Long March
The communist retreat that made Mao their leader
In October 1934 the Chinese communists' Red Army, encircled by Kuomintang forces, broke out of Jiangxi and fought its way some 10,000 km to Shaanxi in a year. Of roughly 86,000 who set out, only a few thousand arrived. During the march Mao Zedong became party leader, and the march became a founding myth of the People's Republic.
Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 16 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 5 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 13 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 14 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 15 years later
Europe
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — 15 years earlier
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 6 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 1 year earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 2 years later
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 7 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 5 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 2 years later
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 7 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 8 years later
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 11 years later
Middle East
- 1915 Armenian genocide — 19 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 18 years earlier
- 1916–1918 The Arab Revolt — 18 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 2 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 14 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 12 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 1 year later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 22 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 24 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 20 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 5 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 4 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 11 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 13 years later
Oceania
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 22 years earlier
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 2 years later
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 7 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 8 years later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 20 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 78)
- Marie Curie (aged 67)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 65)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 63)
- Winston Churchill (aged 60)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 56)
- Albert Einstein (aged 55)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 53)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 53)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 45)