Recognized for heroically protecting the American flag during the Civil War, Army Sgt. William Harvey Carney receives the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration, on May 23, 1900.

For nearly a month beginning June 17, 1900, future President Herbert Hoover and his wife Lou are caught in the middle of the Boxer Rebellion in China, when the community of foreigners they lived in, in the city of Tianjin, is besieged and under attack.

On June 20, 1900, Chinese nationalists behind the so-called Boxer Rebellion occupy the capital city of Peking (later Beijing), kill several Westerners—including German ambassador Baron von Ketteler—and besiege the foreign legations in the diplomatic quarter of the city. The occupation would last 55 days.

Warren Earp, the youngest of the famous clan of gun fighting brothers, is murdered in an Arizona saloon.

In Monza, Italy, King Umberto I is shot to death by Gaetano Bresci, an Italian-born anarchist who resided in America before returning to his homeland to murder the king.

One of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history hits Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900, killing more than 6,000 people. The storm caused so much destruction on the Texas coast that reliable estimates of the number of victims are difficult to make. Some believe that as many as 12,000 people perished, which would make it the most deadly day in American history.

On November 8, 1900, Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind (1936), is born in Atlanta, Georgia.

On November 22, 1900, the first car to be produced under the Mercedes name is taken for its inaugural drive in Cannstatt, Germany. The car was specially built for its buyer, Emil Jellinek, an entrepreneur with a passion for fast, flashy cars. Jellinek had commissioned the Mercedes car from the German company Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft: it was lighter and sleeker than any car the company had made before, and Jellinek was confident that it would win races so handily that besotted buyers would snap it up. (He was so confident that he bought 36 of them.) In exchange for this extraordinary patronage, the company agreed to name its new machine after Jellinek’s 11-year-old daughter, Mercedes.

German physicist Max Planck publishes his groundbreaking study of the effect of radiation on a “blackbody” substance, and the quantum theory of modern physics is born.

Prohibitionist Carry Nation smashes up the bar at the Carey Hotel in Wichita, Kansas, causing several thousand dollars in damage and landing in jail. Nation, who was released shortly after the incident, became famous for carrying a hatchet and wrecking saloons as part of her anti-alcohol crusade.