Fourth Compilation (1921-1929) to Post #219
Seems like a good time to compile the events.
Events from the 1920's:
1921:
August 19 1921: Charles Whittlesey, unable to return to the law because of the demand placed on him for speeches, rejoins the army as a Major.
August 26th, 1921: Franklin D. Roosevelt dies after spending nearly a month with deteriorating health from catching some sort of illness during his trip to Canada.
November 9, 1921: Greece commissions Lambros Katsonis (ex-HMS Chester) and Antinavarchos Kountouriotis (ex-HMS Birkenhead), two cruisers it had ordered before the Great War; the Greek government, fearing that the Entente would not intervene in the Greco-Turkish War, decided to start to build up a fleet to counter the Turks and Soviets.
December 10th, 1921: Shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics in recognition of his explanation of the photo-electric effect, Albert Einstein is killed in a chance car accident in Sweden, much to the dismay of many.
1922:
February 10th, 1922: The Washington Naval Conference breaks down; no treaty is produced. The delegates do agree to meet again in six months.
April 11th, 1922: Herbert O. Yardley, head of the Black Chamber, is struck by a car on the way to work; he is forced to stay in the hospital for six months, recuperating.
March 1, 1922: The monitor HMS Gorgon is sold to Romania and renamed NMS Stefan cel Mar, giving the Romanians a local counter to the Turkish Sultan Yavuz Selim and the Soviet Black Sea Fleet.
October 16, 1922: Percy Ludgate, a Dublin mathematician, survives a severe bout of pneumonia and continues work on his "Ludgate Analytical Engine".
November 11th, 1922: Vladimir Lenin reads his testament aloud before the Soviet Party. It has been slightly altered, after a few visits from both Stalin and Trotsky, and the Testament now criticized Stalin greatly, suggested that he be replaced as General Secretary, and it even went so far as to suggest that Trotsky take his place. After the reading of the testament, Stalin leaves the building to think, and is assassinated once outside by an OGPU agent, who escapes.
December 4th, 1922: The Washington Naval Arms Treaty is signed by representatives of the UK, Japan and the US. It declares a halt to new battleship and battlecruiser construction (with battleships and battlecruisers defined as ships of 18000t or greater, mounting cannon of 13" (330mm) or greater caliber), and to the fortification of League mandate territories in the Pacific (and of the Aleutians and Guam). It is far weaker than the treaty proposed in the first round, but the intransigent American and Japanese delegations are unwilling to compromise further - especially after the French and Italians had already walked out.
December 5th, 1922: After the Washington Naval Treaty - which does not restrict the conversion of laid-down battleships into aircraft carriers - is signed, the US begins conversion of all six Lexington-class battlecruisers currently laid down into aircraft carriers.
December 6th, 1922: Japan follows the American lead, beginning the conversion of two Tosa-class battleships into Kaga-class aircraft carriers of two laid-down Amagi-class battlecruisers into aircraft carriers. However, the Navy cancels the other two Amagi-class battlecruisers, which have yet to be laid down - and thus cannot be built.
December 20th, 1922: HMS Howe, HMS Rodney and HMS Anson, the three sisters to HMS Hood, are reordered as aircraft carriers.
1923:
January 10th, 1923: Captain George S. Patton is transferred to the Panama Canal Zone to serve as Executive Officer to General Fox Conner.
January 22nd, 1923: The Toll of the Sea, the first all-color Hollywood film, is released, two months after the original print was damaged. It sees rave reviews, particularly for star Anna May Wong.
July 20th, 1923: An attempted assassination of Pancho Villa fails, thanks to the effective response of Villa's bodyguards.
August 2nd, 1923: Warren G. Harding suffers a heart attack. Despite the scare, docters are able to save his life, and he recovers quickly.
August 17th, 1923: Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower officially petitions the US Congress for funds for an armored force in the United States.
August 19, 1923: Pancho Villa sells his hacienda and moves to California, fearing another plot on his life by Calles and Obregón.
August 27, 1923: Twelve Romanian naval cadets begin studies at the École Navale in Brest, France.
September 1st, 1923: A moderately strong earthquake - 4.9 on the Richter scale - hits the Kanto plain.
November 9th, 1923: The Beer Hall Putsch ends as the police show up. There is a misfire, resulting in the unfortunate death of one young Adolf Hitler.
1924:
January 14, 1924: HMS Anson, first of the three-ship Admiral-class 17550t carriers, launches; she will join Argus, Courageous, Furious, Glorious and Hermes as Royal Navy carriers. The Admirals are armed with two twin 6"/50 BL Mk.XXII and eight quad 2-pounder pom-poms; they are expected to carry 24 planes. Anson is the second purpose-built carrier of the Royal Navy.
January 21st, 1924: Lenin dies; Kamenev takes over his post on the Council of Labour and Defense, but Trotsky's ally Preobrazhensky takes over Sovnarkom instead of Rykov (Lenin's deputy in Sovnarkom).
March 21st, 1924: Anna May Wong Productions is founded by the popular film star and the investor Sid Grauman, just three days after Wong's second success, The Thief of Baghdad, was released. The company plans to raise money for films centered on Chinese myths and starring the popular actress.
May 4th, 1924: Igor Sikorsky crashes his S-29-A on its maiden flight; though he is uninjured, his company folds.
June 11, 1924: Sergey Kirov is promoted from leader of the Azerbaijani party organization to leader of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine.
July 31, 1924: Pancho Villa co-stars with Fred Thomson in the Western Apache!, a film about Geronimo; it is Villa's debut as an actor in his own right, rather than portraying himself. Villa will star in ten more films during his brief acting career.
September 1, 1924: Today, 21 Greek naval cadets begin studies at the École Navale.
September 2nd, 1924: A Category 3 hurricane, the fourth tropical storm of the 1924 hurricane season, slams into Savannah, Georgia, causing significant damage to a number of historic buildings in the city - most notably the Sorrel Weed House.
October 9, 1924: The private liquor stock of Frederic M. Sackett, Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky and self-proclaimed anti-prohibitionist, is revealed; this causes the Anti-Saloon League to withdraw its endorsement, and will ultimately cost Sackett the election.
October 29th, 1924: Frederick Fox Riley, defeating Liberal Robert Strother Stewart and Tory Harold MacMillan, is one of the 154 Labour Party MPs elected in 1924 - not enough to preserve the minority government that had been in place since January, but more than enough to displace the Liberals as the chief rival to the Conservatives.
November 5th, 1924: President Harding is reelected in a landslide over Democratic candidate Al Smith of New York. In elections for the Senate, Democrat James Tunnell defeats incumbent Republican L. Heisler Ball (R-DE) and independent T. Coleman Du Pont, Alva Adams, appointed to fill Republican Samuel D. Nicholson's seat in 1923, unseats incumbent Republican Lawrence C. Phipps (R-CO) - though Republican Rice W. Means wins the special election to fill Adams' old seat, Samuel G. Bratton unseats Holm Bursum (R-NM), who had been appointed to fill Albert Fall's seat, and William Chilton narrowly beats Guy D. Goff, the Republican nominee to replace retiring Senator Davis Elkins (R-WV). Magnus Johnson (FL-MN) narrowly holds his seat, though Republican William Pine crushes Democrat John Walton in the race to replace retiring Senator Robert L. Owen (D-OK) and Republican Frederick Gillett unseats Democrat David Walsh in Calvin Coolidge's home state of Massachusetts. The end result is that the Republicans hold just 48 seats, as many as the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party combined. Only Coolidge's re-election as vice-president, and the occasional support of progressive Democrats and the two Farmor-Labor Party Senators, allows the GOP to maintain control of the Senate. In the House, however, the Republicans made gains, winning fifteen seats.
December 3, 1924: Fourteen naval mines are stolen from a former Austro-Hungarian depot in Dalmatia; in a week, they will be sold to the Republic of the Rif.
1925:
January 19, 1925: The Xinjiangese Islamic Revolution occurs. Nur Bekri, a famed resistance leader, leads a province-wide revolt in 1925. The Ma Clique (the local warlords) are quickly defeated and in December 1925, the East Turkestan Islamic Republic, also known as the Free State of Xinjiang, is established, with Nur Bekri as its first President.
January 21, 1925: Edouard Herriot successfully passes a major tax reform law, with some cooperation from Raymond Poincaré; the Dawes Plan's reduction in reparations payments from Germany and the need to counter Mussolini's arms buildup made it necessary to curb tax evasion and increase revenues.
January 24th, 1925: Chicago's north side crime boss Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran attempt to assassinate rival Johnny Torrio outside his home. Torrio is tiped off however, and is waiting for them. Weiss and Moran are both killed in a hail of gunfire, throwing the North Side into chaos.
February 5, 1925: Benjamin Cardozo, Associate Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, is confirmed as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by the Senate, replacing Joseph McKenna (who had resigned due to ill health). As a well-respected Democrat, he was thought likely to be able to get past the Senate.
February 18th, 1925: Bukharin's Right Opposition and Kamenev's Center Movement successfully oust Preobrazhensky from Sovnarkom; Zinoviev, Kamenev's most loyal ally, replaces him.
February 25th, 1925: "The Call of Cthulhu" is written by Liu Hui Wen in Shanghai, China.
March 4th, 1925: Trotsky resigns from the position of General Secretary, unable to cope with the workload; he cites a desire to refocus attention on reforming and modernizing the Red Army, and proposes that his protege Georgy Pyatakov, deputy chair of Gosplan, take over the post of General Secretary.
March 11th, 1925: The Bush family moves to New York City, New York, so that Prescott, as VP of A. Harriman & Co., can work at the company's headquarters.
April 10th, 1925: British anthropologist Lietenant Colonel Percy Fawcett reports the discovery of the aboriginal "Akakor Empire" in Mato Grosso, Brazil.
April 17th, 1925: Sikorsky is hired by Grover Loening, director of the Loening Aeronautical Engineering corporation, joining Leroy Grumman.
April 22, 1925: A Brazilian expedition to the supposed site of Akakor returns, having found nothing there.
April 26, 1925: Private investigators hired by the Royal Geographic Society of London discover fake 'artifacts' under construction by confederates of Fawcett.
April 30, 1925: Fawcett, disgraced, resigns from the Army.
May 11th, 1925: The doctor informs Mr. Nixon that his son, Arthur, only has the cold and should recover within the week.
May 18th, 1925: Arthur Nixon is once again fully healthy.
May 21, 1925: Negotiations between Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mufid Libohova, Albanian Minister of Finance, succeed - a National Bank of Albania will be established, backed by British capital. Relations between Britain and Italy (and between Albania and Italy) turn sour.
June 12, 1925: Chittaranjan Das recovers from his illness and resumes his position as mayor of Calcutta.
June 15, 1925: The Argentine navy orders a cruiser-carrier from Fore River Shipbuilding Company to match the Chilean aircraft carrier; bids from Vickers Shipbuilding and Arsenal de Brest proved too expensive for the frugal President Alvear, despite desires by some to buy British.
July 11, 1925: Basileus Konstantinos, a Bretagne-class battleship laid down for the Greek Navy back in 1914, finally launches.
August 3, 1925: Peljidiin Genden, President of the People's Republic of Mongolia, forces Khorloogiin Choibalsan, a supporter of Joseph Stalin, into exile in Canada.
August 19th, 1925: Arthur Nixon is still completely fine.
