Millennium Milestones
Updated February 21, 2017 | Factmonster Staff 
The 100 Most Significant Events of the Last Thousand Years
Reducing the millennium to a laundry list of highlights cannot pretend to be a definitive or accurate exercise. Note that only events judged to have world significance are included. Apologies for the inevitable bias toward Western as well as twentieth century events—we are all prisoners of our own history. For a less whirlwind glance at the last thousand years, see our Millennium Timeline.
- 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
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