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Counterculture Timeline: The Progressive Period (La Belle Epoque / Edwardian Age)
--- 1880 to 1913 ---
Date   Context   Counterculture Events   The Arts   The Period

-- 1880s The generation that grew up during the 1860s reaches their 20s:
Mucha & Gustav Mahler 1860, Rudolf Steiner 1861, Debussy & Delius 1862, Toulouse-Lautrec 1864, Yeats 1865 --

Extremely long 43 year period of progressive inventive creativeness
1880   London's first telephone exchange

Canned fruits and meats first appear in stores

Carnegie develops first large steel furnace

1880s - First land-use zoning: Modesto, California: attempt to control the spread of Chinese laundaries

  Captain Boycott, land agent in Mayo, Ireland is "boycotted" for refusing to accept rents fixed by his tenants


1880s - bicycling clubs, U.K.
 

Vincent Van Gogh begins painting


Sarah Bernhardt is at the height of her fame in New York



Jane Addams

  "1880s: social realism beginning to compete with romanticism"


1880-1902 Missionary generation (Prophet)
born 1860-1882
turns 20
1881   Sales of typewriters finally take off  

US: 1881-85: strikes average 500/year

Icaria Speranza community founded, 3 miles south of Cloverdale, Sonoma County, California by French 1848ers; lasts to 1886

Tuskegee Institute founded by Booker T. Washington

Rational Dress Society, U.K.

  First of all cabarets "Chat Noir" founded in Paris

Frederick Jackson Turner
   
1882   Edison designs first hydroelectric plant, Wisconsin

September 4 - first commercial power station, located on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, goes into operation providing light and electricity power to customers in a one square mile area.
  US: 1881-85: strikes average 500/year   Manet: "Bar aux Folies-Bergere"
Cezanne: "Self Portrait" (pre-cubist)

Paris: controversy over the impressionist painters (Monet, Pissarro, Seurat)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (18) arrives in Paris; he was fascinated with Japanese prints and the figures and compositions of Degas

Nietzsche (28): Beyond Good and Evil

   
1883   First synthetic fiber produced (English scientist Sir Joseph Swan)

First skyscraper built in Chicago (ten stories)

Buffalo Bill Cody organizes "Wild West Show"

Bismarck introduces sickness insurance in Germany
 

US: 1881-85: strikes average 500/year

The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: Andrew Mearns

The Fellowship of the New Life founded, U.K.

Fabian Society founded, London; Shaw joins 1884

Howard Williams: The Ethics of Diet popularizes
vegetarian diet in U.K.

William Robinson: The Wild Garden (first published 1870), UK

  Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra - published in parts; collected 1887 and 1892.   Plekhanov (26) starts first Marxist group in Russian history, the Liberation of Labor, starts plotting the conference outside Russia which finally takes place 20 years later in Brussels in 1903
1884   new recession, business slump U.S.

George Eastman: sensitized roll film

May 3 - first regular comic strip (Britain): Ally Sloper's Half Holiday

  US: 1881-85: strikes average 500/year

National Footpaths Preservation Society, U.K.

Art Workers' Guild, U.K.
 

Georges Seurat (25): Bathers

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (20) moves to Montmartre

first regular comic strip, U.K. (Ally Sloper's Half Holiday)

   
1885   Gottlieb Daimler invents prototype of the modern gas engine

motorcycle ?

first English electrical tram car (Blackpool)

 

US: 1881-85: strikes average 500/year

1880s - Knights of Labor, begun as a secret society of Philadelphia garment cutters in the late 1860s,
is one of the few labor organizations to survive the cataclysmic depression of the 1870s, emerges as the first mass organization of US working class, electing officials in 200+ cities as "Workingmen's", "United Labor," "Union Labor", and "Independent" parties. In 1886, 750,000+ members.

  Cézanne painting Paris landscapes using geometric shapes to convey volume and structure, and blurring contours to counteract illusions of depth.

Monet painting landscapes of southern France, with movement and luminosity
   
1886   January 29, Karl Benz gets the first patent for a gas-fueled car.

Gottlieb Daimler builds the world's primary four-wheeled motor vehicle.

