A Chronology of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s

A work in progress:

1917
8–16 March 1917 – February Revolution in Petrograd, mass demonstrations and armed clashes with police; on 12 March the Russian army sides with the revolutionaries. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and the Russian Council of Ministers was replaced by a Russian Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov

15 March 1917 – abdication of Tsar Nicholas II

7 November 1917–25 October 1922 – the Russian Civil War

7 November 1917 – the October Revolution (Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution), the armed insurrection in Petrograd on 25 October 1917 (under the Old Julian calendar); the Winter Palace (the seat of the Provisional government in Petrograd, capital of Russia) captured

1918
1918–1920 – Ronald Syme attends New Plymouth Boys’ High School, New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand

3 March 1918 – the peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed by new Bolshevik government of Russia and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) to end Russia's participation in World War I

14 May 1918 – death of James Gordon Bennett Jr. (10 May 1841–14 May 1918)

July 1918 – Oswald Spengler publishes volume 1 of Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes)

17 July 1918 – execution of Russian Imperial Romanov family (Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Tsarina Alexandra and their children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei) at Yekaterinburg

20 July 1919 – birth of Edmund Percival Hillary

autumn 1918–summer 1921 – James Hilton attends Christ’s College, Cambridge, and graduates with a history degree

29 October–9 November 1918 – the first stage of the November Revolution, a civil conflict in the Germany at the end of the First World War

3 November 1918–11 August 1919 – second stage of the November Revolution, a civil conflict in the Germany at the end of the First World War

9 November 1918 – Wilhelm II abdicates as emperor of Germany while at the Imperial Army headquarters in Spa, Belgium

9 November 1918 – proclamation of the German Republic by Philipp Scheidemann; Friedrich Ebert assumes the chancellery

11 November 1918 – First World War ended

1919
14 February 1919 – Albert Einstein divorces his first wife Mileva Marić (19 December 1875–4 August 1948), after being separated for five years

18 June 1919 – Germany given ultimatum to sign Treaty of Versailles

22 June 1919 – the German Reichstag ratifies the Versailles Treaty

28 June 1919 – the Versailles Treaty is signed in the Hall of Mirrors in France

11 August 1919 – the Weimar Constitution is announced

25 August 1919 – Ludwig Wittgenstein returns to his family in Vienna

16 November 1919 – the army of right-wing former admiral Miklós Horthy marches into Budapest and takes control of Hungary

1920s1920
1920–1934 – Ludwig von Mises holds a private seminar (Privatseminar) in his office at the Kammer in Vienna, held fortnightly in university term, on Fridays from 7 to 10 p.m.

1920–1926 – Ludwig Wittgenstein works as a school teacher; Wittgenstein given his first job as a primary school teacher in Trattenbach

1920 – Frank P. Ramsey won a scholarship to study mathematics in Trinity College, Cambridge

January 1920–July 1921 – the US Recession of 1920–1921

1 March 1920–15 October 1944 – Miklós Horthy is regent of the Kingdom of Hungary

April 1920 – Ludwig von Mises publishes his essay “Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen” [Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth] in Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaften, a paper that starts the Socialist Economic Calculation Debate

August 1920 – Bertrand Russell travels to Russia as part of an official delegation sent by the British government

August 1920–August 1921 – Bertrand Russell in China

1921
1921 – Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung is published in Annalen der Naturphilosophische

1921–1922 – Ronald Syme attends Victoria University College of Wellington, enrolled in a BA course with majors in Latin and French

4 March 1921–2 August 1923 – Warren G. Harding is 29th President of the United States

April 1921 – Frank P. Ramsey elected as a new member of the Apostles

April–25 October 1921 – the 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition (consisting of Charles Howard-Bury, Harold Raeburn, Alexander Kellas, George Mallory, Guy Bullock, Sandy Wollaston, Alexander Heron, Henry Morshead and Edward Wheeler)

4 May 1921 – the Federal Reserve Bank of New York cuts the discount rate from 7% to 6.5%

May 1921–November 1921 – the severe depreciation in the exchange value of the mark as the German government begins paying large cash reparations payments

5 May 1921 – London Ultimatum

June 1921–January 1924 – hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic

31 July 1921 – the Treaty of Trianon effective, the peace agreement signed 4 June 1920 between the Allies and Hungary

2 August 1921 – John Maynard Keynes publishes A Treatise on Probability

26 August 1921 – Bertrand Russell arrives back in England

December 1921 – George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) leaves Eton

1922
1922 – Moritz Schlick assumes the chair of Naturphilosophie at the University of Vienna (previously held by Ludwig Boltzmann and Ernst Mach)

28 February 1922 – Egypt recognised as sovereign state by the British

4 March 1922 – release date of the German Expressionist horror film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror), directed by F. W. Murnau

10 April–19 May 1922 – the Genoa Economic and Financial Conference, held in Genoa, Italy, to plan the restoration of Europe after World War I; this is attended by John Maynard Keynes

July 1922 – David Lloyd George moves into Bron-y-de house, in Churt, Surrey

12 July 1922 – Germany demands a moratorium on reparation payments

September 1922 – Ludwig Wittgenstein moves to teach in a secondary school in Hassbach; in November 1922, Wittgenstein moves to teach at a primary school at Puchberg in the Schneeberg mountains

October 1922 – Lydia Lopokova moves into a flat at 41 Gordon Square near 46 Gordon Square (Keynes’ London home)

19 October 1922 – Lloyd George steps down as British Prime Minister (PM from 6 December 1916–19 October 1922)

November 1922 – Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung is published in an English translation as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

November 1922–July 1927 – George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) in Burma working in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma

November 1922 – the Swedish Academy of Sciences awards Albert Einstein the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics

26 November 1922 – Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon open the tomb of Tutankhamun

27 December 1922 – France occupies the Ruhr to force payment of war reparations from Germany in kind

1923
1923 – Frank P. Ramsey graduates from Cambridge

1923–1924 – Ronald Syme becomes assistant lecturer in Classics at the Auckland University College; in late 1924 he graduates with Double First Class Honours in Latin and French

11 January 1923 – the Occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium between 1923 and 1925 when Weimar Republic fails to continue its reparation payments in the aftermath of World War I

March 1923–May 1924 – Friedrich Hayek visits America

2 August 1923–4 March 1929 – Calvin Coolidge (Republican) is 30th President of the United States

September 1923 – Frank P. Ramsey visits Wittgenstein in Vienna

8 November 1923 – the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed coup attempt by the Adolf Hitler with Erich Ludendorff, to seize power in Munich, Bavaria

6 December 1923 – the United Kingdom general election of 1923. The results:

Party | Leader | Seats Won
Conservative | Stanley Baldwin | 258
Labour | Ramsay MacDonald | 191
Liberal | H. H. Asquith | 158
Nationalist | Joseph Devlin | 3.

After the 1923 election, the Conservatives had lost their majority. When they lost a vote of confidence in January 1924 King George V calls on MacDonald to form a minority Labour government, with the support of the Liberals

11 December 1923 – John Maynard Keynes publishes A Tract on Monetary Reform

1924
1924–1933 – Karl Polanyi is senior editor of the Der Österreichische Volkswirt (The Austrian Economist) magazine in Vienna

January 1924 – end of the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic

21 January 1924 – Stanley Baldwin (Conservative) defeated in a vote of confidence

21 January 1924 – death of Vladimir Lenin

22 January 1924–4 November 1924 – Ramsay MacDonald (Labour) is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

12 February 1924 – Howard Carter opens the sarcophagus of king Tutankhamun

April–11 June 1924 – the 1924 British Mount Everest expedition (with Charles G. Bruce, George Mallory, Howard Somervell, Edward Norton, Geoffrey Bruce, George Ingle Finch and Andrew Irvine); the second expedition trying to ascend Mount Everest, with three failed attempts. On 8 June, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared on the third attempt

May 1924 – Friedrich Hayek admitted into Mises’ Privatseminar in Vienna

26 May 1924 – enactment of the US Immigration Act of 1924 (or Johnson–Reed Act, including the National Origins Act, and Asian Exclusion Act)

June 1924 – the premiere of Hamilton Deane’s play Dracula at the Grand Theatre, Derby

13 July 1924 – the death of Alfred Marshall (26 July 1842–13 July 1924)

July 1924 – Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington move to Ham Spray House, near Marlborough, Wiltshire

29 August 1924 – the Dawes Plan agreed by Reichstag

September 1924 – John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova at Tilton house, South Downs near Lewes

23 October 1924 – the Chinese warlord Feng Yuxiang seizes Beijing in a coup

25 October 1924 – the Daily Mail reports a purported letter from Grigory Zinoviev (President of the Communist International) to the British representative on the Comintern Executive

29 October 1924 – United Kingdom general election held. The results:

Party | Leader | Seats Won
Conservative | Stanley Baldwin | 412
Labour | Ramsay MacDonald | 151
Liberal | H. H. Asquith | 40
Constitutionalist | - | 7
Communist | Albert Inkpin | 1.

