This Year in History:
1921
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
On April 11, 1921, KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcasts the first live sporting event on the radio, a boxing match between Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee. Pittsburgh Daily Post sports editor Florent…
On May 5, 1921, a date of symbolic importance to its iconic creator, the perfume Chanel No. 5 officially debuts in Coco Chanel’s boutique on the Rue Cambon in Paris.…
Deeply in debt and relegated to a shabby theater, the musical Shuffle Along debuts at the Sixty‑Third Street Music Hall on May 23, 1921. The odds are stacked against the…
Beginning on the night of May 31, 1921, thousands of white citizens in Tulsa, Oklahoma descended on the city’s predominantly Black Greenwood District, burning homes and businesses to the ground…
After Judge Hugo Friend denies a motion to quash the indictments against the major league baseball players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, a trial begins with jury selection.…
At the University of Toronto, Canadian scientists Frederick Banting and Charles Best successfully isolate insulin—a hormone they believe could prevent diabetes—for the first time. Within a year, the first human…
On July 29, 1921, Adolf Hitler becomes the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party. Under Hitler, the Nazi Party grew into a mass movement and ruled Germany…
Fatty Arbuckle, a silent‑film era performer at the height of his fame, is arrested in San Francisco for the rape and murder of aspiring actress Virginia Rappe. Arbuckle was later…
On October 21, 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivers a speech in Alabama in which he condemns lynchings—extrajudicial murders (usually hangings) committed primarily by white supremacists against Black Americans in…
On October 24, 1921, in the French town of Chalons‑sur‑Marne, an American sergeant selects the body of the first “Unknown Soldier” to be honored among the approximately 77,000 United States…
Exactly three years after the end of World War I, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is dedicated at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia during an Armistice Day ceremony presided over…
The Irish Free State, comprising four‑fifths of Ireland, is declared, ending a five‑year Irish struggle for independence from Britain. Like other autonomous nations of the former British Empire, Ireland was…