Apache leader Geronimo surrenders, Apaches sent to ?p.o.w. ?camps in Florida and Oklahoma

US Immigration Reform and Control Act allows 3.1 million previously illegal aliens to obtain legal status

Just 5 years after sales of typewriters take off, almost every sizeable office employs at least one typist

 

Feb 8 London: meeting of 3-5000 unemployed workers in Trafalgar Square met by 600 police officers, goes into riot

May 1 - US: nationwide strikes for 8-hour day,
May 4 - Haymarket, Chicago: bomb thrown into police advancing toward a protest meeting kills one -> police riot against demonstrators -> arrests of union leaders under charge of conspiracy and hanging.

Farmers Alliance joins with Knights of Labor to become Populist movement.

Henry George, running as Independent Labor Party nominee for mayor of New York, comes in second.

1400+ strikes in the US in 1886

American Federation of Labor (AFL) founded


Kaweah Colony, site of present Yosemite National Park, California (to 1902)

  Eighth and last Impressionist Exhibition, Paris

Vincent Van Gogh joins brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris; he is still painting in the dark, heavy style of The Potato Eaters
  AWAKENNG:
Third Great Awakening
1886-1908
1887   Allotment Act: Native American tribal holdings broken up into individual holdings   Fabian Society (led by Sidney Webb & Bernard Shaw): Facts for Socialists

Oct 23 London: huge crowds gathering daily in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square to hear speeches turns into mob

Nov 12 Trafalgar Square, London: police defeat
  November - Vincent Van Gogh (34) meets Paul Gauguin (39) at a Paris art gallery; they exchange paintings; Gauguin goes to Pont Aven, Brittany.
Gauguin had been painting in the Impressionist style since the 1870s.

Van Gogh: "Moulin de la Galette"

Edward Bellamy (37): Looking Backward - utopian novel

   
1888   Nikola Tesla constructs A.C. electric motor

George Eastman perfects "Kodak" box camera

J.B. Dunlop invents pneumatic tire

William Burroughs: commerically practical adding-list machine

First of all beauty contests held: Spa, Belgium

"Jack the Ripper" murders six women in London

  "Police battle unemployed demonstrators, Trafalgar Square (same?)

Port Sunlight model village, UK

June - Charles Ashbee starts Guild & School of Handicraft, Whitechapel, UK

1888-89 Burlington strike
  Cezanne in Paris met Van Gogh & Gauguin

February 20 - van Gogh arrives in Arles; May - rents The Yellow House; October 23 - Gauguin joins van Gogh in Arles; many paintings produced by both; after van Gogh cuts off his ear, Gauguin leaves December 23

Paul Gauguin: "The Vision After the Sermon"

Van Gogh: "The Yellow Chair"

  W.E.B. DuBois turns 20, writes first book
1889   Oklahoma is opened to non-Indian settlement

Punch card system created by H. Hollerith

World's Fair, Paris &Eiffel Tower built for it
 

London Dock Strike

Abbotsholme School founded, Derbyshire, UK (explain) xx

Jane Addams sets up Hull House in immigrant slums of Chicago

1889- 90 Methwold Fruit Farm Colony, Norfolk, UK

"Decadent" art style brought to London from Paris by Arthur Symons, visiting with Havelock Ellis; style is characterised by an anti-narrative stance, a belief in art for art's sakd and that beauty is all. Perhaps originating with Baudelaire, through Théopile Gautier, to its foremost explonent, Paul Verlaine.

 

Moulin Rouge opens (Place Blanche, Paris)

April - Vincent Van Gogh voluntarily enters asylum near Saint-Rémy: The Reaper, Cypresses, Starry Night, +
Wheat Field and Cypress Trees

Edward Carpenter: Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (U.K.)

  Frank Lloyd Wright turns 20, begins career

Emma Goldman
turns 20, moves to NY and gives first speech
1890   Standard Oil becomes the first U.S. industrial `Trust' ---> Sherman Anti-Trust Law

Mississippi becomes first Southern U. S. state to draw up new constitution to control who could vote

Sitting Bull, Sioux leader, assassinated; Sioux seek refuge at Pine Ridge

Dec (last Indian massacre) Wounded Knee, South Dakota: U.S. army kills 300 of 350

Patent for foundtain pen invented by William Purvis, US (African-American)

  Buffalo Bill tours Europe with his Wild West Show

Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, U.K.