Churchill stands as MP for Epping for the Constitutionalist party

29 October 1924–5 July 1945 – Winston Churchill is Member of Parliament for Epping

4 November 1924–5 June 1929 – Stanley Baldwin (Conservative) is British Prime Minister

5 November 1924 – the soldiers of the Chinese warlord Feng Yuxiang expel Puyi, the last Qing emperor of China, from the Forbidden City

6 November 1924–4 June 1929 – Winston Churchill is Chancellor of the Exchequer

6 November 1924 – John Maynard Keynes delivers the Sidney Ball lecture at Oxford university on “The End of Laissez-Faire”

winter 1924–1936 – the Vienna Circle, a meeting of logical positivists, is held in weekly discussions. The phases were as follows:

1921–1924 – irregular private phase with Hans Hahn and Moritz Schlick
1924–1928 – the Schlick Circle (non-public phase of the Vienna Circle)
1928–1934 – Verein Ernst Mach

The circle broke up from 1934 to 1936

20 December 1924 – Adolf Hitler released from Landsberg Prison in Germany

1925
1 January 1925 – Edwin Hubble announces his discovery that galaxies exist outside the Milky Way

3 January 1925 – Mussolini gives a speech in the Italian Chamber of Deputies; this marks the beginning of fascist dictatorship

12 March 1925 – death of Sun Yat-sen (Premier of the Kuomintang of China 10 October 1919–12 March 1925), which leaves a vacuum in the Kuomintang

3 May 1925 – Oswald Mosley gives a speech on the Birmingham Proposals at the Birmingham Town Hall

13 May 1925 – the UK Gold Standard Act 1925

20 May 1925 – C. S. Lewis elected to a fellowship in Magdalen College, Oxford

summer 1925 – Ludwig Wittgenstein visits England and stays with Keynes in Cambridge and Eccles in Manchester

July 1925 – French and Belgian troops evacuate the Ruhr

10 July 1925 – in Dayton, Tennessee, the “Monkey Trial” of John Thomas Scopes (a high school science teacher) accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law begins; on July 21, Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution and fined $100; in 1927, Tennessee Supreme Court overturns the verdict

26 July 1925 – death of William Jennings Bryan in Dayton, Tennessee

4 August 1925 – John Maynard Keynes marries Lydia Lopokova at St Pancreas registry office; they take Oatlands house, near Iford for the summer

8 August 1925 – birth of the ancient historian Ernst Badian in Austria

August 1925 – John Maynard Keynes publishes The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill

August 1925 – Oswald Mosley publishes Revolution by Reason

September 1925 – John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova visit Russia for two weeks; they visit Leningrad and Moscow; they return to England to live at 46 Gordon Square, Keynes’ London home

October 1925–1927 – Ronald Syme educated at Oriel College, Oxford

October 1925 – John Maynard Keynes decides to take Tilton house near Lewes

October 1925 – J. R. R. Tolkien appointed Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College, Oxford

3 October 1925 – birth of Gore Vidal in the cadet hospital of the U.S. Military Academy, at West Point, New York

November 1925 – Henry Watson Fowler moves to Hinton, St George, Somerset

December 1925 – John Maynard Keynes publishes A Short View of Russia

10 December 1925 – George Bernard Shaw awarded Nobel Prize

1926
1926 – from 1926 Ludwig Wittgenstein takes part in discussions of the Vienna Circle

1926 – Frank Plumpton Ramsey becomes university lecturer in mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge; later he becomes Director of Studies in mathematics

17 January 1926 – Ayn Rand (Alisa Rosenbaum) leaves Russia for New York

19 February 1926 – Ayn Rand arrives in New York

3 March 1926 – John Maynard Keynes takes possession of Tilton house, South Downs near Lewes which he rents in a 21 year lease

20 March 1926 – the Canton Coup (or Zhongshan Incident), the purge of Communists in the Chinese Nationalist army in Guangzhou by Chiang Kai-shek

4–13 May 1926 – the 1926 general strike in the United Kingdom, called by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) opposing the British government’s wage reduction for 1.2 million locked-out coal miners

summer 1926 – Ludwig Lachmann visits the University of Zurich and becomes interested in Austrian economics

5 June 1926 – Chiang Kai-shek named commander-in-chief of the Chinese National Revolutionary Army

July 1926 – Hogarth Press publishes The End of Laissez-Faire by John Maynard Keynes

25 September 1926 – John Maynard Keynes meets with David Lloyd George at Churt with 14 others to discuss a new Liberal radical program

October 1926 – Anthony Blunt arrives at Cambridge

8 November 1926 – arrest of Antonio Gramsci by Italian fascists

December 1926 – Piero Sraffa publishes “The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions” in the Economic Journal (vol. 36, 1926)

3–14 December 1926 – Agatha Christie disappears from her house in Styles, Sunningdale, Berkshire; she is found on 14 December 1926 at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire

1927
7 January 1927 – the first transatlantic telephone call from New York City to London

10 January 1927 – release date of the German expressionist science fiction film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang

14 February 1927 – Deane Hamilton’s play Dracula opens in London at the Little Theatre

April 1927 – Chiang Kai-shek makes Nanjing the new Kuomintang capital of China

April 1927 – Nicholas Kaldor arrived in London to study at the LSE; Kaldor enrols for a BSc. in economics from October 1927

4 May 1927 – filing of articles of incorporation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS)

20–21 May 1927 – Charles Lindbergh makes the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in the monoplane Spirit of St. Louis

July 1927 – Piero Sraffa arrived in London; Sraffa accepts an offer by Keynes to take a lectureship at Cambridge university

1 August 1927–22 December 1936 – first phase of Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) government of the Republic of China and the Communist Party of China (CPC)

September 1927 – Bertrand Russell and Dora Russell (Dora Black) rent Telegraph House at Harting near Petersfield in Hampshire; they set up an experimental school at Beacon Hill; Russell involved from 1927 to 1932

October 1927 – Anthony Blunt begins the study of modern languages

October 1927 – opening of the Broadway adaptation of Dracula at the Fulton Theatre (New York) starring Bela Lugosi; it runs until 19 May 1928

6 October 1927 – the release date of The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized sound, directed by Alan Crosland and produced by Warner Bros

1928
15 February 1928 – death of Herbert Henry Asquith

7 March – beginning of the Shakhty Trial in the Soviet Union; Soviet police arrest engineers in the town of Shakhty, who are accused of sabotaging the Soviet economy

April 1928 – John Maynard Keynes visits Russia

April 1928–December 1929 – George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) in Paris

3 May–11 May 1928 – the Jinan incident, armed conflict between the Japanese Army (with Northern Chinese warlords) and the Kuomintang’s southern army in Jinan, the capital of Shandong

May 1928 – Anthony Blunt elected to the Cambridge Apostles

July 1928 – Joan Robinson arrives in London from India

21 July 1928 – death of Ellen Terry

27 August 1928 – the Kellogg–Briand Pact (or Pact of Paris) is signed by Germany, France, and the United States, a treaty that outlaws aggressive warfare

1 October 1928 – Stalin announces the First Five Year Plan

10 October 1928 – Chiang Kai-shek becomes director of the Chinese State Council

6 November 1928 – the US presidential election of 1928, between the Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover (Republican) and New York Governor Al Smith (Democratic)

