Modern Era
Goddard's Rocket (1926): The First Liquid-Fuelled Rocket Launch
The world's first liquid-fuelled rocket flew for about 2.5 seconds, proving a technology that later powered spaceflight.
Region
Americas
Modern Era
Cristero War (1926-1929): Mexico's Church-State Conflict
The 1929 arrangements restored public Catholic worship without changing the constitution; the rebels disbanded under an amnesty.
Modern Era
Lindbergh's Transatlantic Flight (1927): Spirit of St. Louis
Lindbergh completed the first solo non-stop transatlantic flight, won the $25,000 Orteig Prize and became a world celebrity.
Modern Era
Great Mississippi Flood of 1927: America's Worst River Flood
Some 27,000 square miles were flooded and hundreds of thousands displaced; Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1928, making flood control a federal responsibility.
Modern Era
Okeechobee Hurricane (1928): Lake Okeechobee Floods Florida
At least 2,500 people died in Florida, most in the flooded farm towns south of the lake; the disaster led to the building of the Herbert Hoover Dike.
Modern Era
St Francis Dam Disaster (1928): The Collapse in California
The dam failed shortly before midnight; the flood killed at least 431 people and led California to create state oversight of dam safety.
Modern Era
Hubble's Expanding Universe (1929): Galaxies Rushing Apart
Hubble's velocity-distance relation provided the key evidence that the universe is expanding, the foundation of Big Bang cosmology.
Modern Era
Wall Street Crash of 1929: Black Tuesday and the Global Slump
Share prices collapsed, wiping out tens of billions of dollars in paper wealth; the crash was followed by the Great Depression, though historians debate how far it caused it.
Modern Era
Great Depression in the United States (1929-1939)
Output fell by about a quarter and unemployment reached about 25 per cent by 1933; recovery began under the New Deal but was completed only with Second World War mobilisation.
Modern Era
Discovery of Pluto (1930): Clyde Tombaugh Finds Planet X
Pluto was discovered and counted as the ninth planet until the International Astronomical Union reclassified it as a dwarf planet in 2006.
Modern Era
Dust Bowl (1930s): Drought and Dust Storms on the Great Plains
Severe drought and wind erosion stripped topsoil from millions of acres, drove hundreds of thousands of people from the Plains and led to lasting federal soil conservation programmes.
Modern Era
Bonus Army (1932): First World War Veterans March on Washington
Congress refused early payment and the army forcibly cleared the camps on 28 July 1932; the bonus was finally paid in 1936.