Lafcadio Hearn moves to Japan

Wyoming becomes the first state to allow women to vote
  Vincent Van Gogh leaves for Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, to consult physician Paul Gachet; July 29 dies after shooting himself (37)

U.K.: William Morris: News from Nowhere (describes socialist utopia)

Jacob Riis (Danish sociologist): How the Other Half Lives - studies of US poverty

Sir James Frazer: The Golden Bough

"Comic Cuts" and "Chips" comic papers, U.K. (-1953)
   
1890s -- first generation born after birth of modern Europe 1870 reaches its 20s:
Dreiser, Mann, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Jack London, Rilke, Robert Frost --
"the Gay Nineties": Classic Bohemian society in Paris's Latin Quarter; Four Arts Balls held yearly;
Toulouse-Lautrec, Jarry, Bonnard, Gide, Mallarme (Symbolist poet 1842-98), etc.;
England: Hardy, Shaw, Wilde, Whistler, Elgar, Beerbohm, Beardsley, Pinero, Kipling, Conrad, Yeats
1891   First(?) U.S. miners strike, Tennessee   Montmartre, Paris: cabarets (Le Divan Japonais, Le Mirliton) with Jane Avril, May Belfort, etc; dance halls (Elysée-Montmartre, Moulin de la Galette, Moulin Rouge)

Theodore Dreiser
Orville Wright


  Paris: (Montmartre) "Moulin Rouge introduces highkicking dancers" (? see 1862)

Gauguin settles and paints in Tahiti (1891-1893)
 

1890s:
UK: Railways permit middle class to move to countryside around
London (& start of Back To The Land movement).
First public bathing places on the river at Cambridge (men only).

Diptheria, typhoid, smallpox & dysentery epidemics

Freezing winters?

Racist legislation in New Orleans forces Creoles, among the prosperous families of the city, into social &
occupational contact with blacks; leads to changes in the music, as Creoles are educated & can read music.

 

1892   Diesel patents his internal combustion engine

First automatic telephone switchboard

First newspaper comic strips in U.S. newspapers
(San Francisco Examiner): Krazy Kat, Betty Boop
("actually 1896 with Hearst (rival) comic supplement")
  Strikes all over the U.S.: iron & steel workers; general strike New Orleans; railroad strike Buffalo NY; miners strike Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; Homestead steelworkers, Pennsylvania.
Populist candidates in presidential and other elections


Bedales School, Sussex. UK

Home Colonization Society founded, UK

California: Sierra Club founded, John Muir elected president

Bertrand Russell

  Monet begins series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral (-1895)

Toulouse-Lautrec: "At the Moulin Rouge" (his studio is at 27 Rue Caulaincourt)

William Butler Yeats (1865- 1939) referred to his "Tragic Generation" as "The Last Romantics" - driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival; main work 1886 - 1920; Rhymers' Club published two anthologies: 1892 and 1894

 

Mayan Sacred Calendar: Planetary Underworld: Heaven 8: Night 4: Expansion - 1893 - 1913

 
1893   Depression (worst in US so far), & riots in California (where 27 banks failed in June)

U.S. adopts single gold standard, basis of capital centralism

Henry Ford builds his first car

US: The Republican Party, to avoid the embarassment of a federal budget surplus, expanded pensions for veterans of the Union Army and their dependents. By 1910, more than a quarter of all men older than 65, plus hundreds of thousands of widows and children are covered.

  George Poore, M.D.: Essays in Rural Hygiene: introduces earth closet in Britain

1893 to World War I: Chicago - on the outskirts of the World's Fair Grounds, literary Bohemians met at Margery Curry's (& Floyd Dell's): Thorsten Veblen, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsey, Edgar Lee Masters, Eunice Tietjins, Harriet Monroe (Poetry magazine), Maurice Browne, Ellen Volkenburg Browne (theatre), Ben Hecht

The Chicago World's Fair also introduced the Midway, the Ferris Wheel, and Little Egypt.
It's layout was by Frederick Olmsted.

