1925: Events and Inventions

January 3, 1925. Benito Mussolini (Il Duce) announces he is taking dictatorial powers over Italy.

'General Chiang Kai Shek' photo (c) 2010, SDASM Archives - license: http://www.flickr.com/commons/usage/March, 1925. Chiang Kai-shek becomes leader of the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang (party), following the death of Chinese premier Sun Yat-sen. The picture is a young General Chiang Kai-shek.

April 25, 1925. Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg Is the victor in extremely close German elections. He becomes the first popularly elected president of Germany. Although von Hindenburg supports a return to the monarchy, he has promised to uphold the republican constitution.

June 29, 1925. A bill is passed in South Africa that bans black South Africans from doing skilled jobs in all industries. Afrikaaners (people of Dutch descent) and other white South Africans (mostly of British extraction) combine to make the already widely practiced color ban legal. Afrikaans, a Dutch-based dialect, is made the official language of South Africa.

July, 1925. While in prison, German leader Adolf Hitler publishes Mein Kampf, a book promoting himself, Nazism, and anti-Semitism.

August 8, 1925. The Ku Klux Klan demonstrate their popularity by holding a parade in Washington DC; as many as 40,000 male and female members of the Klan march down Pennsylvania Avenue. The ceremony the Klansmen had planned at the Washington Monument is rained out.

'Conference of the Big Three at Yalta' photo (c) 2008, Marion Doss - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/October 31, 1925. Reza Khan Pahlavi becomes Shah of Persia (Iran). He has been ruling Persia since 1921, but now that his rule is official, the Shah vows to modernize his country.

December, 1925. Josef Stalin uses the year 1925 and following years in the 20’s to consolidate more and more power in his hands, gradually putting down all opposition groups within the Soviet Communist party. In December, at the 14th Soviet Communist Party Congress, Stalin wins approval of a new policy called “socialism in one country.” The USSR will no longer pursue world socialist revolution as its first priority. Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s main rival for power in the Soviet Union, favors the idea of international permanent revolution, called by some people Trotskyism. The picture shows Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Yalta in 1945 at the end of World War II.

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