Second Sino-Japanese War
A clash at Marco Polo Bridge becomes full-scale war
A clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing in July 1937 escalated into full-scale war between Japan and China. Marked by atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre, it killed millions and from 1941 merged into the Second World War.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 19 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 2 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 10 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 11 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 12 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 9 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 4 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 1 year earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 4 years later
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 16 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 8 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 1 year earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 4 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 5 years later
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 8 years later
Middle East
- 1915 Armenian genocide — 22 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 21 years earlier
- 1916–1918 The Arab Revolt — 21 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 5 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 11 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 15 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 2 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 19 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 21 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 23 years later
Americas
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 23 years earlier
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 8 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 7 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 8 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 10 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 1 year earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 4 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 5 years later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 17 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 22 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 81)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 68)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 66)
- Winston Churchill (aged 63)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 59)
- Albert Einstein (aged 58)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 56)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 56)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 48)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 48)