World War I ended in 1918, when Germany signed an armistice agreement with the victorious Allies. The war had cost the lives of more than 9 million combatants plus millions of civilians. Meanwhile, an even more deadly threat emerged: the influenza pandemic, which would take another 50 million lives worldwide. Bolshevik revolutionaries executed the Romanov family, ending 300 years of Russian imperial rule. On the U.S. homefront, Congress enacted daylight savings time, only to repeal it the following year.
Jan
08
The Fourteen Points speech of President Woodrow Wilson was an address delivered before a joint meeting of Congress on January 8, 1918, during which Wilson outlined his vision for a stable, long-lasting peace in Europe, the Americas and the rest of the world following World War I.
Oscar White/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images
Jan
22
Feb
09
Feb
21
Mar
03
Mar
04
Just before breakfast on the morning of March 4, Private Albert Gitchell of the U.S. Army reports to the hospital at Fort Riley, Kansas, complaining of the cold-like symptoms of sore throat, fever and headache. Soon after, over 100 of his fellow soldiers had reported similar symptoms, marking what are believed to be the first cases in the historic influenza pandemic of 1918, later known as Spanish flu. The flu would eventually kill 675,000 Americans and an estimated 20 million to 50 million people around the world, proving to be a far deadlier force than even the First World War.
A Red Cross nurse is pictured in a mask with tips on how to prevent catching and spreading the flu in 1918.
The US National Library of Medicine
Mar
08
On March 8, 1918, the ascendant Bolshevik Party formally changes its name to the All-Russian Communist Party. It was neither the first nor the last time the party would alter its name to reflect a slight change in allegiance or direction; however, it was the birth of the Communist Party as it is remembered to history. With this change, the cadre that had brought down both Czar Nicolas II and the Provisional Government that followed his abdication announced itself to the world as a communist government, and it would unilaterally rule the emerging Union of Soviet Socialists Republics until 1991.
Mar
21
Mar
24
Apr
01
Apr
04
Apr
05
Apr
14
Six days after being assigned for the first time to the western front, two American pilots from the U.S. First Aero Squadron engage in America’s first aerial dogfight with enemy aircraft. In a battle fought almost directly over the Allied Squadron Aerodome at Toul, France, U.S. fliers Douglas Campbell and Alan Winslow succeeded in shooting down two German two-seaters. By the end of May, Campbell had shot down five enemy aircraft, making him the first American to qualify as a “flying ace” in World War I.
Apr
21
In the well-trafficked skies above the Somme River in France, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the notorious German flying ace known as the Red Baron,” is killed by Allied fire on April 21, 1918.
Baron von Richthofen with one of his triplanes. (Credit: Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
May
02
May
02
May
16
May
28
Jun
06
Jul
03
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08
Jul
09
William Faulkner, who would go on to become one of America's most iconic Southern authors, joins the Royal Air Force on this day, but will never see combat because World War I will end before he completes his training.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Jul
14
Jul
15
On July 15, 1918, near the Marne River in the Champagne region of France, the Germans begin what would be their final offensive push of World War I. Dubbed the Second Battle of the Marne, the conflict ended several days later in a major victory for the Allies.
Jul
16
Jul
23
Della Sorenson kills the first of her seven victims in rural Nebraska by poisoning her sister-in-law’s infant daughter, Viola Cooper. Over the next seven years, friends, relatives, and acquaintances of Sorenson died under mysterious circumstances before anyone finally realized that it had to be more than a coincidence.
Aug
02
On August 2, 1918, United States troops land at Archangel, in northern Russia. The landing was part of an Allied intervention in the civil war raging in that country after revolution in 1917 led to the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in favor of a provisional government; the seizure of power by Vladimir Lenin and his radical socialist Bolshevik Party; and, finally, Russia’s withdrawal from participation alongside the Allies in World War I.
Aug
08
Aug
20
On August 20, 1918, Jacqueline Susann, the author of Valley of the Dolls, the 1966 mega-hit novel about the showbiz lives of three women (reportedly modeled in part after Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly), is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Aug
30
After speaking at a factory in Moscow, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin is shot twice by Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary party. Lenin was seriously wounded but survived the attack. The assassination attempt set off a wave of reprisals by the Bolsheviks against the Social Revolutionaries and other political opponents. Thousands were executed as Russia fell deeper into civil war.
Sep
26
Sep
28
On September 28, 1918, in an incident that would go down in the lore of World War I history—although the details of the event are still unclear—Private Henry Tandey, a British soldier serving near the French village of Marcoing, reportedly encounters a wounded German soldier and declines to shoot him, sparing the life of 29-year-old Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler.
Sep
28
Sep
29
Sep
30
On September 30, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson gives a speech before Congress in support of guaranteeing women the right to vote. Although the House of Representatives had approved a 19th constitutional amendment giving women suffrage, the Senate had yet to vote on the measure.
Sep
30
On September 30, 1918, a combined Arab and Australian force arrives in Damascus, Syria, to spearhead its liberation from the Turks during World War I, before British troops arrive the following morning to seal the deal. An instrumental commander in the Allied campaign was T.E. Lawrence, a legendary British soldier known as Lawrence of Arabia.
Oct
04
In the early hours of October 4, 1918, German Chancellor Max von Baden, appointed by Kaiser Wilhelm II just three days earlier, sends a telegraph message to the administration of President Woodrow Wilson in Washington, D.C., requesting an armistice between Germany and the Allied powers in World War I.
Oct
08
On October 8, 1918, United States Corporal Alvin C. York reportedly kills more than 20 German soldiers and captures an additional 132 at the head of a small detachment in the Argonne Forest near the Meuse River in France. The exploits later earned York the Medal of Honor.
Oct
12
Oct
14
Oct
29
On October 29, 1918, sailors in the German High Seas Fleet refuse to obey an order from the German Admiralty to go to sea to launch one final attack on the British navy. Their defiance echoes the despondent mood of many on the side of the Central Powers during the last days of World War I.
Oct
30
On October 30, 1918, aboard the British battleship Agamemnon, anchored in the port of Mudros on the Aegean island of Lemnos, representatives of Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire sign an armistice treaty marking the end of Ottoman participation in the First World War.
Nov
03
As the First World War draws to a close, angry rebels in both Germany and Austria-Hungary revolt on November 3, 1918, raising the red banner of the revolutionary socialist Communist Party and threatening to follow the Russian example in bringing down their imperialist governments.
Nov
04
Nov
11
At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ends. At 5 a.m. that morning, Germany, bereft of manpower and supplies and faced with imminent invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. The First World War left nine million soldiers dead and 21 million wounded, with Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France and Great Britain each losing nearly a million or more lives. In addition, at least five million civilians died from disease, starvation or exposure.
11th November 1918: A group of soldiers, including a Scot, an Australian and a member of the WAAC, running down the Strand in London on Armistice Day. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Dec
13
Dec
27
In the wake of the German defeat, members of the People’s Guard, the Polish military organization, joined by a number of volunteers—many of them veterans of the Great War—take up arms against the occupying German army in the major industrial city of Poznan.
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