7 December 1928 – birth of Noam Chomsky

1929
1929 – Ronald Syme elected tutor and fellow in ancient history at Trinity College, Oxford

1929–1931 – the Untouchables under Eliot Ness work to end crimes of Al Capone by enforcing Prohibition laws

January 1929 – Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge

10 January 1929–8 May 1930 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (Hergé) story Tintin in the Land of the Soviets

February 1929 – Trotsky deported from the Soviet Union; he lives in Turkey from 1929 to 1933; in France from 1933 to 1935; in Norway from 1935 to 1936; in Mexico from 1936 to 1940

14 February 1929 – the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago

4 March 1929 – Herbert Hoover is inaugurated as 31st President of the United States (president from 4 March 1929–4 March 1933)

7–22 March 1929 – George Orwell admitted to the Hôpital Cochin, Paris from bronchitis

15 April 1929 – Ayn Rand marries Frank O’Connor

10 May 1929 – Hubert Henderson and John Maynard Keynes publish Can Lloyd George do it?, a pamphlet in support of the Liberal campaign under the leadership of David Lloyd George

16 May 1929 – the 1st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) for the best films of 1927 and 1928, held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, California

30 May 1929 – 1929 United Kingdom general election was held; Winston Churchill stands as MP for Unionists. The results:

Party | Leader | Seats Won
Conservative | Stanley Baldwin | 260
Labour | Ramsay MacDonald | 287
Liberal | David Lloyd George | 59.

The UK Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald wins 287 seats, the most seats.

5 June 1929–7 June 1935 – Ramsay MacDonald is British Prime Minister

7 June 1929 – a Committee headed by American industrialist Owen D. Young submits its first report with the Young Plan, a program for settling German reparations debts after World War I

August 1929–March 1933 – the contractionary phase of the US Great Depression

15–17 September 1929 – the First Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences of logical positivists, held in Prague; this marks the international establishment of the Vienna circle

October 1929 – publication of the official manifesto of the Vienna Circle called Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis (The Scientific Conception of the World. The Vienna Circle)

October 1929 – Kim Philby goes to Trinity College, Cambridge to read History and Economics

October 1929 – Winston Churchill in New York

October 1929 – A. J. Ayer goes up to Christ Church College, Oxford

October 1929 – Joan Robinson and Austin Robinson return to Cambridge; from 1929–1930 Joan Robinson attends Piero Sraffa’s lectures

24 October 1929 – “Black Thursday” on the New York stock exchange, the beginning of the US Stock Market Crash of 1929

29 October 1929 – “Black Tuesday” on the New York stock exchange, the Wall Street Crash of 1929

1930s1930
January 1930 – second Hague Conference in which the Young Plan is adopted

19 January 1930 – death of Frank Plumpton Ramsey

30 March 1930–30 May 1932 – Heinrich Brüning is Chancellor of Germany

21 April 1930 – release of the US movie All Quiet on the Western Front, adapted from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque

May 1930 – Oswald Mosley resigns from his ministerial position within the government of Ramsay MacDonald

June 1930–August 1932 – the Sino-Tibetan War between Tibet (under the 13th Dalai Lama) and Chinese warlords Ma Bufang and Liu Wenhui and Chiang Kai-shek (leader of the Republic of China)

17 June 1930 – the US Tariff Act of 1930 (known as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff) signed into law

30 June 1930 – French troops leave the Rhineland ahead of schedule

7 July 1930 – death of Arthur Conan Doyle in his house in Crowborough, East Sussex

28 July 1930 – the Canadian federal election of 1930; Richard Bedford Bennett’s Conservative Party wins a majority government, and defeats the Liberal Party led by Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King

September 1930–April 1931 – Kurdish revolt in Iraq

October 1930 – Guy Burgess arrives at Trinity College, Cambridge

October 1930 – John Maynard Keynes published “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” in The Nation and Athenaeum

October 1930 – John Maynard Keynes’ A Treatise on Money published

December 1930–January 1931 – Albert Einstein visited America

1931
1931 – Rudolf Carnap accepts a chair of natural philosophy at the German University in Prague, Czechoslovakia

January 1931 – the future Edward VIII first meets Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée

January 1931 – Friedrich Hayek arrives in London; he gives four lectures at the London School of Economics (LSE) that are later published as Prices and Production (1931)

30 January 1931 – Charlie Chaplin’s silent film City Lights is released

14 February 1931 – release date of the famous Universal picture Dracula (12 February 1931 in New York), starring Bela Lugosi

3 March 1931 – death of Frank Russell; Bertrand Russell becomes the third Earl Russell

4 May 1931 – Piero Sraffa appointed as Marshall Librarian at Cambridge

11 May 1931 – the Austrian bank Kreditanstalt collapses

30 May 1931–18 July 1931 – John Maynard Keynes in America

summer 1931 – John Kenneth Galbraith arrives in Berkeley, California, to pursue a Master of Science and PhD in agricultural economics

20 June 1931 – Herbert Hoover announced the Hoover Moratorium (1 year moratorium on German debt payments), approved by Congress and, after some initial resistance by France, by 15 other nations

24 August 1931 – Ramsay MacDonald forms a National Government with Conservatives, Liberals and a new National Labour group

September 1931 – Friedrich Hayek publishes Prices and Production (1931)

3 September 1931–20 October 1932 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (or Hergé) Tintin story Tintin in America in the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle

18 September 1931 – the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, in which the Kwantung Army of the Empire of Japan invades Manchuria after the Mukden Incident; the invasion occurs from 18 September 1931–27 February 1932

20 September 1931 – Britain abandoned the gold standard

October 1931 – Donald Maclean arrives at Trinity College, Cambridge

17 October 1931 – Al Capone convicted on five tax evasion charges and sentenced to 11 years in prison

27 October 1931 – United Kingdom general election held. The results:

Party | Leader | Seats Won
National Government
Conservative | Stanley Baldwin | 470
Liberal | Herbert Samuel | 33
Liberal National | John Simon | 35
National Labour | Ramsay MacDonald | 13
National | - | 4

Opposition
Labour | Arthur Henderson | 46
Ind. Labour Party | Fenner Brockway | 3
Opposition Liberal | David Lloyd George | 4
Nationalist | Joseph Devlin | 2
New Party | Oswald Mosley | 0.

Churchill stands as MP for Epping for the Conservative party; the opposition Liberal party under David Lloyd George is reduced to 4 seats

5 November 1931–7 June 1935 – the Second National Ministry in office in the UK, which was coalition of National Labour, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, and the Liberal National Party

21 November 1931 – US release date of the famous Universal Pictures movie Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff

13 December 1931 – John Maynard Keynes addresses a socialist group on “The Dilemma of Modern Socialism”

1932
1932–1933 – Paul M. Sweezy in London at the London School of Economics for the academic year; he travelled to Vienna during breaks

1932 – Nicholas Kaldor appointed to an Assistant Lectureship at the LSE

1932–1934 – John Cairncross spends two years at the Sorbonne in Paris

1932–1933 – the Soviet famine of major grain-producing areas in the Soviet Union; the Holodomor (or the Great Famine of the Ukraine) is part of this

21 January 1932 – death of Giles Lytton Strachey from stomach cancer

January 1932 – John Maynard Keynes visits Hamburg, Germany and Berlin; Keynes meets Heinrich Brüning

March 1932 – Piero Sraffa publishes his article “Dr. Hayek on Money and Capital” in the Economic Journal

1 March 1932 – Puyi, the last Qing emperor of China, installed by Japanese as the ruler of Manchukuo (the Japanese puppet state); he was officially crowned the emperor of Manchukuo in 1934

20 May 1932–25 July 1934 – Engelbert Dollfuss Chancellor of Austria

1 June 1932–17 November 1932 – Franz von Papen is Chancellor of Germany

16 June–9 July 1932 – Lausanne Conference; the Western nations agree to suspend German reparations payments. Even though it was rejected by US Congress, the pre-Nazi German government still had enough power to refuse to make any more debt repayments

June 1932 – final exams of A. J. Ayer before his graduation with a Bachelor of Arts from Christ Church College, Oxford; Ayer appointed to a lectureship in philosophy

