What happened on 1 October?

22 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1949 People's Republic of China founded Mao proclaims the PRC after Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War.
2. 1949 Mao's rule of China Land reform, the Hundred Flowers, the Great Leap Forward's famine and the Cultural Revolution.
3. 1908 Ford Model T Henry Ford's affordable mass-produced car using the moving assembly line; transforms American society and global manufacturing.
4. 1774 Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther Romantic epistolary novel that triggered a Europe-wide craze.
5. 1949 Mao's China Mao Zedong's rule of the People's Republic of China, from its 1949 founding through the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution to his death in 1976.
6. 331 BCE Battle of Gaugamela Alexander's decisive victory over Darius III in Mesopotamia; effectively ends the Achaemenid Persian Empire.
7. 1347 Black Plague reaches Europe Plague arrives in Sicily; spreads across Europe.
8. 1965 Indonesian mass killings of 1965 Anti-communist purge under Suharto kills an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 people.
9. 1915 Kafka's The Metamorphosis Novella about a salesman who wakes up transformed into a giant insect; foundational text of 20th-century modernist literature.
10. 1918 Spanish flu peaks in second wave Deadly second wave of the H1N1 pandemic kills tens of millions.
11. 1917 Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum est Anti-war poem by Owen, killed a week before the Armistice.
12. 1960 Nigerian independence Nigeria becomes independent from Britain.
13. 1964 Shinkansen bullet train First high-speed rail line, Tokyo to Osaka, opens ahead of 1964 Olympics; spawns a global industry.
14. 1936 Franco is proclaimed Generalísimo The junta names Franco — junior among the plotters three months earlier, indispensable since the airlift — Generalísimo and head of state. Rivals die conveniently or are sidelined;
15. 1982 Helmut Kohl's chancellorship Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl leads West Germany through Cold War's end; mastermind of reunification; longest-serving postwar chancellor.
16. 1541 Born: El Greco Cretan-born painter of elongated, mystical figures in Spanish Toledo.
17. 1991 Soviet–Finnish border closure ends Symbolic end-of-Cold-War border opening.
18. 2017 Catalan independence referendum Catalonia's banned independence vote and the crackdown that followed — Spain's deepest constitutional crisis since 1978.
19. 1956 Born: Theresa May Second female UK Prime Minister; tried and failed to deliver Brexit through Parliament.
20. 1537 Born: Lady Jane Grey Nine days' queen in 1553, deposed and beheaded as a Protestant pretender.
21. 1529 The Marburg Colloquy splits the reformers Philip of Hesse gathers Luther and Zwingli to unite the Protestant cause — and they agree on fourteen articles of fifteen, then break irreparably over the fifteenth: is Christ trul
22. 1932 British Union of Fascists founded Oswald Mosley launches the BUF on the Italian model — blackshirt uniforms, mass rallies, Rothermere's early press backing — peaking at perhaps 50,000 members before violence and wa