• The Red Scare in the United States (1920-1921)
• In the United States, peak of the Ku Klux Klan (about five million members)
• In the United States, KKK auxiliaries established.
• Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and Irish Civil War (1922-23)
• The Irish Free State gains independence from the United Kingdom in 1922
• Marie C. Brehm becomes temperance movement leader.
• Turkish War of Independence
• Moderation League of New York worked for repeal of prohibition.
• Polish-Soviet war
• First Labour Government of Ramsay MacDonald formed in the United Kingdom
• Kellogg-Briand Pact to end war
• Prohibition leaders were at the height of their power.
• The Qajar dynasty ended under Ahmad Shah Qajar and Reza Shah Pahlavi formed the Pahlavi Dynasty, which would later become the last monarchy of Iran.
• Hitler publishes Mein Kampf, a book that foreshadows many of the events in the 1930s.
• Mussolini became Italy's Prime Minister and started a fascist dictatorship.
• Women in the United States received the right to vote following the passage of the 19th amendment.

[edit] Economics

• The New Economic Policy is created by the Bolsheviks in Russia.
• The Dawes Plan, which lasted from 1924-1928
• Economic boom ended by "Black Tuesday" (October 29, 1929); the stock market crashes, leading to the Great Depression

[edit] Literature and Arts

See also: List of years in literature#1920s

• Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One's Own
• George Gershwin writes Rhapsody in Blue
• T. S. Eliot publishes The Waste Land
• James Joyce publishes Ulysses
• Franz Kafka publishes The Trial
• Erich Maria Remarque publishes All Quiet on the Western Front
• Rene Magritte paints The Treachery of Images
• Hugh MacDiarmid publishes A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
• Walter Gropius builds the Bauhaus in Dessau
• F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby
• Hermann Hesse publishes Siddhartha
• Ernest Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms
• Thornton Wilder publishes The Bridge of San Luis Rey
• Alexey Tolstoy publishes Aelita
• George Bernard Shaw publishes Back to Methuselah
• Eugene O'Neill awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon in 1920, Anna Christie in 1922, and Strange Interlude in 1928.
• Sinclair Lewis publishes Babbitt, Dodsworth, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry
• Wallace Stevens publishes his first book of poetry, Harmonium

[edit] Culture and religion

• Prohibition — legal attempt to end consumption of alcohol in Canada, the USA, Norway and Finland
  

  

  Prohibition agents destroying barrels of alcohol.
• Youth culture of The Lost Generation; flappers, the Charleston, and bobbed hair
• "The Jazz Age" — jazz and jazz-influenced dance music widely popular
• F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes some of the most enduring novels characterizing the Jazz Age. This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby, as well as three short story collections, were all published in these years.
• Women's suffrage movement continues to make gains as women obtain full voting rights in Denmark in 1915, in the USA in 1920, and in the UK in 1918 (women over 30) and in 1928 (full enfranchisement); and women begin to enter the workplace in larger numbers
• In the US, gangsters and the rise of organized crime, often associated with bootleg liquor, in defiance of Prohibition.
• Rum rows are established to import bootleg alcoholic beverages into U.S.
• First commercial radio station in the U.S. goes on air in Pittsburgh, in 1920, and radio quickly becomes a popular entertainment medium
• Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals defends alcohol prohibition in U.S.
• First feature-length motion picture with a sound track (Don Juan) is released in 1926. First part-talkie (The Jazz Singer) released in 1927, first all-talking feature (Lights of New York) released in 1928 and first all-color all-talking feature (On with the Show) released in 1929.
• Beginning of surrealist movement
• Beginning of the Art Deco movement
• Fads such as marathon dancing, mah-jongg, crossword puzzles and pole-sitting are popular
• The height of the clip joint
• The Harlem Renaissance
• The Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) which declared that John T. Scopes had violated the law by teaching evolution in schools, creating tension between the competing theories of creationism and evolution.
• Bishop James Cannon, Jr. becomes a U.S. temperance movement leader.
• The Group of Seven (artists)
• Repeal organizations organized to fight national prohibition in U.S.
• Minister Daisey Douglas Barr heads Women's Ku Klux Klan (WKKK).
• The tomb of Tutankhamun is discovered intact by Howard Carter (1922). This begins a second revival of Egyptomania.
• Edward Higgins becomes the third General ( international leader) of The Salvation Army . His term is from 1929-1934.

[edit] People

[edit] World leaders

[edit] Entertainers

[edit] Sports figures

• Warwick Armstrong (Australian cricket captain)
• Gordon Coventry (Australian rules football player)
• Jack Dempsey (American boxer)
• Red Grange (American football player)
• Jack Hobbs (Surrey & England cricketer)
• Alex James (Arsenal & Scotland footballer)
• Bobby Jones (American golfer)
• Kenesaw Mountain Landis (American Baseball Commissioner)
• Suzanne Lenglen (French tennis player )
• Helen Wills Moody (American tennis player)
• Paavo Nurmi (Finnish runner)
• Wilfred Rhodes (Yorkshire & England cricketer)
• Babe Ruth (American baseball player)
• Herbert Sutcliffe (Yorkshire & England cricketer)
• Bill Tilden (American tennis player)
• Lou Gehrig (American baseball player)
• Alex Grove (American bowler)