September 11, 1925: After a storm front finally lifts, General Miguel Primo de Rivera begins an amphibious landing at Alhucemas Bay. The landing had been planned for the 7th, and word had leaked; as such, Rifian defenses, although primarily focused on the wrong beaches, were able to cause somewhat high casualties. A naval mine sank the destroyer Velasco, killing her entire 86-man crew, while Rifian machine-gun nests and artillery killed an additional 109 and wounded 511. Nonetheless, Rivera's skillful use of combined arms, including naval gunnery, aircraft, a single rigid airship, and FT-17 tanks, allowed 13,000 troops to be landed in the space of two days.
October 1st, 1925: German negotiators successfully chip away at the naval limitations imposed on the Reichsmarine by the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was now granted the right to field six heavy cruisers (with armament of up to 12" (304.8mm)) of up to 12000t displacement, eight light cruisers of up to 6000t displacement, 18 destroyers of up to 800t displacement, and 20 torpedo boats.
October 15th, 1925: On a clear day in Pittsburgh, Washington Senators ace pitcher Walter Johnson wins Game 7 of the World Series, 6-3.
October 19, 1925: Primo de Rivera finishes consolidating the region of Alhucemas Bay, clearing the last heights held by the Republic of the Rif.
November 8, 1925: Giuseppe Zangara, a bricklayer and recent immigrant from Italy, dies after an accident at a construction site in New Jersey.
December 9th, 1925: Mulan, Maid of China, the first film by Anna May Wong Productions, is released, and proves wildly successful.
1926:
January 3, 1926: Founding of རེཨེདོམ ་རོཨུཔ་ (Tibetans for Democracy). Anil Shamar, an American-educated Tibetan merchant, founds Tibetans for Democracy, a republican group. The Dalai Lama is largely unsuccessful in containing the spread of pro-republican fervor, and by 1927, at least 30% of Tibet's population favors the establishment of a republic. Chinese Invasion of Xinjiang: The National Revolutionary Army crosses the border in early 1926; however, with the support of the Soviet Union, the Turkestanis are able to beat them with heavy losses.
January 11th, 1926: Hannah Milhous Nixon discovers that she is once again pregnant with a child.
February 12th, 1926: Frances Stevenson, the mistress of David Lloyd George [DLG], gives birth to a baby girl. She names DLG as the father. He decides to accept paternity. The parents give the name Myfanwy (Welsh for beloved) to their daughter.
February 14th, 1926: Margaret Lloyd George, DLG's wife, says that she will stand by her husband. She had known for several years about his infidelity with Miss Stevenson, but she knows in her heart that she is David's first and deepest love. She will love and care for Myfanwy as if she were her own daughter.
February 17th, 1926: In order to take maximum advantage of DLG's public admission of adultery to stop him becoming leader of the Liberal Party, Herbert Asquith resigns as leader.
February 18th, 1926 : DLG says that 'for personal reasons' he will not be standing for leadership of the Liberal Party.
February 19th, 1926: Walter Runciman announces his candidature for leadership of the Liberal Party. As one of the few Liberal MPs elected in the October 1924 general election against both Tory and Labour opponents (he captured Swansea, West from Labour), he said he would keep the party independent of any pact or alliance with the Tories or Labour.
February 20th, 1926: William Wedgwood Benn announces that he is standing for leader of the Liberal Party with the intention of returning the party to its radical roots.
February 21st, 1926: Sir Robert Hutchison, the assistant whip, announces that he is standing for leader of the Liberal Party, He was a Lloyd George Liberal. The other two candidates were Asquithian Liberals.
February 22nd, 1926 : Sir John Simon declares that he is giving his full support to Runciman in the Liberal leadership contest.
March 10th, 1926: First ballot of Liberal MPs: Hutchison 18 votes, Runciman 13 votes, Wedgwood Benn 9 votes. Wedgwood Benn withdraws from the contest.
March 11th, 1926: Wedgwood Benn declares that Runciman has his full support in the leadership contest. He asks all the MPs who voted for him to vote for Runciman on the second ballot.
March 17th, 1926: Result of second ballot of Liberal MPs: Runciman 22 votes, Hutchison 18 votes. Runciman becomes leader of the Liberal Party.
March 31st, 1926: J. Edgar Hoover leaves the Justice of Department after photos are found showing him and a second man in a bedroom with their pants down.
April 29, 1926: Bessie Coleman, the first African-American female to obtain a pilot's license, pulls out of an airshow in Jacksonville scheduled for May 1 after a grease fire destroys her recently-purchased JN-4.
May 11, 1926: The New York Renaissance Five, an all-black basketball team, beats their rivals, the New York Celtics, reigning American Basketball League champions, 42-36, in an exhibition match played in a packed Madison Square Garden.
June 5, 1926: Braunschweig, a German pre-dreadnought battleship, is sold to Peru and renamed BAP Aguirre after Elias Aguirre, a Peruvian naval commander. Aguirre is meant to help counter the Chilean navy's battleship Almirante Latorre and carrier Almirante Cochrane. Aguirre will be refit into a slow flak cruiser; her secondary battery of 6.7" guns will be replaced with eight single 5.9"/45 SK L/45 mounts and eight single 3.5"/45 Flak L/45 AA guns, while the eighteen quick-firing 3.5"/35 mounts will be replaced by twelve 3.5"/45 Flak L/45 AA mounts and twelve 37mm cannon.
June 14, 1927: Charles Lindbergh begins developing a long-range airliner for Curtiss, provisionally designated the Model 52, intended to compete with the Fokker F.VII.
June 27th, 1926: Heinrich Himmler is killed when he is hit by a car as he walks across the street.
July 9, 1926: Harding shelves plans for diplomatic recognition of the USSR, but does approve a proposal to send Charles G. Dawes, who had developed the Dawes Plan to settle the war reparations issue, to Moscow to discuss trade and other matters with the Soviets.
August 9, 1926: Captain Eisenhower is appointed commander of the 1st Independent Tank Battalion stationed in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The battalion operates the Medium Tank M1; it is organized into three companies, each with ten tanks - a command tank and three 3-tank platoons.
August 30rd, 1926: Gustav Stresemann becomes German Chancellor for the third time.
September 12th, 1926: Mao Zedong is caught by Republic of China forces, and is placed in jail; Chiang Kai-Shek plans to make Mao stand trial for revolt against the Republic.
September 18, 1926: A category-4 hurricane smashes Coral Gables and the Miami region; worse, it creates a storm surge that overtakes the northern dikes of Lake Okeechobee, flooding the region.
September 21, 1926: The South Florida Hurricane makes landfall again near Dulac, Louisiana at 7 PM local time; by now, it has been weakened to a tropical storm. After proceeding inland a few hours, the storm is weakened so much as to dissipate just before midnight.
October 3, 1926: After an unsuccessful Catholic boycott of the Calles government and an equally unsuccessful attempt to lobby the government to repeal anti-religious policies, revolution seems likely. As such, Pancho Villa begins raising funds for a campaign against Calles, including oil company executives unhappy with Calles's policy on Mexican oil, Catholic reactionaries, friends made in Hollywood, and even Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple.
November 3rd, 1926: Nellie Tayloe Ross, a progressive 'dry' Democrat, is narrowly re-elected as governor of Wyoming, defeating Republican Frank Emerson; the same day, corrupt 'wet' Democrat Ma Ferguson, having won a bruising primary fight earlier in the year, is re-elected governor of Texas.
November 8, 1926: Benito Mussolini is present at the commissioning of the first Italian battleship of the Vittorio Veneto class. Vittorio Veneto is based on the design for the Caracciolo class, but with a larger anti-aircraft battery than initially planned. She sports four twin 381mm/40 M1914 cannon, a secondary of eight 150mm/52 M1923 cannon, an AA battery of twelve 90mm/45 M1924 and twelve twin 40mm/39 Vickers-Terni M1917, and six 21" torpedo tubes; she displaces 34000t and has a maximum speed of 28 knots.
December 14, 1926: Yugoslavia agrees to purchase the pre-dreadnought Condorcet from the French Navy; it's meant to serve as a sort of counterweight to the RM Roma (formerly the Austro-Hungarian battleship Tegetthoff). Condorcet, to be renamed Dalmacija in Yugoslav service, will be refit before finally commissioning in 1930. Her main battery of 12" Mle 1909 twin-mounts would be replaced with 340mm/45-caliber Mle 1912 twin mounts, while her secondary battery of 9.4" twin mounts would be replaced with modern, faster-firing 8"/50 Mle 1924 twin mounts and her flak belt would be modernized.
December 21st, 1926: French ace René Fonck wins the Orteig Prize, flying a Keystone K-47A Pathfinder biplane from Roosevelt Airfield in New York to Paris Le Bourget, accompanied by navigator Charles Clavier.
December 25th, 1926: A general strike in Cologne turns into a riot as local police are goaded into brutality.
December 26, 1926: Rioters, strikers, and various other malcontents hole up in the main building of the University of Cologne. Mayor Konrad Adenauer personally orders police to storm the building; eleven die in the fighting, including four policemen, and the building itself is wrecked.
1927:
January 1, 1927: Discussions between Satyendra Nath Bose and Niels Bohr lead to the development of the concept of a 'Bose-Bohr condensate,' a state of matter in which identical particles with integer spin would all fall into the lowest accessible quantum state.
January 11, 1927: Menshevik Evgen Gvaladze, recently denied membership on the Board of the Defending Lawyers of Georgia, assassinates Lavrentiy Beria as an act of revenge for Beria's suppression of the August Uprising of 1924.
February 13, 1927: William Boeing, CEO of Boeing Air Transport, approaches the Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft, the world's premier airline, about possible partnership; if such a partnership would occur, DELAG would be able to extend its flight destinations to the West Coast. DELAG and Boeing sign an official agreement.
February 20, 1927: The building of the first zeppelin docks in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle begins.
February 25, 1927: After a Cristero victory over Mexican government forces in Guanajuato, Pancho Villa crosses into Sonora with a party of 2,000 troops (half on horseback), four privately-purchased Ryan M-2s armed with a pair of rear-facing army-surplus Lewis Guns, and twelve armored automobiles, announcing his opposition to the atheist, socialist Calles regime.
March 18, 1927: France commissions the Béarn, a battleship armed with three triple 340mm/45-caliber Mle 1912s, eighteen 138mm/55 Mle 1910s, eight 75mm/50 Mle 1924 AA guns, and six 450mm torpedo tubes. She displaces 27000t, is powered by turbine engines, and can travel up to 26 knots. Her only remaining sister, Languedoc, was in danger of being canceled back in August 1925, but the naval threat from Italy forced PM Herriot to restore funds for the ship; she's expected to commission in about 18 months.
April 5, 1927: Deutschland, the first new German large cruiser, launches from her slip at the Deutsche Werke shipyards in Kiel. She is ostensibly a 12000t cruiser, though the actual displacement will likely be higher; nonetheless, it will be consistently reported as 12000t. Deutschland will mount similar armament to the British County-class large cruisers under construction, but will have lighter armor. Armament is planned to consist of a main battery of two triple 12"/56-caliber SK C/27 mounts, a secondary battery of three triple 5.9"/60 SK C/25 mounts, six of the planned 4.1"/65 SK C/29 AA mounts, eight 37mm cannon and ten 20mm cannon, along with two triple mounts for 21" torpedoes. Speed is projected to be 34 knots. Deutschland is the cornerstone of Vice-Admiral Hans Zenker's plans for the Reichsmarine; the service chief intends for a fleet of six of these cruisers for commerce-raiding, relying on their speed and their guns to outmatch or outrun hostile ships.
April 14, 1927: The Lithuanian Peasant Popular Union attempts a coup d'etat against the right-wing nationalist government of Andreas Smetona, seizing control of key offices in Kaunas; they are unable to take the railway station. Seimas member Juozas Pajaujis, a supporter of the coup, is killed in the fighting.
