Found /www/bigissue/cache/1918oldid is 550821
Centuries: 19th century - 20th century - 21st century
Decades: 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s - 1910s - 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s
Years: 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 - 1918 - 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923
Events:
- World War I ends.
- Poland gains its independence.
- Iceland becomes an independent state, under the Danish crown, with foreign affairs handled by Denmark.
- Finnish Civil War between the Reds and the Whites, January - April.
- March 6 - Finnish Airforce founded. The blue swastika is adopted as its symbol as a tribute to the Swedish explorer and aviator Eric von Rosen who donated the first plane. Von Rosen had painted the buddhist symbol on the plane as his personal lucky insignia.
- Russia adopts the Gregorian calendar, which has the bizarre consequence that the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, previously October, now falls in November.
- Change of emperor of the Ottoman Empire from Mehmed V (Resad) (1909-1918) to Mehmed VI (Vahdettin) (1918-1922)
- August - Influenza pandemic begins, over twenty-five million people die in the following six months (three times as many as died during the war).
- December - New voting laws in Sweden. Votes no longer dependent on taxable assets. One person, one vote.
Births:
- January 20 - Esquivel, musician
- March 5 - James Tobin, economist
- March 9 - Mickey Spillane, mystery writer
- March 16 - Frederick Reines, physicist (1995 Nobel Prize in Physics)
- April 16 - Spike Milligan, comedian
- July 14 - Ingmar Bergman Swedish film director
- July 18 - Nelson Mandela, South African prisoner of conscience and president.
- August 13 - Frederick Sanger, molecular biologist
- August 25 - Leonard Bernstein, American composer and conductor
- August 30 - Ted Williams, American baseball player
- December 11 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer
- December 25 - Anwar Sadat, Egyptian president
Deaths:
Nobel Prizes: