect a patriotic but mendacious 81 year-old wartime national hero, General Paul von Hindenburg.

1925 Gandhi retires from politics, quits the Congress Party and turns his attention to the evils of alcohol and other drugs. He hopes to transform the world through spiritual power.

1925 France begins building the Maginot Line, intended as a barrier against German aggression.

1925 Membership in the Ku Klux Klan is at an new high. Forty thousand of them and their supporters march in Washington, D.C.

1925 Sun Yat-sen, leader of China's nationalist Guomindang movement, dies. Guomingdang organizers, followed by its army, begin extending Guomindang authority northward.

1925 The Locarno Treaty attempts to normalize relations between World War I allies and Germany and to secure an understanding about political borders in Europe. Germany's Rhineland is to remain demilitarized. France agrees to be completely out of the Rhineland by the first weeks of 1926. The participants agree to respect existing borders and to cooperate against any aggressor so far as their geography and military capabilities allow. Germany is a participant. The Russians are not. They sense isolation and are hostile to the gathering.

1925 In the United States a coast-to-coast radio network is established. Many homes now have radio receivers. Dance bands broadcast from dance halls, radio stations and hotels.

1926 Germany joins the League of Nations.

1926 In Morocco, a rebellion led by Mohammed ben Abel Krim is crushed by French and Spanish forces.

1926 In South Africa, Prime Minister M.B. Herzog introduces the Mines and Works Amendment Act, which excludes blacks and Asians (people of Indian heritage) from all skilled and some semi-skilled mining jobs.

1926 Japan's Emperor Taisho dies. His son, Hirohito, 25, ascends the throne. He favors peace and cooperation with foreign powers. The political party in power, the Democratic (Minseito) Party, expresses agreement.

1927 In Japan, factories are closing. Falling silk and rice prices hurt Japanese farmers. Starvation becomes a real threat to millions of people in rural areas. Banks are closing. The government fears unrest and subversion and pursues a campaign against "dangerous thoughts." Communists are sent to prison and professors are dismissed from universities. More hope is placed in empire. Fears arise concerning events in China, and military expenditures are increased.

1927 The Guomindang's movement northward from Canton has been accompanied by a wave of strikes that bring production in China to a standstill, and peasant unrest has been encouraged, raising fears among landowners across China. Warlords have been going over to the side of the Guomindang's leader, Chiang Kai-sheck. Wealthy Chinese businessmen offer moderates within the Guomindang their support if they rid the Guomindang of its leftists. Chiang Kai-shek has developed a dislike for communists. His forces take control of Shanghai and turn against the Guomindang's communists and against labor unions.

1927 A book written by André Gide creates indignation in France regarding mistreatment of people in the Congo - blacks forced to work on the construction of 300 miles of railroad from Brazzaville to Pointe Noire that over a ten-year period killed nearly ten thousand.

1927 Bavaria lifts its ban against Hitler speaking. In his first speech, Hitler attacks agreements that Germany made at Locarno.

1927 The Jazz Age spreads to Germany. Many in Germany, including Hitler and some of his followers, express a puritanical contempt for the new hedonism.

1927 Joy erupts in response to the first non-stop solo transatlantic flight, from the U.S. to France, by Charles Lindbergh.

1927 The United States advocates discussions between the warring sides in Nicaragua's civil war between Liberals and Conservatives. The U.S. sends warships and Marines to establish order. A conference between the the Liberals and Conservatives produces a settlement. But a dissident general, Sandino, pursues guerrilla warfare, attacking the Marines at Ocotal, in the north about 70 miles from the Pacific Coast. The Marines responds with airpower.

1927 In the Chicago area, Al Capone controls gambling, prostitution, distilleries and has a large share in a cleaning and dyeing plant chain. His income is estimated at $105 million per year. The Supreme Court decides that illegal income can be taxed, a tool the U.S. starts to use to fight crime.

1927 Catholics - some of them priests - take up arms against anti-clerical provisions of Mexico's 1917 Constitution. Trains are blown up. Public schools are attacked and burned and teachers are killed. The government retaliates and tries to kill a priest for every murdered teacher. It's called the Cristero War.

