Song in America |
Politics & Culture
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Politics |
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Culture |
Emergence of Modern United States (1890 - 1928) |
| 1890 | 1890
- Wyoming becomes the 44th state and the first one admitted to the Union with women's suffrage
- The second Madison Square Garden opens in New York, designed by Stanford White
- Anatole France: Thaïs
- Henrik Ibsen: Hedda Gabler
- Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Vincent Van Gogh commits suicide
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| 1891 | 1891
- The Populist Party forms
- Yellowstone National Park is established
- Carnegie Hall opens
- Edison patents his moving picture camera, which he calls the kinetoscope
- Paul Gauguin departs for Tahiti
- Hugo Wolf: Italienisches Liederbuch
- Johannes Brahms: Clarinet Quintet
- Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- Claude Monet: Haystacks
- Jean Cocteau born
- Max Ernst born
- Henry Miller born
- Sergei Prokofiev born
- Arthur Rimbaud dies
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| 1892 | 1892
- Ellis Island becomes a gateway for the nation's immigrants; more than half a million are arriving each year
- Lizzie Borden arrested for murdering her parents
- John Philip Sousa forms his own band
- Dvořák arrives in America to direct the National Conservatory in New York
- The Metropolitan Opera is destroyed by a fire
- Ruggiero Leoncavallo: I Pagliacci
- Peter Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker
- Arthur Honegger born
- Darius Milhaud born
- J. R. R. Tolkien born
- Alfred Lord Tennyson dies
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1893- Margaret Ruthven Lang becomes the first woman to have a work performed by a major orchestra (Boston Symphony Orchestra)
- Homer N. Bartlett: “An Autumn Song” (text by Mrs. F. Hemans)
- Amy Marcy Beach: Three Songs, Op. 19, ("For me the jasmine buds unfold", "Ecstasy", and "Golden Gates") and Three Songs, Op. 21 (with French texts by Victor Hugo and Félix Bovet)
- Edward MacDowell: Eight Songs, Op. 47, including “The Sea” (text by William Dean Howells)
- Horatio Parker: Three Songs, Op. 34
- Clara Kathleen Rogers: Six Songs, Op. 27 (Browning Songs)
- Stephen Crane: Maggie, a Girl of the Streets
- Paul Laurence Dunbar: Oak and Ivy
- Dorothy Parker born
| 1893
- Grover Cleveland inaugurated for second term
- Ford builds first automobile engine
- Panic of 1893
- Queen Liliuokalani is deposed and is forced to turn Hawaii over to the U.S.
- Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony premieres in New York
- Giuseppe Verdi's last opera, Falstaff, is his only comedy
- Henry Ossawa Tanner paints The Banjo Lesson
- The World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago commemorates the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival
- Thomas Edison builds the Black Maria motion picture studio
- Edvard Munch: The Scream
- Martha Graham born
- Peter Tchaikovsky dies
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| 1894 | 1894
- Claude Debussy: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
- George Bernard Shaw: Arms and the Man
- Aubrey Beardsley illustrates Oscar Wilde's Salome
- Norman Rockwell born
- Christina Rossetti dies
- Robert Louis Stevenson dies
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| 1895 | 1895
- Lumière Brothers patent their movie camera/projector
- Art Nouveau fashionable
- Frederic Remington's sculptures contribute to American image of the West
- Paul Hindemith born
- Frederick Douglass dies
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| 1896 | 1896
- Plessy v. Ferguson: "separate but equal" is constitutional
- William Jennings Bryan's first run for president
- Edward MacDowell composes Indian Suite
- Edward S. Curtis begins photo surveys of Native American life
- Library of Congress starts its Music Division
- Two influential magazines are founded in Germany: Jugend, for which "Jugendstil" is named, and the satirical Simplicissimus
- First modern Olympics, in Athens
- Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème
- Anton Chekhov: The Seagull
- Oscar Wilde: Salomé
- Baritone David Bispham born
- F. Scott Fitzgerald born
- Baritone Lawrence Tibbett born
- Paul Verlaine dies
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| 1897 | 1897
- William McKinley inaugurated
- Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska
- Running of the Boston Marathon begins
- John Philip Sousa: The Stars and Stripes Forever
- Richard Strauss: Don Quixote
- Edmond Rostand: Cyrano de Bergerac
- George Bernard Shaw: Candide
- Henry Cowell born
- William Faulkner born
- Soprano Rosa Ponselle born
- Thornton Wilder born
- Johannes Brahms dies
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| 1898 | 1898
- Spanish-American War (to 1899)
- The Curies discover radium
- Elisabeth of Austria assassinated
- Magazine Musical America begins publication
- Charles Ives: Symphony No. 1
- Richard Strauss: Ein Heldenleben
- Giuseppe Verdi: Four Sacred Pieces
- Stephen Crane: The Open Boat and Other Tales
- H. G. Wells: War of the Worlds
- Bertolt Brecht born
- Louis Armstrong born
- Paul Robeson born
- Lewis Carroll dies
- Stéphané Mallarmé dies
- Gustave Moreau dies
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| 1899 | 1899
- Arnold Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht
- Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 1 & Finlandia
- Kate O'Flaherty Chopin: The Awakening
- Hart Crane born
- Noel Coward born
- Duke Ellington born
- Ernest Hemingway born
- Eugene Ormandy born
- Francis Poulenc born
- E.B. White born
- Ernest Chausson dies
- Johann Strauss, Jr. dies
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| 1900 | 1900
- U.S. population is over 75,000,000
- The first edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians is published
- Gustave Charpentier: Louise
- Gustave Mahler: Symphony No. 4
- Giacomo Puccini: Tosca
- L. Frank Baum: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- Theodore Dreiser (brother of Paul Dresser): Sister Carrie
- Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams
- Magnetic recording introduced
- Richard Crooks (tenor) born
- Colin McPhee born
- Hermann Reutter born
- Oscar Wilde dies
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| 1901 | 1901
- U.S. Steel incorporated as the first billion-dollar corporation
- President William McKinley assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt becomes president
- Queen Victoria dies
- Universal Edition in Vienna begins publishing
- Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2
- Arnold Schoenberg: Gurre-Lieder
- Pablo Picasso's Blue Period begins
- Zora Neale Hurston born
- Harry Partch born
- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec dies
- Giuseppe Verdi dies
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| 1902 | 1902
- Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande
- Gustave Mahler: Symphony No. 5 & Kindertotenlieder
- Caruso makes his first phonograph record
- Scott Joplin composes "The Entertainer"
- Marian Anderson born
- Richard Rogers born
- Alice Tully born
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| 1903 | 1903
- Wright Brothers have their first successful airplane flight
- W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
- Jack London: Call of the Wild
- Pablo Picasso: The Old Guitarist
- George Bernard Shaw: Man and Superman
- Countee Cullen born
- Mark Rothko born
- Paul Gauguin dies
- Camille Pissarro dies
- James M. Whistler dies
- Hugo Wolf dies
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| 1904 | 1904
- Helen Keller graduates from Radcliffe
- Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 6
- Giacomo Puccini: Madame Butterfly
- Ralph Vaughan Williams: Songs of Travel
- James Barrie: Peter Pan
- Anton Chekov: The Cherry Orchard
- "Count" Basie born
- Bing Crosby born
- Salvadore Dali born
- Jimmy Dorsey born
- Willem de Kooning born
- Glenn Miller born
- Sir Edwin Arnold dies
- Anton Chekov dies
- Anton Dvořák dies
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| 1905 | 1905
- The New York Subway officially opens
- Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg, Russia
- The Institute of Musical Arts is founded in New York--forerunner of The Juilliard School
- Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity is made public
- Claude Debussy: La Mer
- Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 7
- Richard Strauss: Salomé
- Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth
- Jean-Paul Sartre born
- Michael Tippett born
- Jules Verne dies
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| 1906 | 1906
- The Great San Francisco Earthquake
- Muckraker Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle
- Samuel Beckett born
- Dmitri Shostakovich born
- Paul Cézanne dies
- Henrik Ibsen dies
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| 1907 | 1907
- Mahatma Gandhi begins civil disobedience crusade
- Edward Curtis: First of twenty volumes of photos of Native American life
- Ziegfield Follies founded
- Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 8, "Symphony of a Thousand"
- James Joyce: Chamber Music
- Gustav Klimt: The Kiss
- Pablo Picasso: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- Rachel Carson born
- Edvard Grieg dies
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| 1908 | 1908
- First Model T Ford
- Bulgaria declares independence from Turkish authority
- First exhibit of Ashcan School of painting
- First Cubist paintings
- Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde
- Maurice Ravel: Gaspard de la Nuit
- E. M. Forster: A Room with a View
- L. M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables
- Herbert von Karajan born
- Olivier Messiaen born
- Richard Wright born
- Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov dies
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| 1909 | 1909
- William Howard Taft inaugurated
- American explorers Robert Peary and Matthew Henson reach the North Pole
- NAACP founded
- Vachel Lindsay tramps country preaching his illuminated poems
- Poet Robert Underwood Johnson founds the Keats House in Rome
- Ballet Russe founded by Diaghilev
- Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 9
- Richard Strauss: Elektra
- George Meredith dies
- Frederic Remington dies
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| 1910 | 1910
- Boy Scouts of America incorporated
- Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Sea Symphony includes settings of Walt Whitman
- Black musicians begin using the term "blues" to describe the established 12-bar form
- Giacomo Puccini: The Girl of the Golden West
- Richard Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier
- Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird
- Robert Fitzgerald born
- Winslow Homer dies
- William S. Porter (O. Henry) dies
- Henri Rousseau dies
- Leo Tolstoy dies
- Mark Twain dies
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| 1911 | 1911
- Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
- First transcontinental flight across the United States
- Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome
- Frank Lloyd Wright builds his home Taliesin in Wisconsin
- Béla Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle
- Igor Stravinsky: Petrouchka
- Guillaume Apollinaire: Le Bestiaire
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Jedermann
- Gustav Mahler dies
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| 1912 | 1912
- Federal employees are given an 8-hour work day
- Titanic sinks with more than 1,500 people aboard
- James Reese Europe leads first black jazz orchestra in Carnegie Hall
- Claude Debussy: Jeux
- Maurice Ravel: Daphnis and Chloe
- Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire
- Richard Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos
- Carl Jung: The Theory of Psychoanalysis
- George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion
- Jackson Pollack born
- George Solti born
- Samuel Coleridge Taylor dies
- Jules Massenet dies
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| 1913 | 1913
- Woodrow Wilson inaugurated
- Woolworth Building is tallest in the world
- NY Armory show introduces Cubists
- Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring
- Anton Webern: Five Pieces for Orchestra
- Thomas Mann: Death in Venice
- Benjamin Britten born
- Philip Guston born
- Robert Hayden born
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| 1914 | 1914
- Archduke Ferdinand and wife assassinated; World War I begins
- Panama Canal opens
- The Ludlow Massacre in Colorado, a watershed moment in labor history
- Charles Ives: Three Places in New England
- Founding of ASCAP, The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers
- Gustav Holst: The Planets
- James Joyce: Dubliners
- John Berryman born
- William Burroughs born
- Ralph Ellison born
- Weldon Kees born
- Dylan Thomas born
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| 1915 | 1915
- Lusitania sunk off the coast of Ireland
- U.S. Coast Guard formed
- Poison gas used in warfare for first time
- Flowering of New Orleans jazz
- D. W. Griffith's epic film The Birth of a Nation
- Alban Berg: Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6
- Edgar Lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology
- Arthur Miller born
- Frank Sinatra born
- Alexander Scriabin dies
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| 1916 | 1916
- National Park Service created
- Marcus Garvey begins to attract followers to his Universal Negro Improvement Organization
- Charles Ives: Fourth Symphony
- Béla Bartók: The Wooden Prince
- James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Robert Shaw born
- Jack London dies
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| 1917 | 1917
- Russian Revolution
- U.S. enters World War I
- Puerto Rico becomes a United States territory
- Manhattan School of Music founded
- Southern Methodist University Music Department founded
- Igor Stravinsky: Les Noces
- Andrew Wyeth born
- Edgar Degas dies
- Auguste Rodin dies
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| 1918 | 1918
- World War I ends
- Worldwide flu epidemic begins
- Guillaume Apollinaire dies
- Claude Debussy dies
- Gustav Klimt dies
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1919- Frank Bridge sets Walt Whitman's "Darest Thou Now, O Soul" as "To the Soul"
- Arthur Foote: Three Songs 1914-1918, including “In Flanders Fields” (Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae), “The Soldier” (Rupert Brooke), and “Oh, Red is the English Rose” (Dr. Charles Alexander Richmond)
- George Gershwin writes the song "Swanee," with lyrics by Irving Caesar
- Victor Herbert: Farewell, Molly (songs)
- James Hotchkiss Rogers: In Memoriam (song cycle, which sets poetry by Sir Edwin Arnold, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Walt Whitman)
- Carl Ruggles: "Toys" (text by Walter Eckard)
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti born
- William Meredith born
- Pete Seeger born
- Reed Whittemore born
- Horatio Parker dies
| 1919
- U.S. Post Office burns early portions of Joyce's Ulysses
- Bauhaus School of Architecture begins
- Serge Prokofiev: The Love of Three Oranges
- Richard Strauss: Die Frau ohne Schatten
- Liberace born
- Merce Cunningham born
- Doris Lessing born
- J. D. Salinger born
- Ruggiero Leoncavallo dies
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir dies
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| 1920 | 1920
- 18th Amendment: Prohibition
- 19th Amendment gives women the right to vote
- Thousands arrested and deported in Red Scare "Palmer Raids"
- Socialist Eugene V. Debs makes his fifth run for president, this time from prison
- League of Nations is created
- Maurice Ravel: La Valse
- Igor Stravinsky: Symphony of Wind Instruments
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise
- Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
- Sinclair Lewis: Main Street
- Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones on Broadway
- Expressionist landmark film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
- Commercial radio broadcasting begins in U.S.
