1910..........1920

1911

• Victims of a tragic fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. are laid out in the New York City morgue. The fire broke out on March 25, 1911, on the eighth floor of the Asch Building, located in the garment district of the Lower East Side. The blaze lasted only 30 minutes, but 146 factory workers, primarily young immigrant women, died. The fire exposed the sweatshop conditions of the garment district and led to the establishment of dozens of laws to improve worker safety.

• Chinese Empire Overthrown
  Chinese revolution led by Sun Yat-sen ends 2,000
  year-old Chinese dynastic system.

• Thieves break into the Louvre art museum in Paris and steal Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa

1912

• James Francis Thorpe (1888-1953), an American Indian from Oklahoma Territory, is considered one of history's greatest athletes. In the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Thorpe won both the pentathlon and the decathlon (his record would still qualify for a silver medal in 1948), but was stripped of his medals after it was revealed that he had played semiprofessional baseball, which violated the Olympic amateur rule. The runners-up in both events declined his medals, but his titles weren't reinstated until 1983.

• Balkans Explode
  A dangerous mixture of nationalism and ethnic tension turns to war in the Balkans, setting the stage for World
  War I.

• With terrifying drama, the Titanic sank off the coast of Newfoundland on April 15, 1912. The tragedy has since entered the popular imagination, becoming the subject of numerous films and books, including director James Cameron's Oscar-winning Titanic (1997), the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema.
  

1914

• Assassination Leads to Massive War
  Archduke Ferdinand of Austria is
  assassinated. Alliances pull European
  powers into the conflict and world war 1 begins

1915

• birth of silent movies
• Inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) wears headphones while posing with his prize invention, the telephone. Bell invented the apparatus in 1876, but on January 25, 1915, he made history again by making the world's first transcontinental phone call, from New York to his assistant Thomas A. Watson in San Francisco. The ingenious Bell also created the hydrofoil, in 1917, and developed the aileron, an important innovation in aviation history.

• German Sub Sinks Lusitania Americans are shocked and outraged when German U-boat sinks the luxury liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 passengers.

• Turks Massacre Armenians Ottoman Turks go on a killing rampage in effort to eliminate the Armenian population. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians will be
  massacred.

1916

• Social activist and nurse Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) championed the causes of women's rights and of educating women about reproduction. She was arrested in 1914 for mailing "obscene" material relating to birth control. Undeterred, in 1916 she helped found the first birth control clinic in the United States, in Brooklyn, New York. The following year she founded the organization that would later become Planned Parenthood.
• 
  Death Stalks Soldiers at Somme
  The bloody Battle of the Somme claims more than 1 million French, British and German men. Verdun takes another million.
  
• Irish Revolt, British Crack Down British execute 15 Irish nationalists after Easter uprising, galvanizing
  popular support for the radical Sinn
  Fein party.

1917

• Russia is Red
  Communists overthrow Czar Nicholas Romanov, establish the Soviet republic and pull out of
  World War I.

• U.S. at War With Germany
  The United States abandons its isolationist policy to enter World War I.
  
• War Over!
  Germany, exhausted and starving, calls it quits and The Great War ends on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
  

1918

• Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924) speaks in Moscow's Red Square on November 7, 1918, the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin was not present for the initial 1917 revolution that forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate power, but he led the Bolsheviks to victory over the provisional government in October 1917. Presiding with Leon Trotsky as second-in-command, Lenin moved to redistribute land to peasants, nationalize banks and industry, and get Russia out of World War I.

1919

• Versailles Treaty Emasculates Germany
  Treaty of Versailles renders Germany a secondary power.
• Communists on Rampage
  The Communist movement and revolutions sweep through Europe, though none succeed in overthrowing government.