Millennium Milestones

Updated August 5, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

The 100 Most Significant Events of the Last Thousand Years

• 1066—Norman Conquest of Britain
• 1095—Pope Urban II calls for the Crusades
• 1100s—Angkor Wat is built
• 1206—Genghis Khan begins creation of largest land empire in history
• 1215—Magna Carta signed
• 1260—Chartres Cathedral consecrated
• 1271—Marco Polo begins travels to Asia
• 1273—Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologica
• 1300s—Renaissance begins in Italy
• 1347—Bubonic plague (Black Death) spreads in Europe
• c.1387—Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
• 1399—Tamerlane begins last great conquest
• 1438—Incan Empire formed in Peru
• 1455—Gutenberg's movable-type printing press produces the Bible
• 1492—Columbus reaches the New World
• 1509—Michelangelo begins painting Sistine Chapel
• 1513—Machiavelli's The Prince
• 1517—Martin Luther initiates Reformation
• 1519—Aztec Empire at height as Spanish arrive
• 1520—Suleiman I “the Magnificent” presides over the Ottoman Empire's greatest period
• 1522—Magellan's expedition circumnavigates the globe
• 1543—Copernicus postulates a heliocentric universe
• 1582—Pope Gregory XIII reforms calendar
• 1603—Shakespeare's Hamlet
• 1605—Cervantes's Don Quixote, first modern novel
• 1609—Galileo makes first astronomical observations with a telescope
• 1637—Descartes publishes Discours de la méthode
• 1643—Taj Mahal completed
• 1664—Newton's theory of universal gravitation
• 1667—Milton's Paradise Lost
• 1684—Leibniz's calculus published
• 1690—Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding
• 1721—Bach completes the Brandenburg Concertos
• 1755—Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language
• 1760—Industrial Revolution begins in England
• 1762—Rousseau's The Social Contract
• 1764—Mozart (aged eight) writes first symphony
• 1769—Watt patents first practical steam engine
• 1776—U.S. Declaration of Independence; Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations
• 1787—U.S. Constitution signed
• 1789—French Revolution begins
• 1792—Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• 1796—Jenner discovers smallpox vaccine
• 1808—Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
• 1815—Battle of Waterloo crushes Napoleon
• 1819—Bolívar defeats Spanish forces at Boyacá
• 1826—Niepce takes first photograph
• 1833—Slavery abolished in British Empire
• 1842—Long uses first anesthetic (ether)
• 1859—Darwin's On the Origin of Species; Lenoir builds first practical internal-combustion engine
• 1862—Pasteur's experiments lead to germ theory; Salon des Refusés introduces impressionism
• 1867—Japan ends 675-year shogun rule
• 1876—Bell patents the telephone
• 1879—Edison invents electric light
• 1880s—Europe colonizes African continent
• 1885—World's first skyscraper built in Chicago
• 1893—New Zealand becomes first country in the world to grant women the vote
• 1895—Lumiére brothers introduce motion pictures; Marconi sends first radio signals
• 1897—Herzl launches Zionist movement
• 1900—Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
• 1903—Wright brothers fly first motorized airplane
• 1905—Einstein announces theory of relativity
• 1907—Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon introduces cubism
• 1911—Rutherford discovers structure of atom
• 1913—Ford develops first moving assembly line
• 1914—World War I begins
• 1916—Sanger founds international birth control movement
• 1917—Lenin leads the Bolshevik Revolution
• 1918—Global “Spanish flu” epidemic
• 1922—Joyce's Ulysses published
• 1927—Farnsworth demonstrates working model of a television; Lemaitre proposes big bang theory
• 1928—Fleming discovers penicillin
• 1929—Hubble proposes theory of expanding universe; U.S. stock market crash precipitates global depression
• 1936—Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
• 1939—Hitler invades Poland; World War II begins
• 1942—Nazi leaders at Wannsee Conference coordinate “final solution to the Jewish question”
• 1945—Atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; first electronic computer, ENIAC, is built; Arab League launches modern pan-Arabism
• 1946—First meeting of U.N. General Assembly; Churchill's “Iron Curtain” speech marks beginning of cold war
• 1947—Gandhi's civil disobedience movement leads to an independent India
• 1949—Communist victory in China under Mao Zedong
• 1950s—Abstract expressionism introduced
• 1953—Watson, Crick, and Franklin discover DNA's structure
• 1954—Brown v. Board of Education begins unraveling of U.S. racial segregation
• 1957—Russia launches first satellite, Sputnik I
• 1959—Mary and Louis Leakey uncover hominid fossils
• 1969—Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the Moon; Internet (ARPA) goes online
• 1980—Smallpox eradicated
• 1981—Scientists identify AIDS
• 1989—Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe
• 1991—Breakup of Soviet Union; apartheid ends in South Africa