June 1932 – A. J. Ayer meets Ludwig Wittgenstein in Whewell’s Court, Trinity College, Cambridge

6 June 1932 – The US Revenue Act of 1932 signed into law, which raises tax rates across the board

21 July 1932 – Emergency Relief and Construction Act enacted by Herbert Hoover

August 1932–1933 – Willard Van Orman Quine travels in Europe, meets the Polish logicians Stanislaw Lesniewski and Alfred Tarski, members of the Vienna Circle including Rudolf Carnap, and A. J. Ayer

September 1932 – Joseph Schumpeter moves to the United States and takes up a professorship at Harvard University

October 1932 – Anthony Blunt elected a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

October 1932–1 March 1933 – Willard Van Orman Quine visits Vienna

19 October 1932 – a letter signed by Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins and others is printed in the Times rejecting government spending

November 1932 – Guy Burgess elected to the Apostles

8 November 1932 – the US presidential election of 1932

25 November 1932 – A. J. Ayer marries Renée Lees

December 1932 – the US Congress rejects the Allied war debt reduction plan agreed on at the Lausanne Conference

December 1932–March 1933 – Alfred Jules Ayer attended meetings of the Vienna Circle in Vienna, Austria

3 December 1932–28 January 1933 – Kurt von Schleicher is Chancellor of Germany

8 December 1932–8 February 1934 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (or Hergé) Tintin story Cigars of the Pharaoh in the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle

22 December 1932 – release date of the Universal Studios film The Mummy, directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff

1933
1933–1937 – Paul M. Sweezy at Harvard for a doctorate degree

1933 – Anthony Blunt visits the Soviet Union

9 January 1933 – George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) publishes Down and Out in Paris and London

30 January 1933 – Paul von Hindenburg appoints Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany

February–March 1933 – Albert Einstein visits America

27 February 1933 – in Germany the Reichstag building was set on fire

28 February 1933 – Paul von Hindenburg passes the Reichstag Fire Decree

spring 1933 – Ludwig Lachmann comes to England to the LSE from Germany

1 March–April 1933 – Willard Van Orman Quine visits Prague to see Rudolf Carnap

March 1933 – end of the contractionary phase of the US Great Depression

March 1933 – the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss dissolved Austria’s National Assembly and ruled by emergency decree

c. March 1933 – Joan Robinson publishes The Economics of Imperfect Competition

2 March–May 1933 – the failed British Mount Everest expedition (of Lawrence Wager, Percy Wyn-Harris, E. E. Shipton, Hugh Ruttledge, C. G. Crawford and F. S. Smythe) attempts to climb Everest

4 March 1933 – Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President of the United States (in office from 4 March 1933–12 April 1945)

5 March 1933 – Federal elections held in Germany; National Socialist German Workers Party 43.91% of the vote; Social Democratic Party of Germany 18.25%; Communist Party of Germany 12.32%; Centre Party 11.25%

6 March 1933 – Franklin Delano Roosevelt declares a four-day banking holiday in the United States

9 March 1933 – the US Emergency Banking Act (the Emergency Banking Relief Act) is passed by the United States Congress

13 March 1933 – the Institute for Social Research or Institut für Sozialforschung (IfS) is closed down by the German government, a research organisation and home of the Frankfurt School and critical theory, moves to Geneva and in 1934 moves to New York City, where it becomes affiliated with Columbia University

23 March 1933 – the Reichstag voted to pass the Enabling Act, which transforms Hitler’s government into a de facto legal dictatorship

28 March 1933 – Albert Einstein arrives in Antwerp and formally renounced his German citizenship

1 April 1933 – Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany

7 April 1933 – release date of the Radio Pictures film King Kong (release date in New York 7 March 1933), starring Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong

19 April 1933 – the United States abandoned the gold standard

2 May 1933 – Hitler outlawed German trade unions

June 1933 – Kim Philby graduates from Cambridge with upper second-class honours in economics

16 June 1933 – the US National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt

July–October 1933 – Albert Einstein flees from Belgium and lives in England

September 1933 – James Hilton publishes his novel Lost Horizon

October 1933 – Albert Einstein returns to the US to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey

November 1933 – Karl Polanyi moves to London from Vienna (his wife follows him in 1936)

26 December 1933 – death of Henry Watson Fowler

1934
1 January 1934 – UK publication of Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, featuring the fictional detective Hercule Poirot

30 January 1934 – the US Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act, which nationalised all gold and ordered the Federal Reserve banks to turn over gold supply to the US Treasury

12 February 1934–16 February 1934 – Austrian Civil War (or February Uprising), the battles between socialist and conservative-fascist forces in Austria, which in Vienna, Graz, Bruck an der Mur, Judenburg, Wiener Neustadt and Steyr

February 1934 – Kim Philby and Litzi Friedmann are married

March 1934 – Ludwig von Mises accepted an offer from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva to become a visiting professor

9 May–8 June 1934 – John Maynard Keynes in America

23 May 1934 – deaths of Bonnie Elizabeth Parker (1 October 1910–23 May 1934) and Clyde Chestnut Barrow aka Clyde Champion Barrow (24 March 1909–23 May 1934)

28 May 1934 – John Maynard Keynes meets Franklin Delano Roosevelt

June 1934 – Theodor W. Adorno registers at Merton College, Oxford and spends four years at Oxford under the direction of Gilbert Ryle

12 June 1934 – the German film director Fritz Lang arrives in New York after fleeing Germany

29 June 1934 – Night of the Long Knives in Germany

July 1934 – Columbia university invites the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) to affiliate with the university and move to America

24 July 1934 – death of Hans Hahn, the Austrian mathematician and member of the Vienna circle

9 August 1934–17 October 1935 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (or Hergé) story The Blue Lotus, set in China and mentioning the Japanese invasion of Manchuria

2 August 1934 – death of Paul von Hindenburg, President of Germany

9 September 1934 – death of Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866–9 September 1934), the English painter and critic

October 1934 – Donald Maclean graduated from Trinity Hall, Cambridge

October 1934 – James Hilton publishes his novel Goodbye, Mr. Chips in the UK (release date in the US June 1934)

25 October 1934 – Ludwig von Mises begins lecturing at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva

December 1934 – Karl Popper publishes Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft (The Logic of Scientific Discovery)

December 1934 – Ludwig von Mises briefly returns to Vienna to work as consultant for the Vienna Kammer

December 1934 – Guy Burgess was recruited as a Soviet spy by Arnold Deutsch

1935
1935 – Ronald Syme elected to lectureship at Oxford

January 1935 – George L. S. Shackle arrives at the LSE as a PhD student of Hayek

6 May 1935 – the Silver Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary

8 May 1935–1940 – A. J. Ayer elected to a 5-year research studentship (fellowship) at Oxford

10 May 1935 – New York release date of the famous Universal picture Bride of Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff

13 May 1935 – US release date of the famous Universal Pictures movie Werewolf of London, starring Henry Hull

7 June 1935–28 May 1937 – Stanley Baldwin is Prime Minister of the UK

18 June 1935 – the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, a naval agreement between the UK and Germany; this regulated the size of the Kriegsmarine to 35% of the total tonnage of the Royal Navy; the agreement was renounced by Adolf Hitler on 28 April 1939

4 July–14 August 1935 – the 1935 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition, including Eric Shipton

July 1935 – Bertrand Russell and Dora Black divorce

autumn 1935 – Guy Burgess graduates from Cambridge

10 September 1935 – assassination of Huey Pierce Long, Jr.

15 September 1935 – Nuremberg Laws introduced in Germany

October 1935 – George L. S. Shackle visits Cambridge for a research students’ seminar and listens to a talk by Joan Robinson on Keynes’ work on the General Theory; Shackle becomes a Keynesian

October 1935 – Donald Maclean begins work in the British Foreign Office

3 October 1935–May 1936 – the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (Second Italo-Abyssinian War), a colonial between Italy and the Ethiopian Empire; Italy occupied Ethiopia

November 1935 – the election of the first Labour Government in New Zealand under Michael Joseph Savage (23 March 1872–27 March 1940; Prime Minister from 6 December 1935–27 March 1940)

14 November 1935 – United Kingdom general election 1935. The result:

Party | Leader | Seats Won
National
Conservative | Stanley Baldwin | 387
Liberal National | John Simon | 33
National Labour | Ramsay MacDonald | 8

Opposition
Labour | Clement Attlee | 154
Liberal | Herbert Samuel | 21.

The result was a reduced majority for the National Government led by Conservative Stanley Baldwin

December 1935 – Rudolf Carnap moves from Prague to the University of Chicago

5 December 1935–25 February 1937 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (or Hergé) Tintin story The Broken Ear in the Belgian newspaper Le Petit Vingtième

winter 1935 – Karl Polanyi visits the United States

1936
1936–1940 – the future Neoconservative Irving Kristol attends City College of New York

1936–1939 – Gore Vidal attends St. Albans School in Washington

1936–1938 – the Great Purge (or the Great Terror) in Russia

January 1936 – Bertrand Russell and Patricia Spence are married

January 1936 – Alfred Jules Ayer publishes his book Language, Truth and Logic

18 January 1936 – death of Rudyard Kipling

20 January 1936 – death of George V (reigned 6 May 1910–20 January 1936)

20 January 1936–11 December 1936 – reign of Edward VIII

22 January 1936 – fall of the government of Pierre Laval in France

5 February 1936 – Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times is released

February 1936 – John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is published

16 February 1936 – Spanish general legislative election, which was won by the Popular Front, a left-wing coalition of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), Republican Left (Spain) (IR), Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), Republican Union (UR), Communist Party (PCE), Acció Catalana (AC) and other parties

4 March 1936 – the first flight of airship Hindenburg in Germany

7 March 1936 – reoccupation of the Rhineland by Hitler

March 1936 – Michał Kalecki arrived in England from Sweden

25 April–17 June 1936 – 1936 British Mount Everest expedition

28 April 1936–26 July 1952 – reign of Farouk of Egypt

9 May 1936 – Italy annexes Ethiopia

11 May 1936 – release date of the film Dracula’s Daughter by Universal Studios directed by Lambert Hillyer

June 1936 – Peter Cushing begins to work at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing

22 June 1936 – murder of Moritz Schlick

17–18 July 1936 – Spanish coup of July 1936, a group of officers attempt to overthrow the left-wing Popular Front government

17 July 1936–1 April 1939 – Spanish Civil War

1–16 August 1936 – the 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin, Germany

August 1936 – King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson on a private cruise of the Adriatic Sea on board the Nahlin

4 August 1936 – a military coup in Greece by General Ioannis Metaxas

19–23 August 1936 – the first Moscow show trial

24 August 1936 – the introduction of conscription law in Germany

26 August 1936 – the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 between the United Kingdom and Egypt signed in London; the UK was required to withdraw all troops from Egypt, except those protecting Suez Canal and its surroundings

29 August 1936 – the British–American Himalayan Expedition of 1936 (with Peter Lloyd and H. Adams Carter, Bill Tilman and Noel Odell) ascends Nanda Devi

September 1936 – King Edward VIII received in Turkey on an unofficial visit

October 1936 – Eric Hobsbawm went up to King’s College, Cambridge to read History

October 1936 – Guy Burgess joined the BBC as talks producer

4 October 1936 – Battle of Cable Street, in Cable Street, East End of London, a clash between British Union of Fascists (led by Oswald Mosley) and anti-fascist demonstrators

5–31 October 1936 – Jarrow March (or the Jarrow Crusade) from Jarrow to London, organised protest march against the unemployment suffered in the Tyneside town of Jarrow

21 October 1936 – the siege of Madrid begins during the Spanish Civil War

25 October 1936 – Rome-Berlin Axis pact

November 1936 – John Cairncross joins the UK Foreign Office

November 1936 – Edward VIII visits the depressed region of South Wales

16 November 1936 – Edward VIII tells the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin at Buckingham Palace of his intention to marry Wallis Simpson

December 1936 – Abdication crisis in the UK

11 December 1936 – abdication of the British king Edward VIII

11 December 1936 – accession of George VI (reigned 11 December 1936–6 February 1952)

23 December 1936 – George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) sets out for Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War; he stays until June 1937

1937
1937–1938 – John Kenneth Galbraith visits Cambridge University with a postdoctoral fellowship

1937 – James Hilton moves to California

1937 – George L. S. Shackle granted his PhD; he moves to New College, Oxford and took a D.Phil. in 1940

February 1937 – Bertrand Russell delivers his maiden speech in the House of Lords

4 February 1937 – Karl Popper sails for New Zealand from London

February 1937–July 1939 – Kim Philby in Spain as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War, from the side of the pro-Franco forces

March 1937 – Karl Popper arrives in New Zealand

2 March 1937 – release date of the Columbia Pictures movie Lost Horizon, directed by Frank Capra, and starring
Ronald Colman and Jane Wyatt

8 March 1937 – George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) publishes The Road to Wigan Pier

27 April 1937 – death of Antonio Gramsci in Rome

15 April 1937–16 June 1938 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (or Hergé) story The Black Island in Le Vingtième Siècle magazine

May 1937 – John Cairncross recruited to the Soviet cause by Arnold Deutsch

May 1937–June 1938 – the US Recession of 1937–1938

6 May 1937 – the Hindenburg disaster; the German airship LZ 129 Hindenburg catches fire and is destroyed during its attempt to dock at Naval Air Station Lakehurst in Manchester Township, New Jersey, United States

12 May 1937 – the coronation of George VI

25 May 1937 – death of Florence Stoker, wife of Bram Stoker

28 May 1937–10 May 1940 – Neville Chamberlain is British Prime Minister

June 1937 – George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) returns to England from Spain

c. June 1937 – Peter Cushing joins a company at the Grand Theatre in Southampton

3 June 1937 – ex-king Edward VIII marries Wallis Simpson in the Chateau de Candé near Tours in France

July 1937 – the Shaksgam Expedition explores and maps the northern approaches to K2 led by Eric Shipton

July 1937 – F. S. Smythe in an expedition to the Valley of Flowers, India

7 July 1937–9 September 1945 – the Second Sino-Japanese War, the war between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan

9 June 1937 – Theodor W. Adorno sails for New York and stayed there for two weeks

21 September 1937 – J. R. R. Tolkien publishes The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

November 1937 – while ascending the Zemu glacier, Lord Hunt and H. W. Tilman found strange “yeti” tracks in the snow

1 November 1937 – Agatha Christie publishes the book Death on the Nile with the fictional detective Hercule Poirot

13 December 1937–January 1938 – the Nanking Massacre (or Rape of Nanking), the mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against the people of Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War

1938
10 February 1938 – king Carol II of Romania suspended the 1923 constitution and seized emergency powers

16 February 1938 – Theodor W. Adorno sails for New York and moves to America

8 March 1938–22 October 1940 – Joseph P. Kennedy is United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom

9 March 1938 – Schuschnigg scheduled an Austria plebiscite on the issue of unification with Germany on 13 March 1938

12 March 1938 – Austria was annexed by the Third Reich

April 1938 – A. J. Ayer visits America

25 April 1938 – Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), a personal account of the Spanish Civil War, is published

May 1938–August 1939 – the German Expedition to Tibet of 1938–1939, a German scientific expedition led by the German zoologist Ernst Schäfer (14 March 1910–21 July 1992)

26 May 1938 – the House Committee on Un-American Activities established as a special investigating committee, to investigate disloyalty and subversion, either communist or fascist; it was chaired by Martin Dies, Jr. and Dies Committee (from 1938–1944)

4 June 1938 – Sigmund Freud and his wife Martha leave Vienna on the Orient Express for Britain

6 June 1938 – Sigmund Freud and his wife Martha arrive in London at Victoria Station

4 August 1938 – 10 August 1939 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (or Hergé) Tintin story King Ottokar's Sceptre in the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle

17 October 1938 – death of Karl Kautsky, the Czech-Austrian philosopher and Marxist theoretician, in Amsterdam

30 October 1938 – Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air

September 1938 – Bertrand Russell begins a year appointment at the University of Chicago

September 1938–30 March 1939 – George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) in French Morocco