- Bruno Maderna born
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| 1921 | 1921
- Warren Harding inaugurated
- Resurgence of Ku Klux Klan
- Sacco and Vanzetti convicted
- Nadia Boulanger begins teaching at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau
- James Joyce: full-length Ulysses
- T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
- Rudolph Valentino stars in The Sheik
- Albert Einstein lectures in New York on the Theory of Relativity
- Alban Berg: Wozzeck
- Donaueschingen Contemporary Music Festival begins
- Hayden Carruth born
- Enrico Caruso dies
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| 1922 | 1922
- Lincoln Memorial dedicated
- Mussolini becomes dictator in Italy
- U.S.S.R. is formed
- Maurice Ravel orchestrates Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition
- Louis Armstrong joins King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band
- F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age names a decade
- Reader's Digest debuts
- Paul Klee: The Twittering Machine
- Henri Matisse: The Music Lesson
- Phyllis Curtin born
- Judy Garland born
- Jack Kerouac born
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. born
- Marcel Proust dies
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| 1923 | 1923
- Warren G. Harding dies; Calvin Coolidge becomes president
- Teapot Dome scandal
- George Gershwin: Rhapsody In Blue
- Duke Ellington starts his band
- Arnold Schoenberg turns to twelve-tone music
- Le Corbusier writes Towards an Architecture
- Igor Stravinsky: Octet
- Maria Callas born
- Sarah Bernhardt dies
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| 1924 | 1924
- Leopold and Loeb murder case
- Immigration Restriction Act institutes quota system
- The Curtis Institute of Music is founded in Philadelphia
- John Alden Carpenter: Skyscrapers (ballet)
- Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
- Eugene O'Neill: Desire Under the Elms
- H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan found The American Mercury magazine
- Truman Capote born
- Luigi Nono born
- Ferruccio Busoni dies
- Joseph Conrad dies
- Gabriel Fauré dies
- Anatole France dies
- Giacomo Puccini dies
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| 1925 | 1925
- Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee
- Adolf Hitler publishes Mein Kampf
- Jazz arrives in Europe
- Society of American Women Composers founded; Amy Marcy Beach is first president
- Flowering of Harlem Renaissance
- Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedy
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
- The New Yorker magazine first appears
- Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
- Luciano Berio born
- Cathy Berberian born
- Pierre Boulez born
- Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau born
- Mary Flannery O'Connor born
- Gore Vidal born
- Erik Satie dies
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| 1926 | 1926
- Henry Ford institutes the five-day workweek
- Congress creates the Army Air Corps and establishes the Great Smokey Mountains, Mammoth Cave, and Shenandoah National Parks
- Edgar Varèse: first performance of Amériques
- Langston Hughes publishes first jazz poems, The Weary Blues
- Martha Graham's first independent dance performance in New York
- Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
- Alban Berg: Lyric Suite
- A. A. Milne: Winnie the Pooh
- Neal Cassidy born
- John Coltrane born
- Allen Ginsberg born
- Frank O'Hara born
- Claude Monet dies
- Rainer Maria Rilke dies
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| 1927 | 1927
- Sacco and Vanzetti executed
- Trotsky comes to full power of the Russian Communist Party
- Henry Cowell founds New Music, quarterly journal that publishes scores
- Jerome Kern: Showboat (musical)
- Igor Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex
- First talking picture: The Jazz Singer
- Clara Bow stars in the movie It, becoming The "It" Girl
- Charles Lindbergh flies solo from New York to Paris
- Babe Ruth hits 60 home runs, setting a record that will stand for more than 50 years
- Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf
- Günther Grass born
- Leontyne Price born
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| 1928 | 1928
- Kellogg-Briand Pact signed by 15 countries to "outlaw war"
- Henry Ford introduces the Model A
- Amelia Earhart is the first woman to fly across the Atlantic
- Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera
- George Gershwin: An American in Paris
- Dmitri Shostokovich: The Nose
- Bix Beiderbecke plays cornet on four number-one hit records
- First regularly scheduled television broadcast
- First appearance of Mickey Mouse as the character "Steamboat Willie"
- D. H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley's Lover
- Karlheinz Stockhausen born
- Thomas Hardy dies
- Leoš Janáček dies
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