Following the 2005 federal election, Angela Merkel was appointed Germany's first woman Chancellor at the head of a grand coalition consisting of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In December 2015, Merkel was named as Time magazine's Person of the Year, with the magazine's cover declaring her to be the "Chancellor of the Free World."

RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner that was sunk by a German submarine in World War I. The sinking caused a storm of protest in the United States as 128 American citizens were among the dead. It helped shift public opinion in the United States against Germany and was a factor in the United States' declaration of war nearly two years later.

Hirohito, emperor of Japan from 1926 until his death in 1989, was the longest-reigning monarch in Japanese history.

On June 9, 1982, at the outset of the 1982 Lebanon War, ninety Israeli aircrafts destroyed eighty of the one hundred Syrian aircrafts without suffering a single loss. Code-named Operation Mole Cricket 19, this decisive Israeli victory is sometimes referred to colloguially as the "Bekaa Valley Turkey Shoot".

The Weimar Republic is an unofficial designation for the German state between 1919 and 1933. It came to an abrupt end on the morning of 30 January 1933 when Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor and immediately began arresting his political opponents.

In response to the Great Depression, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the New Deal, a series of socially liberal programs enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1938, and focused on what historians refer to as the "3 Rs": Relief for the unemployed and poor, Recovery of the economy to normal levels, and Reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.

The Republican Party first came to power in the election of 1860 when it won control of both houses of Congress and Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Lincoln's vice president that year was Hannibal Hamlin who was chosen in part to bring geographic balance to the ticket and in part because, as a former Democrat, he could work to convince other anti-slavery Democrats that their future lay with the Republican Party.

During the summer of 1967, as many as 100,000 young people from around the world flocked to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Berkeley and other San Francisco Bay Area cities to join in a popularized version of the hippie experience--a melting pot of music, psychedelic drugs, sexual freedom, creative expression, and politics. The Summer of Love, as it came to be called, became a defining moment of the 1960s.

When Vladimir Lenin died at his home on 21 January 1924, a struggle for power developed between Stalin, the secretary of the Communist Party, and Trotsky, the Commissar for War. Stalin, a master of political trickery, used his position as secretary to put his supporters on the Central Committee of the party. He even told Trotsky the wrong date for Lenin's funeral, so Trotsky turned up a day late. And so it was Stalin who became party leader in 1924. Trotsky was dismissed, then exiled and murdered in 1940.

On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland which led Britain and France to declare war on Hitler's Nazi state in retaliation.