Gandhi goes to work for an Indian firm in Durban, South Africa. He found himself treated as a member of an inferior race and was appalled at the widespread denial of civil liberties and political rights to Indian immigrants to South Africa. He threw himself into the struggle for elementary rights for Indians for the next 20 years.
  Edvard Munch: The Scream

ART NOUVEAU appears in Europe

Buddy Bolden (14) is "king" of New Orleans music

World's Fair in Chicago - from it emerged the City Beautiful movement

1890s Trilby (by George Du Maurier) glorified Parisian Bohemia, swept US (riots outside bookstores on finding supplies depleted)
[get date of pub xx]
 
1894   Marconi sends wireless signals over short distances from his home in Bologna, Italy

Alfred Dreyfus sentenced; Emile Zola writes "J'Accuse" article defending him
 

Coxey leads mass march of unemployed to Washington, Pullman Strike, President Cleveland sends troops to put down; Eugene Debs, who helped organized it, sent to prison for six months.

Populist Party gets 40% of U. S. congressional elections vote

Altruria community, Mark West Cree, Sonoma Valley, California (just north of Fountain Grove) (185 acres); contemporary with colonies at Topolobampo, Mexico, Fairhope, Albama (based on Henry George's philosophies), and an Australian settlement in Paraguay

France: Alfred Dreyfus courtmartialed

Charles Ives

 

England: The Yellow Book magazine starts publication (-1897), with art editor Aubrey Beardsley (22), ?including his drawings for Salome

Debussy's "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune"

Art Nouveau

 
1895   Rontgen discovers x-rays

Marconi invents radio (=wireless) telegraph (also saw as 1896)

Trial of Oscar Wilde

The last herd of buffalo in existence, 100 buffalo survive in the protection of Yellowstone National Park

  Maryland Colony, Essex: first intensive agricultural coloney for city market (lasted 10+ years)

Bouesville (?ck spell) model village (Cadbury chocolate)

1895-6 Bohemian "Les Jeunes" in San Francisco publish journal "The Lark"

Altruria community moves to 80 acre farm west of Cloverdale, down to 16 people; then to Santa Rosa (city), and ends

Mary McLeod Bethune
Carl Jung
Jack London


  First public film show, Paris (Hotel Scribe)

H.G. Wells: The Time Machine

Art Nouveau style predominates

First Venice Biennale
 
1896       Homer Adolph Plessy (34) (1/8 of African-American descent) refuses to move from his purchased first-class seat in the "white" car of a Louisiana train, but U. S. Supreme Court rules against him, creating the "separate but equal" doctrine

Populists enticed into Democratic Party to elect William Jennings Bryan, who lost anyway, to Republican William McKinley, supported by the first massive money campaign

1896-7 Purleigh Colony, Essex (commune) -1898

Whiteway Colony, Cotswalds (proposed to be deeded to God) -1901

After being attacked and beaten by white South Africans, Gandhi begins to teach a policy of passive resistance to, and non-cooperation with, the South African authorities. Part of the inspiration for this policy came from Leo Tolstoy, as well as from the teachings of Christ, and from Henry David Thoreau, especially "Civil Disobedience."

  "La Boheme" - opera by Puccini based on Murger's work, opens in Turin, popularizes bohemian life

"Die Jugend" & "Simplicissimus" German art magazines, Munich / Art Nouveau

Hearst starts first comics newspaper supplement
 
1897   Royal Automobile Club founded, London   1897/1898 - Point Loma colony near San Diego, California, founded by 500 Theosophists (followers of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky), lasted to 1940

Forecasts of the Coming Century by a Decade of Writers - Alfred Russel Wallace, Tom Mann, H. Russell Smart, William Morris, H.S. Salt, Enid Stacy, Margaret McMillan, Grant Allen, Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter. Manchester: The Labour Press/London: W Scott, 1897.

  Vienna: Klimt, Schiele and others: first Secessionist exhibition / Art Nouveau

Henri Rousseau: "Sleeping Gypsy"

Edmond Rostand: Cyrano de Bergerac

 

1897: In the wake of the opening of a large U.S. Navy base in New Orleans, Alderman Charles Storyville sponsors an ordinance to limit prostitution to one area of the city, bordered by the Mississippi River, Perdido & Basin Streets; it is nicknamed "Storyville" and becomes the center for the develop-ment of ragtime piano (Jelly Roll Morton, etc.)

First ragtime song published
1898.

