Persia becomes Iran
Reza Shah asks the world to use the country's own name
From Nowruz 1935 Reza Shah's government asked foreign states to call the country Iran, the name its people had long used, while "Persia" comes from a single province, Pars. In 1959 the authorities allowed both names to be used.
Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 17 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 4 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 12 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 13 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 14 years later
Europe
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — 16 years earlier
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 7 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 2 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 1 year later
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 6 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 6 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 1 year later
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 6 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 7 years later
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 10 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 13 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — same year
- 1948 Apartheid begins in South Africa — 13 years later
- 1952 Egyptian revolution of 1952 — 17 years later
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 21 years later
Asia
- 1931 China floods — 4 years earlier
- 1934–1935 Long March — 1 year earlier
- 1937–1938 Nanjing Massacre — 2 years later
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 10 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 18 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 21 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 6 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 5 years earlier
- 1933–1939 New Deal — 2 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 10 years later
Oceania
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 23 years earlier
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 1 year later
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 6 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 7 years later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 19 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 79)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 66)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 64)
- Winston Churchill (aged 61)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 57)
- Albert Einstein (aged 56)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 54)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 54)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 46)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 46)