15 September 1938 – Chamberlain travels to Berchtesgaden to meet with Hitler about the Sudeten crisis

23 September 1938 – the new military government in Czechoslovakia issues a decree for general mobilization

30 September 1938 – Adolf Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and Édouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement

30 September 1938 – the Czechoslovak government capitulates and agrees to the Munich Agreement

30 September 1938 – Neville Chamberlain returns to Britain and gives his “peace for our time” speech to a crowd at Heston Aerodrome

1–10 October 1938 – annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany

9 November 1938 – murder of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan

9–10 November 1938 – Kristallnacht, a pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany; from 12–13 November a similar attack happened in the Free City of Danzig

December 1938 – Guy Burgess begins to work for MI6’s D Section

23 December 1938–10 February 1939 – the Catalonia Offensive in Spain by the Nationalist Army of Franco to take Republican-held Catalonia

1939
1939 – Stefan Zweig’s novel Beware of Pity (in German called Ungeduld des Herzens / “The Heart's Impatience”) is published

5 January 1939 – Josef Beck (Poland’s Foreign Minister) meets with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, to discuss German claims on Danzig and issues with the Polish Corridor

26 January 1939 – fall of Barcelona to Franco’s forces. The Nationalist Army of Franco began the Catalonia Offensive on December 23, 1938

10 February 1939 – Peter Cushing arrives in New York to pursue an acting career in Hollywood

14 March 1939 – Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia and became a separate pro-Nazi state

15 March 1939 – German troops marched into Czechoslovakia

April 1939 – Ernst Badian and his family sail from Genoa for Christchurch, New Zealand

14 April 1939 – publication date of the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

May–June 1939 – George VI and Queen Elizabeth tour Canada and the United States

27 May 1939 – the German ocean liner MS St. Louis arrives in Havana harbour but the Cuban government refuses entry to Cuba to 908 refugees from Europe

6 June 1939 – St. Louis sails back to Europe

summer 1939 – Eric Hobsbawm in Paris carrying out research work on North Africa

June 1939 – Gore Vidal leaves New York for a trip to Europe

July 1939 – Ludwig Wittgenstein visits Vienna and Berlin

23 August 1939 – Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in Moscow

25 August 1939 – US release date of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland

1 September 1939 – Germany invaded Poland

1 September 1939–2 September 1945 – World War II

September 1939–April 1940 – Phony War

1 September 1939 – Operation Pied Piper began, which officially relocated more than 3.5 million people

3 September 1939 – UK and France declare war on Germany; Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty

3 September 1939 – the speech of George VI to the British Empire on the outbreak of World War Two

7 September 1939 – Ronald Syme publishes The Roman Revolution

17 September 1939 – Stalin ordered his own invasion of Poland

23 September 1939 – death of Sigmund Freud in London

27 September 1939 – Warsaw surrendered to German troops encircling its borders

September 1939 – Turing designing the bombe

17 October 1939 – release date of Frank Capra’s film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

c. November 1939 – the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) moves to Peterhouse College in Cambridge

30 November 1939 – Soviet Union attacks Finland in what would become known as the Winter War

30 November 1939–13 March 1940 – the Winter War, the military conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland

1940s1940
1940–1941 – Ronald Syme is Press Attache to the British Legation at Belgrade; at the fall of Belgrade he went to Ankara

1940–1943 – Karl Polanyi teaches at Bennington College in Vermont

24 January 1940 – release date of the film The Grapes of Wrath, directed by John Ford and based on John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel

February 1940 – John Maynard Keynes publishes his pamphlet How to Pay for the War

16 February 1940 – Eric Hobsbawm enrolled in 560th Field Company of the Royal Engineers in Cambridge

18 March 1940 – delivery and installation of Turing’s bombe to Bletchley Park; second bombe, named “Agnus dei,” later shortened to Agnes, or Aggie, was equipped with Welchman's diagonal board, and was installed on 8 August 1940; during 1940, 178 messages were broken on the two machines

9 April 1940 – Germans land in several Norwegian ports and take Oslo; the Norwegian Campaign lasts two months. The British begin their Norwegian Campaign. Denmark surrenders

10 May 1940 – Germany invades Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands; Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom upon the resignation of Neville Chamberlain

10 May 1940 – 26 July 1945 – Churchill as Prime Minister

10 May 1940 – Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister (PM until 26 July 1945)

13 May 1940 – Churchill's "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech in Commons.

14 May 1940 – Germany aircraft attacks on Dutch city of Rotterdam into the ground. 900 civilians died and 85,000 others homeless

15 May 1940 – from this day after the Luftwaffe destroyed the centre of Rotterdam – the RAF also carried out operations east of the Rhine, attacking industrial and transportation targets.

17 May 1940 – Germans enter Brussels and also take Antwerp

23 May 1940 – Oswald Mosley interned under Defence Regulation 18B

25 May 1940 – the Allied forces, British and French alike, retreat to Dunkirk

26 May–4 June 1940 – the Battle of Dunkirk: the defence and evacuation of British and allied forces in Europe

28 May 1940 – Belgium surrenders to the Germans; King Leopold III of Belgium surrenders and is interned

30 May 1940 – crucial British Cabinet meeting: Churchill wins a vote on continuing the war, in spite of vigorous arguments by Lord Halifax and Chamberlain

May 1940 – British start aerial war on German cities

June 1940 – Anthony Blunt recruited by MI5 as a military liaison officer

10 June 1940 – Italy declares war on France and the United Kingdom. Norway surrenders

13 June 1940 – Paris occupied by German troops

16 June 1940 – Marshal Pétain becomes Premier

22 June 1940 – Franco-German armistice signed; 22 June, France signed an armistice at Compiègne with Germany that gave Germany control over the north and west of the country, including Paris and all of the Atlantic coastline

24 June 1940 – Franco-Italian armistice signed

by 25 June 1940 – almost 192,000 Allied personnel, 144,000 of them British, had been evacuated through various French ports

30 June 1940 – Germany invades the Channel Islands

3 July 1940 – the British attack and destroy the French navy at its Mers El Kébir base on the coast of French Algeria, fearing that it would fall into German hands

4 July–9 October 1940 – Piero Sraffa interned in the Isle of Man as an enemy alien

12 July 1940 – Luftwaffe attacks on Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland

25 July 1940 – Ludwig von Mises leaves Europe from Lisbon by ship for America

3 August 1940 – Ludwig von Mises arrives in New York

July–September 1940 – Luftwaffe attacked RAF Fighter Command to gain air superiority as a prelude to invasion

17 August 1940 – Hitler declares a blockade of the British Isles

24 August 1940 – German aircraft mistakenly bomb London including church in Cripplegate, accidentally dictating the future shape of the Battle of Britain.

25 August 1940 – Churchill orders the bombing of Berlin in retaliation for the previous night's bombing of London

30 August 1940 – the bombing of England continues; London is now bombed in retaliation for the bombing of Berlin

7 September 1940 – in one of the major misjudgements of the war, the Luftwaffe shifts its focus to London, away from the RAF airfields

7 September 1940–21 May 1941 – The Blitz

7 September 1940 – first major raid in this regard took place on London

24 September 1940 – Berlin suffers a large bombing raid by the RAF

27 September 1940 – the Tripartite Pact is signed in Berlin by Germany, Italy, and Japan, promising mutual aid. Its informal name “Axis”

15 October 1940 – New York release date of Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator (release date in London 7 March 1941)

17 October 1940–18 October 1941 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (or Hergé) Tintin story The Crab with the Golden Claws in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir Jeunesse

28 October 1940 – the Italian Royal Army launches attacks into Greece from Italian-held Albania and begins the Greco-Italian War

5 November 1940 – President Roosevelt wins a third term

6–9 December 1940 – British and Indian troops of the Western Desert Force launch Operation Compass, an offensive against Italian forces in Egypt

28 December 1940 – Greco-Italian War continues to go badly for the Italians and the Greeks hold roughly one-quarter of Albania: Italy requests military assistance from Germany against the Greeks

29 December 1940 – large German air-raids on London; St Paul’s Cathedral is damaged

1941
1941–1942 – Ronald Syme works at the British Embassy at Ankara

1941–1945 – Ernst Badian enrolled in BA at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand; he graduates with an BA in 1945; an MA in 1946