1898   U.S. fights Spanish-American War

Photographs first taken using artificial light

Paris Metro opened
  Ebenezer Howard: Garden Cities of To-Morrow proposes suburban planned developments with their own employment - starts the Garden City movement

Peter Kropotkin: Fields, Factories and Workshops [explain] xx



Isadora Duncan
Upton Sinclair

  UK: Folk Song Society founded

Aubrey Beardsley dies (26)

H.G. Wells: The War of the Worlds

Alfred Jarry: Ubu Roi

The MacKintosh School of Art, Glasgow: Art Nouveau architecture

 
1899   First magnetic recording of sound

Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid, and Wild Bunch rob Union Pacific train in Wilcox, Wyoming
  London County Council buys land for first suburb, connected by electric railway (Totterdown Fields, opened 1903), meant to relieve crowding in inner city slums

Pablo Picasso (18) moves to Barcelona, hangs out at Els Quatre Gats

France: Novelist Emile Zola pro-Dreyfus pamphlet "J'Accuse!"; army retries Dreyfus with forged evidence

Albert Einstein
Margaret Sanger


  Art Nouveau: Vienna, London, Paris, Munich, Barcelona, Glasgow, San Francisco

Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class - the concept of conspicuous consumption

Feb - Toulouse-Lautrec so alcoholic that he is sent to assylum at Neuilly

  The first dance craze: Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, published 1899, sold 1 million copies in U.S. alone; Eubie Blake composed the Charleston Rag in 1899
1890 - 1914
Invention of: the telephone, cheap camera, phonograph, rotary press & linotype, photoengraving,
railroad air-brake & sleeping car, electric street car, skyscraper, suspension bridge, motor vehicles, airplane, typewriter,
bicycle, electric light, motion picture, public library, scientific medicine, department store, ocean liner, refrigeration,
elevator, sewing machine, gas stove, steam heating, hot running water + traffic light
+ Between 1851 and 1901 London grew from 2.7 million to 6.6 million population,
with no government policy to accomodate the growth
1900   1900 Marconi sends wireless telegraphy message across the English Channel

1900-1902 US:
214 Negro lynchings

Paper clip invented by Norwegian, Johann Vaaler, living in Germany
  1900s Start and growth of the Wandervogel movement in Germany

Pablo Picasso (19) visits Paris for the first time, sees art by Gauguin, Van Gogh, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec; the friend Picasso came with commits suicide and Picasso starts his "Blue Period"


"Belle Epoque" starts in Paris

H. L. Mencken
Helen Keller


 

Art Nouveau

Sigmund Freud: Interpretation of Dreams

L. Frank Baum: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Cake Walk becomes fashionable dance

Silent Film era begins

   
1901   First U.S. legislation to set up building codes,
meant to improve living conditions in big city slums

William Maybach, technical director at the Daimler works, constructs the first Mercedes car

J.P. Morgan organizes U.S. Steel Corporation

12/12 at 12:00 - Marconi (20) transmits telegraphic radio messages in Morse code from Cornwall
to Newfoundland (saw as Newfoundland to Cape Cod, Massachusetts)

Hawaii Pineapple Company founded by Dole

 

First London housing co-op founded: Ealing Tenants Limited

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) founds anthroposophy (Anthroposophical Society) - reinvigorated the Theosophic teachings of the Symbolists

Sept 9 - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec dies (36)

 

Art Nouveau

Frank Norris: The Octopus (exposes railroad monopolies)

H.G. Wells: Anticipations - predicts car-only motorways (get this) xx

Ragtime jazz develops in U.S.

First Picasso exhibit

  UK: One in fifteen employed as a servant
1902      

Coal strike in U.S., May-October

Labor strikes in Belgium

William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience


Franklin D. Roosevelt turns 20
(last Missionary)


 

Art Nouveau

Enrico Caruso makes his first phonograph recording

   
1903   December 17 - Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully fly a powered airplane (first manned flight)

  Labor strikes in Holland

First Garden City started, built by co-operative association: Letchworth, England (north of London)

1903-1908, 1912 - Halcyon colony near Pismo Beach, California, founded; lasted to 1950s, after moving to Covina, then Altadena

Leo Stein, moves to 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris; autumn: sister Gertrude (29) joins him; they start collecting art

  Art Nouveau to 1914

"The Great Train Robbery" first movie to tell a story, produced by Edison's company
  At Plekhanov's planned conference in Belgium, Lenin takes over leadership

1904  

War between Japan and Russia - first time U.S. gets involved as a world power.