April 15, 1927: The Lithuanian army and the Rifleman's Union (a nationalist-backed paramilitary organization) mop up remaining resistance. In light of the crisis, Smetona dissolves the Seimas, calling for new elections on April 30.
April 21, 1927: Negotiations between Smetona's Nationalists and the Lithuanian Christian Democrats lead to a formal coalition between the two.
April 27, 1927: USS Pensacola, the first of a six-ship class of large scout cruisers, is laid down. Pensacola will displace 15,450t, and will feature 12" cannon as her main armament.
April 28th, 1927: Li Dazhao, co-founder of the Communist Party of China, escapes the KMT purge of Communists, surviving only with the support of Soviet agents.
April 30, 1927: Smetona and Ernestas Galvanauskas are elected President and Prime Minister in a fairly corrupt election.
May 4, 1927: A Cristero column of 1,000 rebels links up with Villa's forces, which have now swelled to 3,000, in Rosario, Sinaloa; Villa's scout planes have helped him avoid contact with major government forces, in spite of the size of his column.
May 20, 1927: Charles Lindbergh resigns from flying the U.S. Air Mail for the Robertson Aircraft Corporation in order to work for Curtiss as an engineer and test pilot.
June 3rd, 1927: President Warren G. Harding signs the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Act into law, attempting to maintain 1913 agricultural price levels and counteract the overproduction that had occurred during the Great War by purchasing surplus crops for sale overseas; losses incurred would be made up for by fees against farm producers.
July 7, 1927: DELAG orders four new airships; in honor of the agreement with Boeing, one is ordered from Goodyear-Zeppelin.
July 9, 1927: Villa's column links up with the largest force of Cristeros, led by Father Vega, in Jalisco, having not had to face a single battle.
July 11, 1927: Villa and Vega begin a series of raids on Mexican railway lines, hoping to cut off Mexican troops in Jalisco from their supply lines.
August 1-9, 1927 The Siege of Nanchang occurs. The Chinese Communist Party seizes control of Nanchang; much to the surprise of the Nationalists, the workers in the city also rise up and join the communists. Zhou Enlai takes over political leadership of the city, while Zhu De is given command of the nascent People's Liberation Army. Over the next few days, the city is besieged by Chiang Kai'shek, who is unable to defeat the PLA. However, the city has few supplies, and quickly runs out of food. On August 7th, Zhu De attacks Nationalist lines north of Nanchang, attempting to break out. He succeeds, and the Communists retreat north, to Fuzhou.
August 19th, 1927: Mendez Nunez, converted into an aircraft carrier, commissions into the Spanish Navy, twelve years after she was ordered.
August 28, 1927: Thirteen Turkish naval cadets begin studies at the Royal Naval Engineering College in Keyham.
September 7, 1927: Li Dazhao leads the Autumn Harvest Uprising. However, it fails and he is arrested and imprisoned in Beijing.
September 8, 1927: Chiang engages with Zhu De's army in the Battle of Fuzhou. After hours of bloody fighting for both sides, Zhu De is forced to withdraw, this time into Hubei, where he and Zhou Enlai establish a Hubei Soviet.
September 20, 1927: In the aftermath of the battle of Fuzhou, 30 Communist soldiers, led by one Pu Yingban, attack the prison of Anqing, in Anhui province in an attempt to free Mao Zedong. Only 9 of the soldiers surive, but Mao is successfully rescued and brought to Hubei.
September 22, 1927: Jack Dempsey reclaims the world heavyweight title by defeating Gene Tunney with a knockout in the seventh round.
November 4, 1927: The Legend of the White Serpent, a film by Anna May Wong Productions, is released. The plot, in which an evil serpent is accidentally transformed into a woman, who then falls in love with a young scholar, is an adaptation of a Chinese legend; much of the cast, and a portion of the crew, is Asian, in keeping with Wong's desire to develop the Chinese-American film industry; funding comes in part from the Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco affiliates of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. It was the second 'talkie' released, but, thanks to Sid Grauman's connections and the support of Chinese-American groups in New York, it was the first to see a national release, beating out The Jazz Singer by a month.
December 3, 1927: The Bank of Athens opens its third Albanian branch in Tirana, joining Durres and Korca.
1928:
January 1, 1928: The Mono Aircraft Company is purchased by Curtiss.
January 3, 1928: Negotiations between the US Football Association and the American Soccer League succeed - the former agrees to move the National Challenge Cup to the summer, rather than the winter, so that games would not be during the ASL's season, and the latter agrees to permit its teams to enter the Cup.
January 17th, 1928: Huey Long wins re-election as governor of Louisiana, winning 45% of the vote - well more than the 27% won by each of the anti-Long candidates.
March 4, 1928: HMS Cumberland, the first cruiser of the County class, commissions into the Royal Navy. Cumberland displaces 17,000 tons; her main armament consists of two triple 12"/50 Mk.XIV turrets, with a secondary armament of six 4"/45 Mk.V high-angle mounts. Two quad 2-pounder 'pom pom' AA mounts, two quad 0.50" machine guns, and two quad 21" torpedo tube mounts are fitted, along with a catapult for two Fairey IIIF seaplanes. Her maximum speed is rated at 28 knots
March 13, 1928: The Monument to the March Dead in Weimar, Germany, a monument to workers who lost their lives during the Kapp Putsch of 1920, is vandalized.
May 9, 1928: A coalition of barnstorming teams, including the New York Rens, the New York Celtics, and the Philadelphia SPHAs, takes control of the American Basketball League.
May 11 1928: Frank Whittle is commissioned as a Pilot Officer into the RAF.
June 1st, 1928: Following the disastrous election results, the new DNVP chairman Alfred Hugenberg takes a radical new volkisch course in the DNVP special conference in Stettin.
June 3, 1928: RM Littorio, the second and last Vittorio Veneto-class battleship, is laid down.
June 9: 1928: Japanese Emperor Hirohito proposes that the Diet sack several Japanese military officers supportive of an invasion of China.
June 19, 1928: José López Rega dies of accidental food poisoning after eating an undercooked piece of chicken.
Also today, in the Wiesbaden Conference, Hugenberg's DVNP merges with General Erich Ludendorff's Voelkisch-Nationale Block (NVP) and Josef Goebble's National Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands (NSPD). They form the Nationale Volksblock (NVB)
June 28th, 1928: Henry T. Rainey, former Speaker of the House (D-IL), and Senator Alben W. Barkley (D-KY), are nominated as presidential and vice-presidential candidates by the DNC; Al Smith, expecting that the GOP would win in '28 and not wanting to be beaten again, had not seriously campaigned, while Cordell Hull found himself outmaneuvered.
Also today, the Games of the IX Olympiad open in Los Angeles, California. The US, host of the Games, will win 61 medals in total, including 24 gold medals.
July 1, 1928: Kawamura Takeji, Governor-General of Formosa, begins negotiations with Long Yun, governor of Yunnan, for the establishment of Japanese factories in the province, as part of a general program of industrial outreach in China and Formosa.
July 5, 1928: Negotiations with Long Yun end favorably for the Japanese government, with the "King of Yunnan" agreeing to allow the establishment of factories and, surprisingly, Japanese enclaves throughout Yunnan. These actions on the part of Yun are not ignored by Chiang Kai'shek, who begins fearing the collapse of China.
July 10, 1928: A grease fire burns out of control, eventually burning down the restaurant La Bombilla, along with seven other nearby buildings in San Angel, Mexico D.F. José de Léon Toral, a Catholic militant, is among the victims of the fire.
September 1st, 1928: In spite of opposition from both Trotsky and Zinoviev, the Sixth Congress of the Comintern narrowly adopts a policy of supporting "Popular Fronts", encouraging European Communist parties to join broad left-wing alliances containing Social Democrats and others. Trotsky had favoured support but not full alliances, and Zinoviev condemned any collaboration with "bourgeois liberals". This division in the opposition was largely why the policy was able to pass.
October 7, 1928: Shanty Hogan wins Game 3 of the 1928 World Series in the Polo Grounds in dramatic fashion, hitting a walk-off grand slam off Yankees pitcher Tom Zachary. It would be the New York Giants' only win of the Series.
October 11, 1928: Juan Trippe, CEO of Pan American Airways, buys 10 Keystone-Loening K-66 Air Yacht twin-engine nine-seat flying boats. The K-66, designed by Sikorsky before he left the company, would be Keystone-Loening's most successful civilian airplane.
November 6th, 1928: Republicans Herbert Hoover and William Borah defeat Rainey and Barkley, winning 55% of the popular vote and 367 electoral votes to the Rainey-Barkley ticket's 43% and 166 electoral votes. Republican Alanson B. Houghton unseats Democratic Senator Royal S. Copeland of New York in a narrow contest.
December 22, 1928: Vyacheslav Molotov, a rising figure in the Soviet government, is killed when he slips on a patch of ice and is run over by a horse-cart outside of the Palace of the Soviets.
December 31, 1928-August 11, 1929 The Tibetan-Xinjiangese War is fought. The Tibetan army invades Xinjiang and engages in several bloody battles with the Islamic Republic's soldiers. After a bloody counteroffensive, the Tibetans are forced back into Tibet proper after over a war.
1929:
January 1, 1929: The 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, signs a treaty with the Japanese Foreign Minister, entailing that Japan will train Tibet's army in exchange for the right to invest in and build factories in Tibet, thus opening Tibet up to Japanese trade. Several Japanese military advisors are sent to Lhasa. The Treaty of Lhasa also stipulates a provision for Japanese settlement in Tibet. Japanese immigrants will be given prime agricultural land and will have the right to own property and business in Tibet, unlike other foreigners. However, they still do not have the right to live in Lhasa; this is still reserved for native Tibetans.
January 2, 1929: Gustav Stresemann suffers a stroke, but eventually survives, if still a weakened man.
January 4th, 1929: Paul Von Hindenberg considers running for the Presidency of Germany in the up-coming election, but is talked out of it due to his age, even though he is promised backing from several high-ranking army figures.
January 6, 1929: Yugoslav politician Svetozar Pribićević is accidentally shot and killed as he attempts to escape the troops of King Alexander of Yugoslavia, who have come to arrest him.
January 12 1929: Pilot Officer Whittle show his ideas for a jet engine to the Air Ministry. A.A. Griffith was a member of the board who heard Whittle’s Ideas and said it was too simple to work.
March 1, 1929: David Selznick, a producer recently hired by Anna May Wong Productions, organizes the Chinese Braves, a Chinese-American barnstorming basketball team, intending to film their exploits. Seven months later, his film, Cagers, is released, focusing around a tilt between the Braves (none of which stood more than 5'9") and Olson's Terrible Swedes (all of whom were taller than 6'4").
March 12, 1929: San Francisco Aerodrome is completed, acting as a combination zeppelin dock and airport.
March 16, 1929: The Litvinov Pact, a non-aggression pact between the USSR, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania, comes into effect.
March 19 1929: The French Navy lays down the keel of the Joffre. This is their first fleet carrier. It will displace 27,000 tons, have a top speed of 30knots, and carry 75 aircraft.
March 22, 1929: Los Angeles Aerodrome completed; it is just a zeppelin dock.
April 1, 1929: Seattle Aerodrome, another combination, is completed.
April 3, 1929: Japan agrees to send several military advisors to Yunnan to help build up Long Yun's regional army. Kai'shek watches this with a wary eye, but he is too occupied with a rebellion in Manchuria to do anything about it.
April 6, 1929: Percy Ludgate finishes his Ludgate Analytical Engine, a primitive, but useful programmable computer, in Dublin, and begins searching for someone to purchase it.