11 March 1941 – United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs the Lend Lease Act (now passed by the full Congress) allowing Britain, China, and other allied nations to purchase military equipment and to defer payment until after the war

24 March 1941 – Rommel attacks and reoccupies El Agheila, Libya in his first offensive. The British retreat and within three weeks are driven back to Egypt

28 March 1941 – suicide of Virginia Woolf

6 April 1941 – Forces of Germany, Hungary, and Italy, moving through Romania and Hungary, initiate the invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece

8 May–28 July 1941 – John Maynard Keynes in America

20 May 1941 – German paratroopers land on Crete; the battle for Crete will continue for seven days.

22 June 1941 – Operation Barbarossa begins

1 June 1941 – Commonwealth forces complete the withdrawal from Crete

9 August 1941 – Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meet at NS Argentia, Newfoundland. The Atlantic Charter is created, signed, and released to the world press

5 September 1941 – US release date of Orson Welles’ movie Citizen Kane; 1 May 1941 release date at the Palace Theatre

20 October 1941–21 May 1942 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (or Hergé) story The Shooting Star in Le Soir magazine

7 December 1941 – Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbour

8 December 1941 – just after midnight, Japanese invasion of Malaya began

12 December 1941 – release date of the famous Universal Pictures movie the The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney, Jr.

1942
1942–1945 – Ronald Syme is Professor of Classical Philology at University of Istanbul

11 June 1942–14 January 1943 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (or Hergé) Tintin story The Secret of the Unicorn in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir

winter 1942–1943 – John Cairncross moves to Bletchley Park to Hut 3

8 November 1942 – Operation Torch, the British-American invasion of French North Africa during the North African Campaign; three amphibious Allied task forces attack areas of Morocco (targeting Casablanca and Safi) and Algeria (Oran and Algiers)

1943
23 January 1943 – US release date of the movie Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman

15 April 1943 – Ayn Rand publishes The Fountainhead

c. May 1943–May 1944 – the Bengal famine of 1943 in Bengal Province of pre-partition India; between 1.5 and 4 million people died of starvation, malnutrition and disease

May 1943 – de Gaulle moved his headquarters to Algiers

July 1943 – Gore Vidal enlists in the army after his graduation; he serves from December 1944 to March 1945

1944
1944 – Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is published

3 June 1944 – de Gaulle flies back to the UK

26 August, 1944 – de Gaulle liberates Paris

September 1944 – publication of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom by the University of Chicago Press

10 November 1944 – Churchill flew to Paris to a reception by de Gaulle and the two together were greeted by thousands of cheering Parisians on the next day

1945
1945 – Karl Popper publishes The Open Society and Its Enemies

7 May 1945 – SHAEF headquarters in Rheims the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender

8 May 1945 – Victory in Europe Day

5 July 1945 – United Kingdom general election of 1945; some polls in some constituencies delayed until 12 July and in Nelson and Colne until 19 July, because of local wakes weeks

17 July–2 August 1945 – Potsdam Conference was held at Cecilienhof, the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm Hohenzollern, in Potsdam, occupied Germany

26 July 1945 – United Kingdom general election results counted and declared on 26 July owing in part to the time it took to transport the votes of those serving overseas

26 July 1945 – Churchill resigns as British Prime Minister

26 July 1945–26 October 1951 – Clement Attlee as British Prime Minister

15 August 1945 – Emperor Hirohito issues a radio broadcast announcing the Surrender of Japan

17 August 1945 – George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) publishes Animal Farm: A Fairy Story in Britain; on 26 August 1946 in the US

2 September 1945 – The Japanese Instrument of Surrender is signed on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay

2 September 1945 – formal end of WWII

5 September 1945 – Singapore is officially liberated by British and Indian troops

9 September 1945 – The Japanese troops in China formally surrender, end of the Second Sino-Japanese War

24 October 1945 – the United Nations officially comes into existence on the ratification of the UN Charter by the five permanent members of the Security Council (France, the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the UK and the US) and a majority of the other 46 signatories

22 December 1945 – death of Otto Neurath in Britain

1946
January 1946 – Karl Popper arrives back in England from New Zealand

6 January 1946 – the first meeting of the UN General Assembly (with 51 nations present) and the Security Council takes place in London (the General Assembly selected New York City as the site for the headquarters of the United Nations; the facility was completed in 1952)

20 January 1946 – de Gaulle abruptly resigned

5 March 1946 – Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri

21 April 1946 – John Maynard Keynes dies at his home Tilton in Firle, Sussex

22 July 1946 – release date of the film Beware of Pity, starring Lilli Palmer, Albert Lieven and Cedric Hardwicke

13 August 1946 – death of H. G. Wells

20 December 1946 – release date of Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life

1947
1947–1948 – Ernst Badian is Junior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at Victoria University in Wellington

1947–1953 – Karl Polanyi teaches at Columbia University as Professor of Economics in New York; he retired in 1953

1947 – Eric Hobsbawm appointed as Lecturer in History at Birkbeck College, London

26 May 1947 – release date of the film Black Narcissus, starring Deborah Kerr

18 July 1947 – the Indian Independence Act 1947 is given royal assent; the act partitioned British India into India and Pakistan

15 August 1947 – India partitioned British India into India and Pakistan

September–November 1947 – the 1947 Jammu massacres in the Jammu region of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India

October 1947 – the House on Un-American Activities Committee holds nine days of hearings in Los Angeles about communists in Hollywood

22 October 1947–1 January 1949 – Indo-Pakistani War of 1947–1948, sometimes known as the First Kashmir War, was fought between India and Pakistan over the princely state of Kashmir and Jammu from 1947 to 1948

1948
c. 1948 – Ernst Badian leaves New Zealand for University College, Oxford

30 January 1948 – assassination of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

30 June 1948 – UK release date of film Oliver Twist, starring Alec Guinness

22 November 1948 – release of the British anthology film Quartet, adapted from W. Somerset Maugham stories

1949
1949–1970 – Ronald Syme is Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, and fellow of Brasenose; 1970–1989 fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford

1949 – Ludwig Lachmann appointed to a chair in Economics and Economic History at the University of Wittwatersrand in South Africa

1949 – Paul M. Sweezy publishes Karl Marx and the Close of His System and Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx (August M. Kelley, New York)

1949 – Ronald Syme elected as Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford; he retired in 1970

May 1949 – the first issue of Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman’s Monthly Review

June 1949 – George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four

October 1949 – Kim Philby arrives in Washington as British intelligence liaison to the US intelligence agencies

c. October 1949 – Nicholas Kaldor appointed as a fellow and lecturer of King’s College, Cambridge

October 1949 – Theodor W. Adorno left America and returns to Germany, where he teaches at Frankfurt University

1950s1950
1950 – Ernst Badian awarded his BA in literae humaniores at University College, Oxford

1950–1952 – Ernst Badian held a fellowship in Classics at the British School in Rome

8 January 1950 – death of Joseph Schumpeter

21 January 1950 – death of George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)

23 February 1950 – British general election gave Labour a massively reduced majority of five

February 1950 – Friedrich Hayek submits a letter of resignation to the London School of Economics (LSE); Hayek teaches at the University of Chicago (from 1950–1962)

25 June 1950–27 July 1953 – Korean War

1 August 1950 – release of the British anthology film Trio, based on three short stories by W. Somerset Maugham

September 1950 – The Authoritarian Personality is published, by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, who were working at the University of California, Berkeley

October 1950 – China invades Tibet

16 October 1950 – C. S. Lewis publishes The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (the novel is set in 1940)

1951
25 May 1951 – Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean flee from Britain to Russia

July 1951 – Kim Philby resigns from MI6

27 August 1951–21 November 1951 – the 1951 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition led by Eric Shipton reconnoitres possible routes for climbing Mount Everest from Nepal; the best one found was through the Khumbu Icefall, Western Cwm and South Col; Edmund Hillary is part of the expedition

15 October 1951 – C. S. Lewis publishes Prince Caspian, second volume of the The Chronicles of Narnia

25 October 1951 – United Kingdom general election. The results:

Party | Leader | Seats Won
Labour | Clement Attlee | 295
Conservative | Winston Churchill | 302
National Liberal | James Stuart | 19
Liberal | Clement Davies | 6.