Economic recession

New York City opens first subway segment

First radio transmission of music (Austria)
First practical photoelectric cell (Elster)
First ultraviolet lamps
First telgraphic transmission of photographs

Rolls-Royce Company founded

 

Labor strikes in Italy

10-hour work day: France

Congress of the Second (Socialist) International, Stuttgart, Germany: Rosa Luxembourg (34) gives speech opposing World War I and Lenin's hope to make use of war to forward revolution.

Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

New York policeman arrests woman for smoking cigarette in public

Jean Jaures issues socialist newspaper "L'Humanite", Paris

Lizzie Magie granted patent for board game "Landlord's Game", which later was called Monopoly. Magie, a Quaker and follower of Henry George, felt that speculation in land values was at the root of modern society's social and final problems.

 

Freud: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Ivan Pavlov wins Nobel prize (explain) ?wrong?

James Barrie: Peter Pan

Herman Hesse (27): Peter Camenzind (first book)

Madeleine G. appeared on a Munich cabaret stage as a hypnotic (or dream) dancer

Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) begins her first dance school in Grunewald, Germany

   
1905  

Jan 22 - Russia: Bloody Sunday: 500 killed in peaceful Petrograd demonstration asking for 8-hour day and minimum wage, followed by a wave of strikes; Russian revolutionaries come close to dragging down the monarchy, but things quiet down when czar creates an elected parliament (Duma)

October - Pogroms In 300 Russian cities, bloodiest in Odessa

Albert Einstein (26): Special Theory of Relativity

First neon light signs

Automobiles become common

 

June: Niagara Movement first meeting, called by W.E.B. Du Bois

June: I.W.W. (Wobblies) founded, Chicago, by William Haywood, Mother Jones, Father Thomas J. Hagerty, Lucy Parsons, Daniel De Leon, & Eugene V. Debs and 200 others

Sinn Fein Party founded, Dublin

France: over 1,000 strikes , Germany over 2,000

Street fighting in Petersburg crushed by police

Jack London runs for mayor of ??

Alternative schools start, U.K.: St. Christopher's
(near Letchworth Garden City)

Nipsell's Farm, Essex: intensive cultivation

Winter 1905-06 - Gertrude Stein visits Picasso's studio frequently to pose for him


 

First regular cinema established (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

First Fauve exhibit (Paris) (Marquet, Matisse, Roualt, Vlaminck, Derain, Dufy +)

Poet George Sterling moves to Carmel, California

Jack London: The Road - about hobo life

Hermann Hesse: Unterm Rad

Debussy: "Golliwogs Cakewalk"

After traveling between Barcelona and Paris since 1900, Picasso settles in Paris
(Montmartre: Bateau Lavoir)

  D. H. Lawrence
Sinclair Lewis
turn 20
1906   Nightshift work for women internationally forbidden
First radio program of voice and music, U.S.

First parkway started, Long Island: limited-access highway designed for private-car traffic only, and landscaped

April 18 5:13 am San Francisco earthquake --> fire


 

France: over 1,000 strikes , Germany over 2,000

Upton Sinclair: The Jungle (Chicago stockyard)
---> U.S. Pure Food and Drugs Act

July 22 - France: Alfred Dreyfus reinstated in the army

F.A. Morton: The Simple Life on Four Acres
(fourth in Cottage Farm Series by simple-life publisher A.C. Fifield)

Amedeo Modigiliani (21) arrives in Paris (Montmartre)

April 23 - Imperial decree on the 30th Day of the Third Moon from Empress Dowager of China to send 100,000 taels as a personal contribution to the relief of the San Francisco sufferers. President Theodore Roosevelt declined the offer, as well as donations from other foreign governments.


 

Jack London: The Iron Heel

Buddy Bolden, 28, the first "king" of New Orleans Storyville music, stops playing (1907 committed to New Orleans mental hospital for 24 years)

Charleston invented ca 1904, 1907

Hot fudge sundaes become famous at C. C. Brown's in Hollywood

Matisse, always passionate about Moorish art, visits North Africa for the first time

  when? Paris: "Le bande," includes Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Georges Braque; Picasso finds a painting of Henri Rousseau's in a junk shop and throws a party for him.
1907   Fall - Panic causing run on banks stopped by J.P. Morgan's importation of $100 million in gold from Europe

Pres. Theodore Roosevelt bars Japanese from immigrating to U.S.