April 15, 1929: Representative Willis C. Hawley (R-Oregon), Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, proposes an act that would increase tariffs on most industrial goods to unprecedented levels.
April 29, 1929: RM Gorizia, a Trento-class cruiser, is laid down; she will be the last heavy cruiser to commission in the Regia Marina before the war with the Balkan Pact.
May 3, 1929: Honolulu Aerodrome begun. DELAG's reach now extends over two continents.
May 11, 1929: Cordell Hull (D-Tennessee), ranking minority member of Ways and Means, issues a minority report on the proposed Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, vociferously criticizing it and arguing against the need for industrial protection. Two days later, he will use over an hour of time to argue against the bill, with Minority Leader John Nance Garner yielding time to Hull. However, the comfortable Republican House majority passed the bill.
May 19, 1929: A protest outside the Excelsior movie theater in Tananarive, Madagascar against policies discriminating against the Malagasy fizzles, even though it was held on a public holiday and during a strike by medical school students. The nationalists and Communists who had planned the protest had intended for French Communist Edouard Planque to enter the theater with a dog, then to begin their protest, shouting that the French were discriminatory in favor of dogs over Malagasy; Planque failed to show, having accidentally slept in, and a rainstorm led to significantly reduced turnout.
May 20, 1929: Despite calls for reprisals from some of the more reactionary colons, including the head of the Ligue des Interets Economiques de Madagascar, Governor-General Marcel Olivier ignores the protest. A few prominent loudmouths are briefly detained, but nothing much comes of it, particularly since the strike - and thus the best opportunity for the nationalists - blows over by the end of the week.
Also on this day, the British aviation company Blackburn establishes an American subsidiary with General Motors, the Blackburn Aircraft Company, 90% owned by GM and 10% owned by Blackburn. Blackburn Aircraft will produce Blackburn designs in North and South America.
May 29, 1929: A raid on Manzanillo by Pancho Villa and a column of 800 Cristeros and other rebels is beaten back with heavy losses by Mexican government troops; worse, the last airplane in Villa's possession, a Monoprep 218 recently purchased by Villa's agents in Hollywood and delivered in secret, is shot down during the battle.
May 30, 1929: Labour wins the British general election with an overall majority of 3 seats over all other parties and independents. The number of MPs elected and percentage vote for each party and independents were as follows:
Labour: 309 - 39.1
Conservative: 232 - 35.6
Liberal: 65 - 24.1
Others: 9 - 1.2. The others comprised 3 Irish Nationalists, 1 independent Conservative, one independent Labour, one Socialist Prohibition Party, 3 independents.
Among the Conservatives who lost their seats were Lady Astor in Plymouth, Sutton and Kingsley Wood in Woolwich, West. In Birmingham, West Austen Chamberlain scrapes through with a majority of 31 in a straight fight with Labour because enough Liberals voted for him because of his internationalist, pro League of Nations foreign policy.
May 31, 1929: Stanley Baldwin resigns and Ramsay Macdonald becomes Prime Minister. His cabinet is the same as in OTL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Labour_Government - except that Lord Arnold is Secretary of State for India instead of William Wedgwood Benn who has stayed in the Liberal Party.
June 3, 1929: Pan American Airways establishes a partnership with the Grace Shipping Company, with routes throughout Latin America, intending to compete with Boeing's United Aircraft and Transport Corporation. The same day, Pan Am's holding company, the Aviation Corporation of the Americas, buys the Stearman Aircraft Company out before UATC can manage an offer.
July 1, 1929: The Soviet Union begins its first 5 Year Plan for industrialization.
July 4, 1929: Howard Hughes buys out the Ryan Aircraft Corporation, forestalling a proposed takeover by the Detroit Aircraft Corporation.
Also today, Benigno Ramos calls on a "Young Philippines" to engage in a civil-disobedience campaign against the American government on this day. The protests are brutally suppressed by United States Marines, killing at least 200 civilians.
July 19, 1929: The Detroit Aircraft Corporation buys 80% of the assets of the Lockheed Aircraft Company.
August 1, 1929: The L3/28 tankette, designed in 1928 enters service with the Italian Army and the MVSN Blackshirt militia. The tankette is inspired by the Carden-Lloyd, and is armed with a pair of 6.5mm light machine guns; armor is welded, and is 6-10mm thick. At 2.65 tons, the L3/28 is a very light vehicle; it is also rather inexpensive, allowing Mussolini to expand his army rapidly.
August 8, 1929: In the Twickenham by-election caused by the elevation of William Joynson-Hicks to the peerage as Viscount Brentford, Labour gains the seat from the Conservatives by a majority of 242.
August 9, 1929: The dissatisfaction with Baldwin in the Conservative Party after its defeat in the general election, receives a boost after the Twickenham by-election with the start of a Baldwin Must Go (BMG) campaign orchestrated in the Beaverbrook and Rothermere press.
August 27, 1929: Bessie Coleman wins the First Women's Air Derby, beating such rivals as Amelia Earhart, Florence 'Pancho' Barnes, Louise Thaden, and Thea Rasche to Cleveland. Later that day, she and her fellow racers began discussions about a collaborative organization to support female pilots, which would culminate in the first meeting of the Hundred Sparrows, also known as the International Organization of Woman Pilots, named after the 100 (of 118 invited) licensed female pilots who attended the meeting in Valley Stream, New York.
September 11, 1929: After consulting with his shadow cabinet and Conservative Central Office, Baldwin announces that he will resign the leadership of the Conservative Party when a new leader has been chosen.
September 12, 1929: Leopold Amery and Austen Chamberlain announce that they are candidates for leadership of the Conservative Party. In those days Conservative leaders were not elected, rather they 'emerged' after consultations with Conservatives in Parliament and in the country. Amery is a leading tariff reformer and is strongly committed to the cause of Imperial preference. Chamberlain supports protection but without the ideological intensity of Amery. While Chamberlain has the support of most of the shadow cabinet and the liberal wing of the party, Amery is supported by the bulk of the party who want tariff reform, and by the Beaverbrook and Rothermere press.
September 14, 1929: Senate President Borah, despite his own personal opposition, can do nothing but sit and watch as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, by now incorporating agricultural tariffs as well (in spite of McNary-Haughton already providing agricultural supports), is passed after a few months of horse-trading among Senators and speeches by anti-tariff Democrats. By the end of the month, the House and Senate bills are reconciled, and Hoover, despite personally opposing the bill, signs it, hoping to gain political advantage.
September 19, 1929: John Davidson, the Chairman of the Conservative Party organisation, announces that the bulk of the Conservative Party in Parliament and the country want Leopold Amery to be the leader of the party. Therefore he is now the leader of the Conservative Party. Amery says that he accepts with great humility the tremendous honour and privilege of leading the Conservative Party.
October 14, 1929: Juan Trippe orders a tinclad airship airliner to be developed, based on the ZMC-2, by the Aircraft Development Corporation, a subsidiary of the Detroit Aircraft Corporation.
October 21, 1929: An industrial mishap damages the Junkers D-2000, a prototype airliner which would have had passengers seated in the wings themselves, under construction for Lufthansa in Leipzig; construction is set back a month.
November 11, 1929: ARA Yrigoyen is formally commissioned by her namesake, President Hipolito Yrigoyen of Argentina, in person. She displaces 12,500t, is armed with three triple 6"/53 Mk.12 mounts, all forward, eight 3"/50 Mk.14 AA guns and four twin 0.50" M2 AA machine gun mounts spread across the hull, and two triple 21" torpedo tubes; she carries 25 aircraft, which can operate off a 375-foot angled flight deck. Yrigoyen can travel up to 30 knots, and is considered by the Argentines to be more than a match for the Chilean navy's carrier.
November 20, 1929: After a meeting of the shadow cabinet, Leopold Amery, the leader of the Conservative party, announces its commitment to a protectionist policy of imperial preference with tariffs on food imports from outside the British Empire.
November 21, 1929: Austen Chamberlain and Winston Churchill resign from the shadow cabinet because of their opposition to its new trade policy.
Also on this day, the German Third Cavalry Division, led by Gerd von Rundstedt and supported by Ernst Rohm's Sturmabteilung and the Jungdeutscher Ordern - but not by the NVB - seize the railway lines, telegraph stations, and other key facilities in Berlin, Dortmund, Hamburg and Koenigsberg, staging a coup d'etat. The coup is backed by a number of colonels and lesser officers, and the First and Third Infantry Divisions see half their combat strength turned traitor. Rundstedt plans to name Werner von Blomberg President of Germany and impose a quasi-fascist military regime, but Blomberg, knowing that Rundstedt does not have complete control over the military, demurs.
November 22, 1929: Blomberg rejects Rundstedt's offer, as do other leading officers and a variety of nationalists, but Werner Freiherr von Fritsch accepts the offer of President of Germany. Rundstedt apparently was unwilling to accept the presidency himself. Admiral Hans Zenker, commander of the Reichsmarine, formally denounces the coup, and begins planning to retake Koenigsberg and Hamburg; his fleet largely remains loyal, and the few traitorous officers are detained quickly. German Communists and Socialists call for new general strikes, hoping to end the coup the way that the Kapp Putsch fell apart; the Communists also plan to use force to help defeat the plot. The NVB declares that it was not involved in planning the coup; leadership refuse to commit to supporting or opposing it.
November 23, 1929: Deutschland arrives in Hamburg from Kiel, escorted by two destroyers and six torpedo boats; the large cruiser's twelve-inch guns provide fire support for loyalist First Infantry Division troops, backed by local left-wing paramilitary organizations, particularly the Rotfrontkampferbund (Red Front Fighters' League). By three o'clock, rebel forces surrender.
November 24, 1929: Fighting between pro-coup and anti-coup paramilitaries in Dessau causes an unrelated electrical fire to destroy the Junkers factory there, as firefighters were unable to respond due to the fighting. As a result, the D-2000 prototype is lost, along with the principal production line for Junkers.
November 26, 1929: The last fighting of the Rundstedt-Fritsch Putsch comes to a close. General Edwin von Stulpenagl's Fourth Infantry Division is heavily involved in the fighting, as are the Rotfrontkampferbund and the center-left paramilitary Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold; the latter single-handedly drove off an SA push on Potsdam.
November 29, 1929: Alexander Shlyapnikov returns to his old post as People's Commissar for Labour, replacing Vasili Schmidt, a sign of the increased power of the Left Communists in the Soviet Union.
December 1, 1929: Léon Cayla arrives in Madagascar to replace Olivier as Governor-General. A representative of the Ligue talks with him about the need to keep Madagascar White and French, and about his predecessor's atrocious mishandling of the riot of May 19.
Also on this day, an American Catholic priest is murdered by drunken government soldiers in Tijuana, ostensibly for wearing clerical garb.
December 5th, 1929: American Catholics in San Diego, including a sizeable group of Mexican refugees and Mexican-Americans, stage a demonstration in support of the Cristeros.
Also today, Leroy Grumman, Igor Sikorsky, and four other former Loening employees, unwilling to move to Pennsylvania (home of the Keystone Aircraft Corporation that bought Loening in '28), found the Sikorsky-Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation on Long Island.
December 7, 1929 In a speech in Birmingham, Leo Amery said that Great Britain should withdraw from the League of Nations and develop the economic and military unity of the Empire. This would be his policy if he became Prime Minister.
December 9, 1929 Sir Samuel Hoare resigns from the shadow cabinet in opposition to Amery's policy on the League of Nations.