The Conservatives won.

26 October 1951 – Winston Churchill as British Prime Minister (26 October 1951–6 April 1955)

November 1951 – the Himalayan expedition of Eric Shipton (with Michael Ward, Bill Murray, and Tom Bourdillon), while scouting for a new route to Everest, discover so-called “yeti” tracks in the snow near the head of Menlung Glacier

14 November 1951 – release of the British anthology film Encore, an adaptation of three short stories by W. Somerset Maugham

1952
1952 – John Cairncross resigns from the government

1952–1954 – Ernst Badian at the University of Sheffield

6 February 1952 – death of George VI; accession of Elizabeth II

August 1952 – C. S. Lewis first meets Joy Davidman Gresham

18 September 1952 – Charlie Chaplin boards the RMS Queen Elizabeth with his family but the next day has his re-entry revoked

1953
1953 – Noam Chomsky and his wife Carol Doris Schatz visit England, France, Switzerland and Italy, and 6 weeks at a kibbutz in Israel

January 1953 – Charlie Chaplin and his family move to Manoir de Ban, overlooking Lake Geneva in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland

20 January 1953–20 January 1961 – Dwight D. Eisenhower is President of the United States

5 March 1953 – death of Stalin

29 May 1953 – Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest

2 June 1953 – coronation of Queen Elizabeth II as monarch of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon

18 June 1953 – the Egyptian Republic was declared

27 July 1953 – end of the Korean War

15–19 August 1953 – the 1953 Iranian coup d’état, the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of the shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, with help from the United Kingdom and the United States

14 September 1953–14 October 1964 – Nikita Khrushchev is First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1954
1954 – Ernst Badian takes an MA at University College, Oxford

1954–1965 – Ernst Badian at the University of Durham

January 1954 – Daily Mail Snowman Expedition leaves Katmandu

7 June 1954 – death of Alan Turing

18–27 June 1954 – the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état, a covert operation CIA to depose the democratically-elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz; it installs the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas

29 July 1954 – J. R. R. Tolkien publishes The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings

11 November 1954 – J. R. R. Tolkien publishes The Two Towers, the second volume of The Lord of the Rings

1955
6 April 1955 – Winston Churchill steps down as British Prime Minister

6 April 1955–10 January 1957 – Anthony Eden (Conservative) is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

October 1955 – Kim Philby officially cleared by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan

20 October 1955 – J. R. R. Tolkien publishes The Return of the King, the third volume of The Lord of the Rings

1956
25 February 1956 – Nikita Khrushchev gives a secret speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Soviet Party Congress

23 April 1956 – Helen Joy Davidman marries C. S. Lewis in a civil marriage at the register office, 42 St Giles’, Oxford

13 June 1956 – British forces complete their withdrawal from the occupied Suez Canal Zone

19 July 1956 – the US State Department rejects American financial assistance for the Egyptian High Dam

26 July 1956 – Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal

5 October 1956 – release date of the film The Ten Commandments, directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner

29 October 1956–7 November 1956 – the Suez Crisis (Tripartite Aggression), the invasion of Egypt by Israel, followed by the United Kingdom and France

1957
1957 – Noam Chomsky is promoted to the position of associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

1957 – Ayn Rand publishes Atlas Shrugged

10 January 1957–19 October 1963 – Harold Macmillan (Conservative) is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

February 1957 – publication of Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky, which introduces the idea of transformational generative grammar

2 May 1957 – release date of the film The Curse of Frankenstein, directed by Terence Fisher, and starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee

26 August 1957 – release date of the film The Abominable Snowman, starring Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker

1958
February–June 1958 – the Slick-Johnson Snowman Expedition, led by Gerald Russell and Peter and Bryan Byrne

27 March 1958–14 October 1964 – Nikita Khrushchev is Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union

8 May 1958 – release date of the film UK Dracula, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing

1 June 1958 – de Gaulle became Premier and was given emergency powers for six months by the National Assembly, fulfilling his desire for parliamentary legitimacy

1 June 1958–8 January 1959 – de Gaulle Prime Minister of France

17 September 1958–25 November 1959 – serialisation of Georges Prosper Remi’s (or Hergé) story Tintin in Tibet in Tintin magazine

28 September 1958 – a French referendum took place and 79.2 percent of those who voted supported the new constitution and the creation of the Fifth Republic

1959
8 January 1959–28 April 1969 – de Gaulle President of the French Republic

18 November 1959 – release date of the film Ben-Hur, directed by William Wyler and starring Charlton Heston

December 1959 – Slick-Johnson Snowman Expedition, with Peter Byrne

1960
February 1960 – Friedrich Hayek publishes The Constitution of Liberty

27 May 1960 – Piero Sraffa publishes The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities; Italian publication on 6 June 1960

13 July 1960 – death of Helen Joy Davidman

September 1960–June 1961 – the World Book Encyclopedia scientific expedition to the Himalayas, led by Sir Edmund Hillary and Marlin Perkins, to study adaptation to high altitude and to search for the yeti

1960s1961
8 January 1961 – referendum on self-determination for Algeria was held in France

20 January 1961 – John F. Kennedy inaugurated as US president (in office 20 January 1961–22 November 1963)

1962
1 June 1962 – Friedrich Hayek leaves New York for Naples (arriving on 13 June)

c. 15 June 1962–July 1968 – Friedrich Hayek is professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany

3 July 1962 – France recognised Algerian independence

October 1962 – Cuban missile crisis

5 October 1962 – release date of the James Bond film Dr. No in the United Kingdom

10 December 1962 – release date of the film Lawrence of Arabia, directed by David Lean and starring Peter O’Toole

1963
23 January 1963 – Kim Philby vanishes from Beirut

June 1963 – John F. Kennedy visits Ireland

1 July 1963 – Kim Philby’s flight to Moscow officially confirmed

11 October 1963 – release date of the James Bond film From Russia with Love in the United Kingdom

22 November 1963 – the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 pm Central Standard Time on Friday; Lyndon B. Johnson sworn in as President on Air Force One in Dallas on 22 November 1963

22 November 1963 – death of C. S. Lewis

23 November 1963 – broadcast date of the first Doctor Who TV program An Unearthly Child in the UK

25 November 1963 – a Requiem Mass held for John F. Kennedy at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle

21 December 1963–1 February 1964 – broadcast dates of the Doctor Who TV program The Daleks in the UK

1964
23 April 1964 – Anthony Blunt secretly confessed to MI5 about his spying

18 September 1964 – release date of the James Bond film Goldfinger in the United Kingdom

14 October 1964 – Nikita Khrushchev is forced to resign as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union

14 October 1964–10 November 1982 – Leonid Brezhnev is General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Brezhnev becomes Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union on 16 June 1977

1965
24 January 1965 – death of Winston Churchill

23 August 1965 – release date of the film Dr. Who and the Daleks, starring Peter Cushing

22 September 1965 – the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (or the Hart–Celler Act) is passed in the US Senate (25 August 1965 in the House); effective from 30 June 1968

21 December 1965 – release date of the James Bond film Thunderball in the United States; released in the UK on 29 December 1965

1966
1966 – Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy publish Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Monthly Review Press)

5 August 1966 – release date of the film Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., starring Peter Cushing

1968
4 April 1968 – murder of Martin Luther King

April 1968 – UK Race Relations Bill

20 April 1968 – Enoch Powell’s notorious address to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre, which became known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech

6 June 1968 – death of Randolph Spencer-Churchill (1911–1968), son of Winston

5 November 1968 – the United States presidential election of 1968, between the Republican nominee Richard Nixon and the Democratic nominee Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon won the electoral college by 301–191

1969
20 January 1969–9 August 1974 – Richard Nixon is US president

December 1969–1977 – Friedrich Hayek is professor at the University of Salzburg

1970
3 January 1970 – broadcast date of “Spearhead from Space,” the first serial of British science fiction television series Doctor Who starring Jon Pertwee

18 June 1970 – the United Kingdom general election of 1970; the Conservative Party under Edward Heath defeats the Labour Party under Harold Wilson