First suburb specifically based on the automobile:
Country Club District, Kansas City (& at low density)

Louis Lumiere develops process for color photography


  Montessori [explain] xx

Baden-Powell founds Boy Scouts

Sierra Club submits a resolution to the Secretary of the Interior opposing the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley

France: over 1,000 strikes , Germany over 2,000

Poet George Sterling, who moved to Carmel in 1905, founds literary colony which included poet Jack London, and Jimmy Harper (see "Seacoast of Bohemia" by Franklin Walker). (Many San Franciscans moved to Carmel after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.)
 

Pablo Picasso (25) meets Georges Braque (25) while both live in Montmartre; they jointly develop cubism; Picasso paints "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", as part of his development of cubism. They were heavily influenced by the late paintings of Paul Cezanne (died 1906).

First Cubist exhibition, Paris (term first used in 1908)

Claude Monet painting water lilies at Giverny

Henri Rousseau: "The Snake Charmer"

Hawaiian George Freeth introduces surfing to mainland US with demonstrations at Redondo Beach, California

   
1908   August - Springfield, Illinois: white woman's accusation of Negro rape (later retracted) sets off riot which destroys Negro businesses and ransacks Negro homes; Negro barber and 84 year old Negro man, married to white woman 30 years, lynched; 5000 militia sent in to suppress

1908 First steel and glass building (Berlin factory)

General Motors Corporation formed;
Ford Motor Company produces first Model "T"

  France: over 1,000 strikes , Germany over 2,000   Fauves works first shown in U.S.

Gertrude Stein: Three Lives

Isadora Duncan becomes popular interpreter of dance

"Ashcan School" founded - realistic portrayals of life: Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, George Bellows, Everett Shinn

The Power of the Sultan - first dramatic film shot entirely in Los Angeles
   
1909   Commercial manufacture of Bakelite, to be used in plastics


  France: over 1,000 strikes , Germany over 2,000

Spokane, Washington: 600 Wobblies arrested for free speech

Futurist manifesto published, Italy - "end to traditionalism, reproduce the dynamic sensation of life"

Rudolf Steiner - original center established 1909 in Munich. Emphasized creation of "soul-art": Mystery Dramas (crystalline structures surrounded performers and dancers dressed in diaphanous robes and skirts; archetypal figures interacted with characters from the mundane world; whirling and mysterious movements; "Eurythmy" accompanied ethereal music as a rainbow of primary colors were projected on the geometrically-patterned stage floor.)

30,000 New York shirtwaist workers walk out, strike broken up by police, hundreds jailed

  Vassily Kandinsky's first abstract paintings

Henri Matisse: Harmony in Red (Red Room)

May 19 - Sergei Diaghilev: first Ballet Russe presentation, Paris & tour - sensation

First big cache of Jurassic-era dinosaurs uncovered at Carnegie Quarry, Utah (1915 became Dinosaur National Monument)

   
1910   The "week-end" becomes popular in the U.S.

Portugal king deposed
  NAACP formed

France: over 1,000 strikes , Germany over 2,000

First womens suffrage parade in US

First Socialist elected to U. S. Congress

William James: The Moral Equivalent of War

Alice B. Toklas joins Gertrude Stein in Paris

1910s Paris: Utrillo, Apollinaire, Braque, Modigliani, Derain, Picasso, Andre Gide, Brancusi, Lipchitz, Legere, Soutine, Chagall, and Gertrude Stein collecting their art

  Henri Rousseau: The Dream (& dies)

Erik Satie starts composing again: "the humor of absurdity in music"

Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery, New York

Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture becoming well known

South American tango popular in Europe and U.S.

The hobble skirt, which could daringly expose 5-8 inches of ankle.

   
1911  

Taylor publishes book on "scientific management" of labor

Chinese Revolution - Sun Yat-sen becomes first president

  Fire at the unionized Triangle Shirtwaist Company, New York - 146 women die

France: over 1,000 strikes , Germany over 2,000

Thousands arrested in Fresno, California free speech fight and free speech fight in Aberdeen, Washington

US: first 12 states pass workmen's compensation laws

Election of 73 Socialist mayors & 1200 Socialist city officials in 340 U. S. cities

Krotona colony, 15 acres in the Hollywood Hills, founded (moved to Ojai 1924; lasted to 1950s

Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958) at bohemian colony in Ascona, Switz begins to formulate his idea of Ausdruckstanz, dance movement independent of music and storytelling in which every gesture expresses the ineffable essence of man-in-space or Body Wisdom. Also created concept of movement choirs and community festivals organized on the principles of ecstatic movement and a shared history. Dancers lived communally, dining solely on nuts, dried fruits, and grain beverages; frequent nudity, and a form of group marriage. In the 1930s, they organized Nazi festivals; in 1936, Laban left for England.