December 31, 1929: The Mei Wah Club of Los Angeles, a girl's basketball club for the Chinese-American community, is founded
Events from the 1920's:
1921:
August 19 1921: Charles Whittlesey, unable to return to the law because of the demand placed on him for speeches, rejoins the army as a Major.
August 26th, 1921: Franklin D. Roosevelt dies after spending nearly a month with deteriorating health from catching some sort of illness during his trip to Canada.
November 9, 1921: Greece commissions Lambros Katsonis (ex-HMS Chester) and Antinavarchos Kountouriotis (ex-HMS Birkenhead), two cruisers it had ordered before the Great War; the Greek government, fearing that the Entente would not intervene in the Greco-Turkish War, decided to start to build up a fleet to counter the Turks and Soviets.
December 10th, 1921: Shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics in recognition of his explanation of the photo-electric effect, Albert Einstein is killed in a chance car accident in Sweden, much to the dismay of many.
1922:
February 10th, 1922: The Washington Naval Conference breaks down; no treaty is produced. The delegates do agree to meet again in six months.
April 11th, 1922: Herbert O. Yardley, head of the Black Chamber, is struck by a car on the way to work; he is forced to stay in the hospital for six months, recuperating.
March 1, 1922: The monitor HMS Gorgon is sold to Romania and renamed NMS Stefan cel Mar, giving the Romanians a local counter to the Turkish Sultan Yavuz Selim and the Soviet Black Sea Fleet.
October 16, 1922: Percy Ludgate, a Dublin mathematician, survives a severe bout of pneumonia and continues work on his "Ludgate Analytical Engine".
November 11th, 1922: Vladimir Lenin reads his testament aloud before the Soviet Party. It has been slightly altered, after a few visits from both Stalin and Trotsky, and the Testament now criticized Stalin greatly, suggested that he be replaced as General Secretary, and it even went so far as to suggest that Trotsky take his place. After the reading of the testament, Stalin leaves the building to think, and is assassinated once outside by an OGPU agent, who escapes.
December 4th, 1922: The Washington Naval Arms Treaty is signed by representatives of the UK, Japan and the US. It declares a halt to new battleship and battlecruiser construction (with battleships and battlecruisers defined as ships of 18000t or greater, mounting cannon of 13" (330mm) or greater caliber), and to the fortification of League mandate territories in the Pacific (and of the Aleutians and Guam). It is far weaker than the treaty proposed in the first round, but the intransigent American and Japanese delegations are unwilling to compromise further - especially after the French and Italians had already walked out.
December 5th, 1922: After the Washington Naval Treaty - which does not restrict the conversion of laid-down battleships into aircraft carriers - is signed, the US begins conversion of all six Lexington-class battlecruisers currently laid down into aircraft carriers.
December 6th, 1922: Japan follows the American lead, beginning the conversion of two Tosa-class battleships into Kaga-class aircraft carriers of two laid-down Amagi-class battlecruisers into aircraft carriers. However, the Navy cancels the other two Amagi-class battlecruisers, which have yet to be laid down - and thus cannot be built.
December 20th, 1922: HMS Howe, HMS Rodney and HMS Anson, the three sisters to HMS Hood, are reordered as aircraft carriers.
1923:
January 10th, 1923: Captain George S. Patton is transferred to the Panama Canal Zone to serve as Executive Officer to General Fox Conner.
January 22nd, 1923: The Toll of the Sea, the first all-color Hollywood film, is released, two months after the original print was damaged. It sees rave reviews, particularly for star Anna May Wong.
July 20th, 1923: An attempted assassination of Pancho Villa fails, thanks to the effective response of Villa's bodyguards.
August 2nd, 1923: Warren G. Harding suffers a heart attack. Despite the scare, docters are able to save his life, and he recovers quickly.
August 17th, 1923: Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower officially petitions the US Congress for funds for an armored force in the United States.
August 19, 1923: Pancho Villa sells his hacienda and moves to California, fearing another plot on his life by Calles and Obregón.
August 27, 1923: Twelve Romanian naval cadets begin studies at the École Navale in Brest, France.
September 1st, 1923: A moderately strong earthquake - 4.9 on the Richter scale - hits the Kanto plain.
November 9th, 1923: The Beer Hall Putsch ends as the police show up. There is a misfire, resulting in the unfortunate death of one young Adolf Hitler.
1924:
January 14, 1924: HMS Anson, first of the three-ship Admiral-class 17550t carriers, launches; she will join Argus, Courageous, Furious, Glorious and Hermes as Royal Navy carriers. The Admirals are armed with two twin 6"/50 BL Mk.XXII and eight quad 2-pounder pom-poms; they are expected to carry 24 planes. Anson is the second purpose-built carrier of the Royal Navy.
January 21st, 1924: Lenin dies; Kamenev takes over his post on the Council of Labour and Defense, but Trotsky's ally Preobrazhensky takes over Sovnarkom instead of Rykov (Lenin's deputy in Sovnarkom).
March 21st, 1924: Anna May Wong Productions is founded by the popular film star and the investor Sid Grauman, just three days after Wong's second success, The Thief of Baghdad, was released. The company plans to raise money for films centered on Chinese myths and starring the popular actress.
May 4th, 1924: Igor Sikorsky crashes his S-29-A on its maiden flight; though he is uninjured, his company folds.
June 11, 1924: Sergey Kirov is promoted from leader of the Azerbaijani party organization to leader of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine.
July 31, 1924: Pancho Villa co-stars with Fred Thomson in the Western Apache!, a film about Geronimo; it is Villa's debut as an actor in his own right, rather than portraying himself. Villa will star in ten more films during his brief acting career.
September 1, 1924: Today, 21 Greek naval cadets begin studies at the École Navale.
September 2nd, 1924: A Category 3 hurricane, the fourth tropical storm of the 1924 hurricane season, slams into Savannah, Georgia, causing significant damage to a number of historic buildings in the city - most notably the Sorrel Weed House.
October 9, 1924: The private liquor stock of Frederic M. Sackett, Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky and self-proclaimed anti-prohibitionist, is revealed; this causes the Anti-Saloon League to withdraw its endorsement, and will ultimately cost Sackett the election.
October 29th, 1924: Frederick Fox Riley, defeating Liberal Robert Strother Stewart and Tory Harold MacMillan, is one of the 154 Labour Party MPs elected in 1924 - not enough to preserve the minority government that had been in place since January, but more than enough to displace the Liberals as the chief rival to the Conservatives.
November 5th, 1924: President Harding is reelected in a landslide over Democratic candidate Al Smith of New York. In elections for the Senate, Democrat James Tunnell defeats incumbent Republican L. Heisler Ball (R-DE) and independent T. Coleman Du Pont, Alva Adams, appointed to fill Republican Samuel D. Nicholson's seat in 1923, unseats incumbent Republican Lawrence C. Phipps (R-CO) - though Republican Rice W. Means wins the special election to fill Adams' old seat, Samuel G. Bratton unseats Holm Bursum (R-NM), who had been appointed to fill Albert Fall's seat, and William Chilton narrowly beats Guy D. Goff, the Republican nominee to replace retiring Senator Davis Elkins (R-WV). Magnus Johnson (FL-MN) narrowly holds his seat, though Republican William Pine crushes Democrat John Walton in the race to replace retiring Senator Robert L. Owen (D-OK) and Republican Frederick Gillett unseats Democrat David Walsh in Calvin Coolidge's home state of Massachusetts. The end result is that the Republicans hold just 48 seats, as many as the Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party combined. Only Coolidge's re-election as vice-president, and the occasional support of progressive Democrats and the two Farmor-Labor Party Senators, allows the GOP to maintain control of the Senate. In the House, however, the Republicans made gains, winning fifteen seats.
December 3, 1924: Fourteen naval mines are stolen from a former Austro-Hungarian depot in Dalmatia; in a week, they will be sold to the Republic of the Rif.
1925:
January 19, 1925: The Xinjiangese Islamic Revolution occurs. Nur Bekri, a famed resistance leader, leads a province-wide revolt in 1925. The Ma Clique (the local warlords) are quickly defeated and in December 1925, the East Turkestan Islamic Republic, also known as the Free State of Xinjiang, is established, with Nur Bekri as its first President.
January 21, 1925: Edouard Herriot successfully passes a major tax reform law, with some cooperation from Raymond Poincaré; the Dawes Plan's reduction in reparations payments from Germany and the need to counter Mussolini's arms buildup made it necessary to curb tax evasion and increase revenues.
January 24th, 1925: Chicago's north side crime boss Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran attempt to assassinate rival Johnny Torrio outside his home. Torrio is tiped off however, and is waiting for them. Weiss and Moran are both killed in a hail of gunfire, throwing the North Side into chaos.
February 5, 1925: Benjamin Cardozo, Associate Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, is confirmed as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by the Senate, replacing Joseph McKenna (who had resigned due to ill health). As a well-respected Democrat, he was thought likely to be able to get past the Senate.
February 18th, 1925: Bukharin's Right Opposition and Kamenev's Center Movement successfully oust Preobrazhensky from Sovnarkom; Zinoviev, Kamenev's most loyal ally, replaces him.
February 25th, 1925: "The Call of Cthulhu" is written by Liu Hui Wen in Shanghai, China.
March 4th, 1925: Trotsky resigns from the position of General Secretary, unable to cope with the workload; he cites a desire to refocus attention on reforming and modernizing the Red Army, and proposes that his protege Georgy Pyatakov, deputy chair of Gosplan, take over the post of General Secretary.
March 11th, 1925: The Bush family moves to New York City, New York, so that Prescott, as VP of A. Harriman & Co., can work at the company's headquarters.
April 10th, 1925: British anthropologist Lietenant Colonel Percy Fawcett reports the discovery of the aboriginal "Akakor Empire" in Mato Grosso, Brazil.
April 17th, 1925: Sikorsky is hired by Grover Loening, director of the Loening Aeronautical Engineering corporation, joining Leroy Grumman.
April 22, 1925: A Brazilian expedition to the supposed site of Akakor returns, having found nothing there.
April 26, 1925: Private investigators hired by the Royal Geographic Society of London discover fake 'artifacts' under construction by confederates of Fawcett.
April 30, 1925: Fawcett, disgraced, resigns from the Army.
May 11th, 1925: The doctor informs Mr. Nixon that his son, Arthur, only has the cold and should recover within the week.
May 18th, 1925: Arthur Nixon is once again fully healthy.
May 21, 1925: Negotiations between Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mufid Libohova, Albanian Minister of Finance, succeed - a National Bank of Albania will be established, backed by British capital. Relations between Britain and Italy (and between Albania and Italy) turn sour.
June 12, 1925: Chittaranjan Das recovers from his illness and resumes his position as mayor of Calcutta.
June 15, 1925: The Argentine navy orders a cruiser-carrier from Fore River Shipbuilding Company to match the Chilean aircraft carrier; bids from Vickers Shipbuilding and Arsenal de Brest proved too expensive for the frugal President Alvear, despite desires by some to buy British.
July 11, 1925: Basileus Konstantinos, a Bretagne-class battleship laid down for the Greek Navy back in 1914, finally launches.
August 3, 1925: Peljidiin Genden, President of the People's Republic of Mongolia, forces Khorloogiin Choibalsan, a supporter of Joseph Stalin, into exile in Canada.
August 19th, 1925: Arthur Nixon is still completely fine.
