January 1, 1912. The Republic of China is officially established. Emperor Pu Yi abdicates the throne.
March 27, 1912. The first of the famous cherry trees that beautify Washington D.C. were planted on this date in 1912 by First Lady Helen Taft and the Japanese ambassador’s wife, Viscountess Chinda.
April 15, 1912. RMS Titanic,a passenger liner, strikes an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, and sank, resulting in the deaths of 1,517 people.
Pictures of the Titanic and of some of its passengers:
May, 1912. Italy and Turkey continue to make war, with Italy bombarding the Dardanelles and occupying the Greek island of Rhodes.
May, 1912. In the House of Commons, the British government passes a bill to grant Home Rule (semi-independence) to Ireland. Northern Ireland, also called Ulster, which is mostly Protestant doesn’t want to be a part of a mostly Catholic independent Ireland. The Home Rule bill will be put into effect in 1914, then suspended for the duration of the war (WW I), then reinstated in 1918 as a part of the British plan to draft more soldiers into the war from Ireland.
May, 1912. The first issue of the Bolshevik (Communist) newspaper Pravda is published in St. Petersburg, Russia. Pravda means “truth”.
June-September, 1912. Amateur scientist Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum gather fragments of a skull and jawbone from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. A reconstruction of the fragments comes to be known as The Piltdown Man believed to be the skeleton of a primitive man 50,000 years old. In 1953 the Piltdown Man was finally exposed as a forgery consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a modern human.
September-December, 1912. The Balkan League—Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro–goes to war against Turkey (Ottoman Empire). This conflict is known as The First Balkan War.
October, 1912. Turkey, busy in the Balkans, signs a treaty to end its war with Italy.
November 5, 1919. Woodrow Wilson is elected the first Democratic president of the United States in more than twenty years. His rivals Taft, the Republican, and Teddy Roosevelt, running for his own Progressive (Bull Moose) party, split the Republican vote. Labor Union leader Eugene V. Debs is the nominee of the Socialist Party of America.