 

T.S. Eliot: The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Hermann Hesse: Journey to India

Picasso & Braque start painting fragmented forms, intensely abstracted cubism

The term "Expressionism" first used for Fauves

1910-11 First use of `jazz' to describe Nola music style
Heyday of Nola jazz, including Freddie Keppard, Edward
`Kid' Ory, and especially Joe `King' Oliver (26), who merged hot music with the smoothness of the Creole bands. Louis Armstrong (12) starts visits to Storyville to hear them.
Sidney Bechet, age 14, starts to play publicly with Bunk
Johnson's band.

Diaghilev forms own company, performs i.e. Scheherezade

   
1912   Polish chemist coins the term "vitamine"

Cloud chamber photographs detect protons and electrons

April 14 - RMS Titanic sinks on maiden voyage: 1513 of 2205 drowned

C.G. Jung: The Theory of Psychoanalysis

A young mother who had tried to give herself an abortion dies in the arms of Margaret Sanger, a nurse, who later founded what later became Planned Parenthood

New Mexico becomes 47th US state and Arizona 48th

  Jan-March - IWW helps with American Woolen Company strikes, Lawrence, Massachusetts

San Diego Wobbly free-speech arrests

France: over 1,000 strikes , Germany over 2,000

Women Suffrage parades +

Bread and Roses

79 Socialist majors & larger number of Democratic & Republican reform mayors elected throughout the US; Eugene V. Debs running for President from the Socialist Party polls 900,000 votes. [Woodrow Wilson elected]

1912 -17 Greenwich Village: Mabel Dodge's Wednesday evenings salons - John Reed, xx

"Germany became socialist" and has Europe's biggest socialist party

England's liberal government gives Ireland home rule, but civil war almost breaks out led by Ulster protestants and Englands Tories


  Picasso & Braque start cubist collage

Marcel Duchamp: "The Bride"

Kandinsky (Munich) & Delauney & Kupka (Paris): abstraction

Arnold Schonberg (Vienna): 12-tone ?scale?

Zane Grey: Riders of the Purple Sage
Edgar Rice Borroughs: Tarzan of the Apes (the "natural" man)
   

Mayan Sacred Calendar: Planetary Underworld: Heaven 9: Day 5: Budding - 1913 - 1932

   
1913   Henry Ford brings together techniques to begin first
mass-production plant (for automobiles), Highland Park, Michigan

Federal income tax introduced in US through 16th Amendment

Apaches moved to reservations in Oklahoma & New Mexico
 

June - Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden, NYC

Sept Colorado coal strike starts


France: over 1,000 strikes , Germany over 2,000, Britain nearly 1,500, Russia over 2,400


Rudolf Steiner moved to Dornach, outside Basel; constructed dome "the Goetheanum"; destroyed by fire 1923; rebuilt in concrete 1928

Albert Schweitzer opens hospital in Lambarene, French Congo

1912 -17 Greenwich Village continues

Salons in Paris: Anna de Noailles the only female poet of the time; Edmond Rostand (dramatist), Jean Cocteau; Countess de Greffulhe's musical soirees help establish Moussorgsky, Debussy, Wanda Landowska, Caruso

Bloomsbury Group in London: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey


  Marcel Proust: first part of "A la recherche du temps perdu"

International Exhibition of Modern Art at New York Armory
introduces modernism to US (Cubists & Futurists
including Duchamp: "Nude Descending a Staircase");
Marcel Duchamp starts creating "readymades" including
the "Bicycle Wheel" and the "Bottle Rack"

May 29 - Diaghilev Ballet Russe troupe performance of Stravinsky: "Le Sacre du Printemps" (Rite of Spring), with Nijinsky dancing - near-riot at Paris premiere

D.H. Lawrence (28): Sons and Lovers

The foxtrot

  Forty years of peace --> very few Europeans remember the last time Europe was at war (1870)
                 
On to The Early War Years: 1914-1932