September 11, 1925: After a storm front finally lifts, General Miguel Primo de Rivera begins an amphibious landing at Alhucemas Bay. The landing had been planned for the 7th, and word had leaked; as such, Rifian defenses, although primarily focused on the wrong beaches, were able to cause somewhat high casualties. A naval mine sank the destroyer Velasco, killing her entire 86-man crew, while Rifian machine-gun nests and artillery killed an additional 109 and wounded 511. Nonetheless, Rivera's skillful use of combined arms, including naval gunnery, aircraft, a single rigid airship, and FT-17 tanks, allowed 13,000 troops to be landed in the space of two days.
October 1st, 1925: German negotiators successfully chip away at the naval limitations imposed on the Reichsmarine by the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was now granted the right to field six heavy cruisers (with armament of up to 12" (304.8mm)) of up to 12000t displacement, eight light cruisers of up to 6000t displacement, 18 destroyers of up to 800t displacement, and 20 torpedo boats.
October 15th, 1925: On a clear day in Pittsburgh, Washington Senators ace pitcher Walter Johnson wins Game 7 of the World Series, 6-3.
October 19, 1925: Primo de Rivera finishes consolidating the region of Alhucemas Bay, clearing the last heights held by the Republic of the Rif.
November 8, 1925: Giuseppe Zangara, a bricklayer and recent immigrant from Italy, dies after an accident at a construction site in New Jersey.
December 9th, 1925: Mulan, Maid of China, the first film by Anna May Wong Productions, is released, and proves wildly successful.
1926:
January 3, 1926: Founding of རེཨེདོམ ་རོཨུཔ་ (Tibetans for Democracy). Anil Shamar, an American-educated Tibetan merchant, founds Tibetans for Democracy, a republican group. The Dalai Lama is largely unsuccessful in containing the spread of pro-republican fervor, and by 1927, at least 30% of Tibet's population favors the establishment of a republic. Chinese Invasion of Xinjiang: The National Revolutionary Army crosses the border in early 1926; however, with the support of the Soviet Union, the Turkestanis are able to beat them with heavy losses.
January 11th, 1926: Hannah Milhous Nixon discovers that she is once again pregnant with a child.
February 12th, 1926: Frances Stevenson, the mistress of David Lloyd George [DLG], gives birth to a baby girl. She names DLG as the father. He decides to accept paternity. The parents give the name Myfanwy (Welsh for beloved) to their daughter.
February 14th, 1926: Margaret Lloyd George, DLG's wife, says that she will stand by her husband. She had known for several years about his infidelity with Miss Stevenson, but she knows in her heart that she is David's first and deepest love. She will love and care for Myfanwy as if she were her own daughter.
February 17th, 1926: In order to take maximum advantage of DLG's public admission of adultery to stop him becoming leader of the Liberal Party, Herbert Asquith resigns as leader.
February 18th, 1926 : DLG says that 'for personal reasons' he will not be standing for leadership of the Liberal Party.
February 19th, 1926: Walter Runciman announces his candidature for leadership of the Liberal Party. As one of the few Liberal MPs elected in the October 1924 general election against both Tory and Labour opponents (he captured Swansea, West from Labour), he said he would keep the party independent of any pact or alliance with the Tories or Labour.
February 20th, 1926: William Wedgwood Benn announces that he is standing for leader of the Liberal Party with the intention of returning the party to its radical roots.
February 21st, 1926: Sir Robert Hutchison, the assistant whip, announces that he is standing for leader of the Liberal Party, He was a Lloyd George Liberal. The other two candidates were Asquithian Liberals.
February 22nd, 1926 : Sir John Simon declares that he is giving his full support to Runciman in the Liberal leadership contest.
March 10th, 1926: First ballot of Liberal MPs: Hutchison 18 votes, Runciman 13 votes, Wedgwood Benn 9 votes. Wedgwood Benn withdraws from the contest.
March 11th, 1926: Wedgwood Benn declares that Runciman has his full support in the leadership contest. He asks all the MPs who voted for him to vote for Runciman on the second ballot.
March 17th, 1926: Result of second ballot of Liberal MPs: Runciman 22 votes, Hutchison 18 votes. Runciman becomes leader of the Liberal Party.
March 31st, 1926: J. Edgar Hoover leaves the Justice of Department after photos are found showing him and a second man in a bedroom with their pants down.
April 29, 1926: Bessie Coleman, the first African-American female to obtain a pilot's license, pulls out of an airshow in Jacksonville scheduled for May 1 after a grease fire destroys her recently-purchased JN-4.
May 11, 1926: The New York Renaissance Five, an all-black basketball team, beats their rivals, the New York Celtics, reigning American Basketball League champions, 42-36, in an exhibition match played in a packed Madison Square Garden.
June 5, 1926: Braunschweig, a German pre-dreadnought battleship, is sold to Peru and renamed BAP Aguirre after Elias Aguirre, a Peruvian naval commander. Aguirre is meant to help counter the Chilean navy's battleship Almirante Latorre and carrier Almirante Cochrane. Aguirre will be refit into a slow flak cruiser; her secondary battery of 6.7" guns will be replaced with eight single 5.9"/45 SK L/45 mounts and eight single 3.5"/45 Flak L/45 AA guns, while the eighteen quick-firing 3.5"/35 mounts will be replaced by twelve 3.5"/45 Flak L/45 AA mounts and twelve 37mm cannon.
June 14, 1927: Charles Lindbergh begins developing a long-range airliner for Curtiss, provisionally designated the Model 52, intended to compete with the Fokker F.VII.
June 27th, 1926: Heinrich Himmler is killed when he is hit by a car as he walks across the street.
July 9, 1926: Harding shelves plans for diplomatic recognition of the USSR, but does approve a proposal to send Charles G. Dawes, who had developed the Dawes Plan to settle the war reparations issue, to Moscow to discuss trade and other matters with the Soviets.
August 9, 1926: Captain Eisenhower is appointed commander of the 1st Independent Tank Battalion stationed in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The battalion operates the Medium Tank M1; it is organized into three companies, each with ten tanks - a command tank and three 3-tank platoons.
August 30rd, 1926: Gustav Stresemann becomes German Chancellor for the third time.
September 12th, 1926: Mao Zedong is caught by Republic of China forces, and is placed in jail; Chiang Kai-Shek plans to make Mao stand trial for revolt against the Republic.
September 18, 1926: A category-4 hurricane smashes Coral Gables and the Miami region; worse, it creates a storm surge that overtakes the northern dikes of Lake Okeechobee, flooding the region.
September 21, 1926: The South Florida Hurricane makes landfall again near Dulac, Louisiana at 7 PM local time; by now, it has been weakened to a tropical storm. After proceeding inland a few hours, the storm is weakened so much as to dissipate just before midnight.
October 3, 1926: After an unsuccessful Catholic boycott of the Calles government and an equally unsuccessful attempt to lobby the government to repeal anti-religious policies, revolution seems likely. As such, Pancho Villa begins raising funds for a campaign against Calles, including oil company executives unhappy with Calles's policy on Mexican oil, Catholic reactionaries, friends made in Hollywood, and even Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple.
November 3rd, 1926: Nellie Tayloe Ross, a progressive 'dry' Democrat, is narrowly re-elected as governor of Wyoming, defeating Republican Frank Emerson; the same day, corrupt 'wet' Democrat Ma Ferguson, having won a bruising primary fight earlier in the year, is re-elected governor of Texas.
November 8, 1926: Benito Mussolini is present at the commissioning of the first Italian battleship of the Vittorio Veneto class. Vittorio Veneto is based on the design for the Caracciolo class, but with a larger anti-aircraft battery than initially planned. She sports four twin 381mm/40 M1914 cannon, a secondary of eight 150mm/52 M1923 cannon, an AA battery of twelve 90mm/45 M1924 and twelve twin 40mm/39 Vickers-Terni M1917, and six 21" torpedo tubes; she displaces 34000t and has a maximum speed of 28 knots.
December 14, 1926: Yugoslavia agrees to purchase the pre-dreadnought Condorcet from the French Navy; it's meant to serve as a sort of counterweight to the RM Roma (formerly the Austro-Hungarian battleship Tegetthoff). Condorcet, to be renamed Dalmacija in Yugoslav service, will be refit before finally commissioning in 1930. Her main battery of 12" Mle 1909 twin-mounts would be replaced with 340mm/45-caliber Mle 1912 twin mounts, while her secondary battery of 9.4" twin mounts would be replaced with modern, faster-firing 8"/50 Mle 1924 twin mounts and her flak belt would be modernized.
December 21st, 1926: French ace René Fonck wins the Orteig Prize, flying a Keystone K-47A Pathfinder biplane from Roosevelt Airfield in New York to Paris Le Bourget, accompanied by navigator Charles Clavier.
December 25th, 1926: A general strike in Cologne turns into a riot as local police are goaded into brutality.
December 26, 1926: Rioters, strikers, and various other malcontents hole up in the main building of the University of Cologne. Mayor Konrad Adenauer personally orders police to storm the building; eleven die in the fighting, including four policemen, and the building itself is wrecked.
1927:
January 1, 1927: Discussions between Satyendra Nath Bose and Niels Bohr lead to the development of the concept of a 'Bose-Bohr condensate,' a state of matter in which identical particles with integer spin would all fall into the lowest accessible quantum state.
January 11, 1927: Menshevik Evgen Gvaladze, recently denied membership on the Board of the Defending Lawyers of Georgia, assassinates Lavrentiy Beria as an act of revenge for Beria's suppression of the August Uprising of 1924.
February 13, 1927: William Boeing, CEO of Boeing Air Transport, approaches the Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft, the world's premier airline, about possible partnership; if such a partnership would occur, DELAG would be able to extend its flight destinations to the West Coast. DELAG and Boeing sign an official agreement.
February 20, 1927: The building of the first zeppelin docks in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle begins.
February 25, 1927: After a Cristero victory over Mexican government forces in Guanajuato, Pancho Villa crosses into Sonora with a party of 2,000 troops (half on horseback), four privately-purchased Ryan M-2s armed with a pair of rear-facing army-surplus Lewis Guns, and twelve armored automobiles, announcing his opposition to the atheist, socialist Calles regime.
March 18, 1927: France commissions the Béarn, a battleship armed with three triple 340mm/45-caliber Mle 1912s, eighteen 138mm/55 Mle 1910s, eight 75mm/50 Mle 1924 AA guns, and six 450mm torpedo tubes. She displaces 27000t, is powered by turbine engines, and can travel up to 26 knots. Her only remaining sister, Languedoc, was in danger of being canceled back in August 1925, but the naval threat from Italy forced PM Herriot to restore funds for the ship; she's expected to commission in about 18 months.
April 5, 1927: Deutschland, the first new German large cruiser, launches from her slip at the Deutsche Werke shipyards in Kiel. She is ostensibly a 12000t cruiser, though the actual displacement will likely be higher; nonetheless, it will be consistently reported as 12000t. Deutschland will mount similar armament to the British County-class large cruisers under construction, but will have lighter armor. Armament is planned to consist of a main battery of two triple 12"/56-caliber SK C/27 mounts, a secondary battery of three triple 5.9"/60 SK C/25 mounts, six of the planned 4.1"/65 SK C/29 AA mounts, eight 37mm cannon and ten 20mm cannon, along with two triple mounts for 21" torpedoes. Speed is projected to be 34 knots. Deutschland is the cornerstone of Vice-Admiral Hans Zenker's plans for the Reichsmarine; the service chief intends for a fleet of six of these cruisers for commerce-raiding, relying on their speed and their guns to outmatch or outrun hostile ships.
April 14, 1927: The Lithuanian Peasant Popular Union attempts a coup d'etat against the right-wing nationalist government of Andreas Smetona, seizing control of key offices in Kaunas; they are unable to take the railway station. Seimas member Juozas Pajaujis, a supporter of the coup, is killed in the fighting.
