January 8, 1913. Dalai Lama Thubten Gyatso declares Tibet independent from China. He has returned to Tibet from India following three years of exile.
January 31, 1913. Turkish revolutionaries, the Young Turks, overthrow the Ottoman government. Balkan peace negotiations are put in jeopardy.
February 23, 1913. Mexican President Madero is deposed and killed. General Victoriano Huerta takes over as president.
April, 1913. Swedish inventor Gideon Sundback patents a new fastener, the zipper.
May 30, 1913. End of the First Balkan War. Turkey and the members of the Balkan League sign a peace treaty agreeing to recognize a new country, Albania, in territory that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire and to divide the territory of Macedonia between Serbia and Bulgaria.
June 30, 1913. The Second Balkan War begins. Bulgaria attacks Greece and Serbia. Montenegro and Rumania will help the Greeks against the Bulgarians and Serbians.
August 10, 1913. Peace is agreed to in the Balkans, ending the Second Balkan War. All nations will withdraw to their pre-war borders, and Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland will establish frontier lines to keep the peace. Bulgaria must disperse its troops and give up most of its newly gained lands.
September 21, 1913. As the British Parliament passes the Third Irish Home Rule Bill, Dublin, Ireland is filled with strikers demanding Home Rule now (an independent, self-governing Ireland). Protestant Unionists in the north who oppose Home Rule begin to recruit their own army to keep Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom.
October 7, 1913. Henry Ford establishes the assembly line at his automobile plant to make cars more quickly and efficiently.
October 10, 1913. The Panama Canal opens.
November, 1913. Pancho Villa and his Villistas try to take over the government of Mexico. Some Americans, including writer Ambrose Bierce, come to join Pancho Villa’s revolutionaries. Some quotations form Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. Bierce went missing, presumed killed, in December, 1913 while he was supposedly with Villa’s army, and neither he nor his body was ever found.