1928 A Catholic partisan assassinates Mexico's president-elect Alvaro Obregon. The Cristero War is to last into 1929.

1928 France wants assurances of U.S. help should another war erupt in Europe. The U.S. Secretary of State, Frank B. Kellogg, wants to avoid U.S. involvement in another European War. He does this by turning an agreement with France into a grandiose renunciation of war. His Kellogg-Briand Pact is signed by sixty-three nations, including Italy, Germany and Japan.

1928 The economy in the Soviet Union has been part private enterprise, part state run and mismanaged. The country is suffering economically, and communists are searching for "saboteurs and wreckers." A trial begins against 53 engineers accused of sabotage. Communists are complaining and flinging accusations at each other while Stalin appears to be a reasonable and a symbol of unity. He wants to build socialism at home and good relations abroad rather than pursue revolution abroad. Stalin and the Politburo move the country to an all-out socialist economy. The first Five-Year Plan and collectivization of agriculture begins.

1928 Voting in Italy drops by two-thirds in the wake of new voting restrictions, including a prohibition on the vote of women.

1928 By June, Chiang Kai-shek's forces were in control in Beijing, in China's north. Chiang was the chairman of his political party, the Guomindang. He was the republican army's commander-in-chief, and in September 1928, his government's Organic Law gave him dictatorial powers, with the title of President.

1929 In Kenya missionaries have been critical of the Kikuyu custom of female circumcision. The Kikuyu claim that it was an essential part of their culture and accuse the missionaries were undermining their rights. many Kikuyu to break away from the Christian churches and mission schools. And in place of these, Kikuyu developed their own schools

1929 In the United States, investing in stocks has been encouraged by a rising stock market, which has created a lot of dreams of wealth and more investing. Investing has become a craze, too much of it on borrowed money. The reality of limitations is ignored. The smarter investors begin to withdraw from the market. More selling follows. The bubble bursts.

1929 A Scot, Alexander Fleming, discovers penicillin, an anti-biotic.

1929 In Africa, the first know HIV virus jumps from an animal to a human. (Said by epidemiologist Larry Brilliant on the PBS program Now, May 8, 2009)

1929 Edwin Hubble discovers that galaxies are moving away from each other.

1929 The Lateran Treaty restores Vatican City to the pope. The Roman Catholic Church is established as the state church, and it is assured substantial control over Italy's educational system.

1929 King Alexander proclaims a dictatorship and changes the name of his kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes to Yugoslavia.

1929 Jews are accused of having seized Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem enraged mobs attacked Jews and loot their homes. The attacks spread to other cities. A Jewish settlement of 700 people in Hebron comes to an end. The uprising helps convince Jews in Palestine of the need for a separate state.

1930 Gandhi and Nehru organize a Declaration of Independence, or Purna Swaraj, by the people of India. On January 26, across India were great gatherings of people solemnly taking the pledge of independence by their presence - unrecognized by Britain.

1930 German manufacturing has fallen 17 percent since 1927 and its unemployment has skyrocketed to 3,000,000. The Nazi Party places second in elections.

1930 In a speech to his fascist blackshirts, Mussolini says "Words are beautiful things, but rifles, machine guns, ships and airplanes are more beautiful still. It was May 17. (Human Smoke, p. 19)

1930 In Jamaica, Rastafarians proclaim Haile Selassie the Messiah.

1930 The name of the city that had been called Constantinople is formally changed to Istanbul.

1930 In Vietnam, strikes erupt on French-owned plantations. Farmers demonstrate against taxes. The French Foreign Legion and airplanes are sent against rebellious peasants. The French execute Vietnam's leading nationalist, Nguyen Thai Hoc and others. Nguyen Thai Hoc's nationalist movement is destroyed, providing opportunity for a movement directed by Ho Chi Minh.

1930 Against President ********* Hoover's urgings, manufacturers are responding to an economic down turn by laying people off, which decreases private spending and sends the economy into further decline. Bank failures increase and people rush to withdraw their money. The party in power, the Republicans, are swept from Congress.

1930 Sir Frank Whittle of Britain patents a gas turbine for jet propulsion.

1930 On December 31 the Roman Catholic strengthens its centuries old ban on "artificial" birth control by officially prohibiting all means of "artificial" birth control, including condoms, diaphragms and cervical caps.

1930 In the U.S. and Germany the movie All Quiet On the Western Front is under attack by patriots who see the film as subversive. In Berlin, a group of Brownshirts led by Joseph Goebbels create a disturbance that shuts down the theater showing the film. Disturbances at the theater continue for days. The German government bans the film. It is December.