April 15, 1927: The Lithuanian army and the Rifleman's Union (a nationalist-backed paramilitary organization) mop up remaining resistance. In light of the crisis, Smetona dissolves the Seimas, calling for new elections on April 30.
April 21, 1927: Negotiations between Smetona's Nationalists and the Lithuanian Christian Democrats lead to a formal coalition between the two.
April 27, 1927: USS Pensacola, the first of a six-ship class of large scout cruisers, is laid down. Pensacola will displace 15,450t, and will feature 12" cannon as her main armament.
April 28th, 1927: Li Dazhao, co-founder of the Communist Party of China, escapes the KMT purge of Communists, surviving only with the support of Soviet agents.
April 30, 1927: Smetona and Ernestas Galvanauskas are elected President and Prime Minister in a fairly corrupt election.
May 4, 1927: A Cristero column of 1,000 rebels links up with Villa's forces, which have now swelled to 3,000, in Rosario, Sinaloa; Villa's scout planes have helped him avoid contact with major government forces, in spite of the size of his column.
May 20, 1927: Charles Lindbergh resigns from flying the U.S. Air Mail for the Robertson Aircraft Corporation in order to work for Curtiss as an engineer and test pilot.
June 3rd, 1927: President Warren G. Harding signs the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Act into law, attempting to maintain 1913 agricultural price levels and counteract the overproduction that had occurred during the Great War by purchasing surplus crops for sale overseas; losses incurred would be made up for by fees against farm producers.
July 7, 1927: DELAG orders four new airships; in honor of the agreement with Boeing, one is ordered from Goodyear-Zeppelin.
July 9, 1927: Villa's column links up with the largest force of Cristeros, led by Father Vega, in Jalisco, having not had to face a single battle.
July 11, 1927: Villa and Vega begin a series of raids on Mexican railway lines, hoping to cut off Mexican troops in Jalisco from their supply lines.
August 1-9, 1927 The Siege of Nanchang occurs. The Chinese Communist Party seizes control of Nanchang; much to the surprise of the Nationalists, the workers in the city also rise up and join the communists. Zhou Enlai takes over political leadership of the city, while Zhu De is given command of the nascent People's Liberation Army. Over the next few days, the city is besieged by Chiang Kai'shek, who is unable to defeat the PLA. However, the city has few supplies, and quickly runs out of food. On August 7th, Zhu De attacks Nationalist lines north of Nanchang, attempting to break out. He succeeds, and the Communists retreat north, to Fuzhou.
August 19th, 1927: Mendez Nunez, converted into an aircraft carrier, commissions into the Spanish Navy, twelve years after she was ordered.
August 28, 1927: Thirteen Turkish naval cadets begin studies at the Royal Naval Engineering College in Keyham.
September 7, 1927: Li Dazhao leads the Autumn Harvest Uprising. However, it fails and he is arrested and imprisoned in Beijing.
September 8, 1927: Chiang engages with Zhu De's army in the Battle of Fuzhou. After hours of bloody fighting for both sides, Zhu De is forced to withdraw, this time into Hubei, where he and Zhou Enlai establish a Hubei Soviet.
September 20, 1927: In the aftermath of the battle of Fuzhou, 30 Communist soldiers, led by one Pu Yingban, attack the prison of Anqing, in Anhui province in an attempt to free Mao Zedong. Only 9 of the soldiers surive, but Mao is successfully rescued and brought to Hubei.
September 22, 1927: Jack Dempsey reclaims the world heavyweight title by defeating Gene Tunney with a knockout in the seventh round.
November 4, 1927: The Legend of the White Serpent, a film by Anna May Wong Productions, is released. The plot, in which an evil serpent is accidentally transformed into a woman, who then falls in love with a young scholar, is an adaptation of a Chinese legend; much of the cast, and a portion of the crew, is Asian, in keeping with Wong's desire to develop the Chinese-American film industry; funding comes in part from the Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco affiliates of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. It was the second 'talkie' released, but, thanks to Sid Grauman's connections and the support of Chinese-American groups in New York, it was the first to see a national release, beating out The Jazz Singer by a month.
December 3, 1927: The Bank of Athens opens its third Albanian branch in Tirana, joining Durres and Korca.
1928:
January 1, 1928: The Mono Aircraft Company is purchased by Curtiss.
January 3, 1928: Negotiations between the US Football Association and the American Soccer League succeed - the former agrees to move the National Challenge Cup to the summer, rather than the winter, so that games would not be during the ASL's season, and the latter agrees to permit its teams to enter the Cup.
January 17th, 1928: Huey Long wins re-election as governor of Louisiana, winning 45% of the vote - well more than the 27% won by each of the anti-Long candidates.
March 4, 1928: HMS Cumberland, the first cruiser of the County class, commissions into the Royal Navy. Cumberland displaces 17,000 tons; her main armament consists of two triple 12"/50 Mk.XIV turrets, with a secondary armament of six 4"/45 Mk.V high-angle mounts. Two quad 2-pounder 'pom pom' AA mounts, two quad 0.50" machine guns, and two quad 21" torpedo tube mounts are fitted, along with a catapult for two Fairey IIIF seaplanes. Her maximum speed is rated at 28 knots
March 13, 1928: The Monument to the March Dead in Weimar, Germany, a monument to workers who lost their lives during the Kapp Putsch of 1920, is vandalized.
May 9, 1928: A coalition of barnstorming teams, including the New York Rens, the New York Celtics, and the Philadelphia SPHAs, takes control of the American Basketball League.
May 11 1928: Frank Whittle is commissioned as a Pilot Officer into the RAF.
June 1st, 1928: Following the disastrous election results, the new DNVP chairman Alfred Hugenberg takes a radical new volkisch course in the DNVP special conference in Stettin.
June 3, 1928: RM Littorio, the second and last Vittorio Veneto-class battleship, is laid down.
June 9: 1928: Japanese Emperor Hirohito proposes that the Diet sack several Japanese military officers supportive of an invasion of China.
June 19, 1928: José López Rega dies of accidental food poisoning after eating an undercooked piece of chicken.
Also today, in the Wiesbaden Conference, Hugenberg's DVNP merges with General Erich Ludendorff's Voelkisch-Nationale Block (NVP) and Josef Goebble's National Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands (NSPD). They form the Nationale Volksblock (NVB)
June 28th, 1928: Henry T. Rainey, former Speaker of the House (D-IL), and Senator Alben W. Barkley (D-KY), are nominated as presidential and vice-presidential candidates by the DNC; Al Smith, expecting that the GOP would win in '28 and not wanting to be beaten again, had not seriously campaigned, while Cordell Hull found himself outmaneuvered.
Also today, the Games of the IX Olympiad open in Los Angeles, California. The US, host of the Games, will win 61 medals in total, including 24 gold medals.
July 1, 1928: Kawamura Takeji, Governor-General of Formosa, begins negotiations with Long Yun, governor of Yunnan, for the establishment of Japanese factories in the province, as part of a general program of industrial outreach in China and Formosa.
July 5, 1928: Negotiations with Long Yun end favorably for the Japanese government, with the "King of Yunnan" agreeing to allow the establishment of factories and, surprisingly, Japanese enclaves throughout Yunnan. These actions on the part of Yun are not ignored by Chiang Kai'shek, who begins fearing the collapse of China.
July 10, 1928: A grease fire burns out of control, eventually burning down the restaurant La Bombilla, along with seven other nearby buildings in San Angel, Mexico D.F. José de Léon Toral, a Catholic militant, is among the victims of the fire.
September 1st, 1928: In spite of opposition from both Trotsky and Zinoviev, the Sixth Congress of the Comintern narrowly adopts a policy of supporting "Popular Fronts", encouraging European Communist parties to join broad left-wing alliances containing Social Democrats and others. Trotsky had favoured support but not full alliances, and Zinoviev condemned any collaboration with "bourgeois liberals". This division in the opposition was largely why the policy was able to pass.
October 7, 1928: Shanty Hogan wins Game 3 of the 1928 World Series in the Polo Grounds in dramatic fashion, hitting a walk-off grand slam off Yankees pitcher Tom Zachary. It would be the New York Giants' only win of the Series.
October 11, 1928: Juan Trippe, CEO of Pan American Airways, buys 10 Keystone-Loening K-66 Air Yacht twin-engine nine-seat flying boats. The K-66, designed by Sikorsky before he left the company, would be Keystone-Loening's most successful civilian airplane.
November 6th, 1928: Republicans Herbert Hoover and William Borah defeat Rainey and Barkley, winning 55% of the popular vote and 367 electoral votes to the Rainey-Barkley ticket's 43% and 166 electoral votes. Republican Alanson B. Houghton unseats Democratic Senator Royal S. Copeland of New York in a narrow contest.
December 22, 1928: Vyacheslav Molotov, a rising figure in the Soviet government, is killed when he slips on a patch of ice and is run over by a horse-cart outside of the Palace of the Soviets.
December 31, 1928-August 11, 1929 The Tibetan-Xinjiangese War is fought. The Tibetan army invades Xinjiang and engages in several bloody battles with the Islamic Republic's soldiers. After a bloody counteroffensive, the Tibetans are forced back into Tibet proper after over a war.
1929:
January 1, 1929: The 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, signs a treaty with the Japanese Foreign Minister, entailing that Japan will train Tibet's army in exchange for the right to invest in and build factories in Tibet, thus opening Tibet up to Japanese trade. Several Japanese military advisors are sent to Lhasa. The Treaty of Lhasa also stipulates a provision for Japanese settlement in Tibet. Japanese immigrants will be given prime agricultural land and will have the right to own property and business in Tibet, unlike other foreigners. However, they still do not have the right to live in Lhasa; this is still reserved for native Tibetans.
January 2, 1929: Gustav Stresemann suffers a stroke, but eventually survives, if still a weakened man.
January 4th, 1929: Paul Von Hindenberg considers running for the Presidency of Germany in the up-coming election, but is talked out of it due to his age, even though he is promised backing from several high-ranking army figures.
January 6, 1929: Yugoslav politician Svetozar Pribićević is accidentally shot and killed as he attempts to escape the troops of King Alexander of Yugoslavia, who have come to arrest him.
January 12 1929: Pilot Officer Whittle show his ideas for a jet engine to the Air Ministry. A.A. Griffith was a member of the board who heard Whittle’s Ideas and said it was too simple to work.
March 1, 1929: David Selznick, a producer recently hired by Anna May Wong Productions, organizes the Chinese Braves, a Chinese-American barnstorming basketball team, intending to film their exploits. Seven months later, his film, Cagers, is released, focusing around a tilt between the Braves (none of which stood more than 5'9") and Olson's Terrible Swedes (all of whom were taller than 6'4").
March 12, 1929: San Francisco Aerodrome is completed, acting as a combination zeppelin dock and airport.
March 16, 1929: The Litvinov Pact, a non-aggression pact between the USSR, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania, comes into effect.
March 19 1929: The French Navy lays down the keel of the Joffre. This is their first fleet carrier. It will displace 27,000 tons, have a top speed of 30knots, and carry 75 aircraft.
March 22, 1929: Los Angeles Aerodrome completed; it is just a zeppelin dock.
April 1, 1929: Seattle Aerodrome, another combination, is completed.
April 3, 1929: Japan agrees to send several military advisors to Yunnan to help build up Long Yun's regional army. Kai'shek watches this with a wary eye, but he is too occupied with a rebellion in Manchuria to do anything about it.
April 6, 1929: Percy Ludgate finishes his Ludgate Analytical Engine, a primitive, but useful programmable computer, in Dublin, and begins searching for someone to purchase it.
April 15, 1929: Representative Willis C. Hawley (R-Oregon), Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, proposes an act that would increase tariffs on most industrial goods to unprecedented levels.
April 29, 1929: RM Gorizia, a Trento-class cruiser, is laid down; she will be the last heavy cruiser to commission in the Regia Marina before the war with the Balkan Pact.
May 3, 1929: Honolulu Aerodrome begun. DELAG's reach now extends over two continents.
May 11, 1929: Cordell Hull (D-Tennessee), ranking minority member of Ways and Means, issues a minority report on the proposed Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, vociferously criticizing it and arguing against the need for industrial protection. Two days later, he will use over an hour of time to argue against the bill, with Minority Leader John Nance Garner yielding time to Hull. However, the comfortable Republican House majority passed the bill.
May 19, 1929: A protest outside the Excelsior movie theater in Tananarive, Madagascar against policies discriminating against the Malagasy fizzles, even though it was held on a public holiday and during a strike by medical school students. The nationalists and Communists who had planned the protest had intended for French Communist Edouard Planque to enter the theater with a dog, then to begin their protest, shouting that the French were discriminatory in favor of dogs over Malagasy; Planque failed to show, having accidentally slept in, and a rainstorm led to significantly reduced turnout.
May 20, 1929: Despite calls for reprisals from some of the more reactionary colons, including the head of the Ligue des Interets Economiques de Madagascar, Governor-General Marcel Olivier ignores the protest. A few prominent loudmouths are briefly detained, but nothing much comes of it, particularly since the strike - and thus the best opportunity for the nationalists - blows over by the end of the week.
Also on this day, the British aviation company Blackburn establishes an American subsidiary with General Motors, the Blackburn Aircraft Company, 90% owned by GM and 10% owned by Blackburn. Blackburn Aircraft will produce Blackburn designs in North and South America.
May 29, 1929: A raid on Manzanillo by Pancho Villa and a column of 800 Cristeros and other rebels is beaten back with heavy losses by Mexican government troops; worse, the last airplane in Villa's possession, a Monoprep 218 recently purchased by Villa's agents in Hollywood and delivered in secret, is shot down during the battle.
May 30, 1929: Labour wins the British general election with an overall majority of 3 seats over all other parties and independents. The number of MPs elected and percentage vote for each party and independents were as follows:
Labour: 309 - 39.1
Conservative: 232 - 35.6
Liberal: 65 - 24.1
Others: 9 - 1.2. The others comprised 3 Irish Nationalists, 1 independent Conservative, one independent Labour, one Socialist Prohibition Party, 3 independents.
Among the Conservatives who lost their seats were Lady Astor in Plymouth, Sutton and Kingsley Wood in Woolwich, West. In Birmingham, West Austen Chamberlain scrapes through with a majority of 31 in a straight fight with Labour because enough Liberals voted for him because of his internationalist, pro League of Nations foreign policy.
May 31, 1929: Stanley Baldwin resigns and Ramsay Macdonald becomes Prime Minister. His cabinet is the same as in OTL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Labour_Government - except that Lord Arnold is Secretary of State for India instead of William Wedgwood Benn who has stayed in the Liberal Party.
June 3, 1929: Pan American Airways establishes a partnership with the Grace Shipping Company, with routes throughout Latin America, intending to compete with Boeing's United Aircraft and Transport Corporation. The same day, Pan Am's holding company, the Aviation Corporation of the Americas, buys the Stearman Aircraft Company out before UATC can manage an offer.
July 1, 1929: The Soviet Union begins its first 5 Year Plan for industrialization.
July 4, 1929: Howard Hughes buys out the Ryan Aircraft Corporation, forestalling a proposed takeover by the Detroit Aircraft Corporation.
Also today, Benigno Ramos calls on a "Young Philippines" to engage in a civil-disobedience campaign against the American government on this day. The protests are brutally suppressed by United States Marines, killing at least 200 civilians.
July 19, 1929: The Detroit Aircraft Corporation buys 80% of the assets of the Lockheed Aircraft Company.
August 1, 1929: The L3/28 tankette, designed in 1928 enters service with the Italian Army and the MVSN Blackshirt militia. The tankette is inspired by the Carden-Lloyd, and is armed with a pair of 6.5mm light machine guns; armor is welded, and is 6-10mm thick. At 2.65 tons, the L3/28 is a very light vehicle; it is also rather inexpensive, allowing Mussolini to expand his army rapidly.
August 8, 1929: In the Twickenham by-election caused by the elevation of William Joynson-Hicks to the peerage as Viscount Brentford, Labour gains the seat from the Conservatives by a majority of 242.
August 9, 1929: The dissatisfaction with Baldwin in the Conservative Party after its defeat in the general election, receives a boost after the Twickenham by-election with the start of a Baldwin Must Go (BMG) campaign orchestrated in the Beaverbrook and Rothermere press.
August 27, 1929: Bessie Coleman wins the First Women's Air Derby, beating such rivals as Amelia Earhart, Florence 'Pancho' Barnes, Louise Thaden, and Thea Rasche to Cleveland. Later that day, she and her fellow racers began discussions about a collaborative organization to support female pilots, which would culminate in the first meeting of the Hundred Sparrows, also known as the International Organization of Woman Pilots, named after the 100 (of 118 invited) licensed female pilots who attended the meeting in Valley Stream, New York.
September 11, 1929: After consulting with his shadow cabinet and Conservative Central Office, Baldwin announces that he will resign the leadership of the Conservative Party when a new leader has been chosen.
September 12, 1929: Leopold Amery and Austen Chamberlain announce that they are candidates for leadership of the Conservative Party. In those days Conservative leaders were not elected, rather they 'emerged' after consultations with Conservatives in Parliament and in the country. Amery is a leading tariff reformer and is strongly committed to the cause of Imperial preference. Chamberlain supports protection but without the ideological intensity of Amery. While Chamberlain has the support of most of the shadow cabinet and the liberal wing of the party, Amery is supported by the bulk of the party who want tariff reform, and by the Beaverbrook and Rothermere press.
September 14, 1929: Senate President Borah, despite his own personal opposition, can do nothing but sit and watch as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, by now incorporating agricultural tariffs as well (in spite of McNary-Haughton already providing agricultural supports), is passed after a few months of horse-trading among Senators and speeches by anti-tariff Democrats. By the end of the month, the House and Senate bills are reconciled, and Hoover, despite personally opposing the bill, signs it, hoping to gain political advantage.
September 19, 1929: John Davidson, the Chairman of the Conservative Party organisation, announces that the bulk of the Conservative Party in Parliament and the country want Leopold Amery to be the leader of the party. Therefore he is now the leader of the Conservative Party. Amery says that he accepts with great humility the tremendous honour and privilege of leading the Conservative Party.
October 14, 1929: Juan Trippe orders a tinclad airship airliner to be developed, based on the ZMC-2, by the Aircraft Development Corporation, a subsidiary of the Detroit Aircraft Corporation.
October 21, 1929: An industrial mishap damages the Junkers D-2000, a prototype airliner which would have had passengers seated in the wings themselves, under construction for Lufthansa in Leipzig; construction is set back a month.
November 11, 1929: ARA Yrigoyen is formally commissioned by her namesake, President Hipolito Yrigoyen of Argentina, in person. She displaces 12,500t, is armed with three triple 6"/53 Mk.12 mounts, all forward, eight 3"/50 Mk.14 AA guns and four twin 0.50" M2 AA machine gun mounts spread across the hull, and two triple 21" torpedo tubes; she carries 25 aircraft, which can operate off a 375-foot angled flight deck. Yrigoyen can travel up to 30 knots, and is considered by the Argentines to be more than a match for the Chilean navy's carrier.
November 20, 1929: After a meeting of the shadow cabinet, Leopold Amery, the leader of the Conservative party, announces its commitment to a protectionist policy of imperial preference with tariffs on food imports from outside the British Empire.
November 21, 1929: Austen Chamberlain and Winston Churchill resign from the shadow cabinet because of their opposition to its new trade policy.
Also on this day, the German Third Cavalry Division, led by Gerd von Rundstedt and supported by Ernst Rohm's Sturmabteilung and the Jungdeutscher Ordern - but not by the NVB - seize the railway lines, telegraph stations, and other key facilities in Berlin, Dortmund, Hamburg and Koenigsberg, staging a coup d'etat. The coup is backed by a number of colonels and lesser officers, and the First and Third Infantry Divisions see half their combat strength turned traitor. Rundstedt plans to name Werner von Blomberg President of Germany and impose a quasi-fascist military regime, but Blomberg, knowing that Rundstedt does not have complete control over the military, demurs.
November 22, 1929: Blomberg rejects Rundstedt's offer, as do other leading officers and a variety of nationalists, but Werner Freiherr von Fritsch accepts the offer of President of Germany. Rundstedt apparently was unwilling to accept the presidency himself. Admiral Hans Zenker, commander of the Reichsmarine, formally denounces the coup, and begins planning to retake Koenigsberg and Hamburg; his fleet largely remains loyal, and the few traitorous officers are detained quickly. German Communists and Socialists call for new general strikes, hoping to end the coup the way that the Kapp Putsch fell apart; the Communists also plan to use force to help defeat the plot. The NVB declares that it was not involved in planning the coup; leadership refuse to commit to supporting or opposing it.
November 23, 1929: Deutschland arrives in Hamburg from Kiel, escorted by two destroyers and six torpedo boats; the large cruiser's twelve-inch guns provide fire support for loyalist First Infantry Division troops, backed by local left-wing paramilitary organizations, particularly the Rotfrontkampferbund (Red Front Fighters' League). By three o'clock, rebel forces surrender.
November 24, 1929: Fighting between pro-coup and anti-coup paramilitaries in Dessau causes an unrelated electrical fire to destroy the Junkers factory there, as firefighters were unable to respond due to the fighting. As a result, the D-2000 prototype is lost, along with the principal production line for Junkers.
November 26, 1929: The last fighting of the Rundstedt-Fritsch Putsch comes to a close. General Edwin von Stulpenagl's Fourth Infantry Division is heavily involved in the fighting, as are the Rotfrontkampferbund and the center-left paramilitary Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold; the latter single-handedly drove off an SA push on Potsdam.
November 29, 1929: Alexander Shlyapnikov returns to his old post as People's Commissar for Labour, replacing Vasili Schmidt, a sign of the increased power of the Left Communists in the Soviet Union.
December 1, 1929: Léon Cayla arrives in Madagascar to replace Olivier as Governor-General. A representative of the Ligue talks with him about the need to keep Madagascar White and French, and about his predecessor's atrocious mishandling of the riot of May 19.
Also on this day, an American Catholic priest is murdered by drunken government soldiers in Tijuana, ostensibly for wearing clerical garb.
December 5th, 1929: American Catholics in San Diego, including a sizeable group of Mexican refugees and Mexican-Americans, stage a demonstration in support of the Cristeros.
Also today, Leroy Grumman, Igor Sikorsky, and four other former Loening employees, unwilling to move to Pennsylvania (home of the Keystone Aircraft Corporation that bought Loening in '28), found the Sikorsky-Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation on Long Island.
December 7, 1929 In a speech in Birmingham, Leo Amery said that Great Britain should withdraw from the League of Nations and develop the economic and military unity of the Empire. This would be his policy if he became Prime Minister.
December 9, 1929 Sir Samuel Hoare resigns from the shadow cabinet in opposition to Amery's policy on the League of Nations.
December 31, 1929: The Mei Wah Club of Los Angeles, a girl's basketball club for the Chinese-American community, is founded
