What happened on 1 December?

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

1. 1914 Trench warfare on the Western Front (period) Stalemate in trenches from Switzerland to the Channel for nearly four years.
2. 1913 Ford's moving assembly line Ford's moving line cuts car assembly from twelve hours to ninety minutes, the template for 20th-century mass production.
3. 1991 Ukraine votes to leave the Soviet Union Ninety-two per cent of Ukrainians — with majorities in every region, Crimea included — vote for independence. Without Ukraine there is no union worth the name: a week later the lea
4. 1955 Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat A 42-year-old seamstress and NAACP secretary, ordered to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, quietly says no and is arrested. Four days later the city's Blac
5. 1847 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë's wild Yorkshire-moor novel of Heathcliff and Catherine.
6. 1872 Middlemarch George Eliot's panoramic novel of life in a provincial English town.
7. 1991 Ukrainian independence referendum 92% vote for independence; Ukraine becomes sovereign.
8. 1918 Kingdom of Yugoslavia The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929) unites the South Slavs under the Serbian crown — a state riven from birth by the Serb-Croat question.
9. 1860 Dickens's Great Expectations Bildungsroman of Pip, Estella, and the convict Magwitch.
10. 1516 More's Utopia Thomas More's Latin satire of an ideal commonwealth.
11. 1641 Parliament passes the Grand Remonstrance By just eleven votes, the Long Parliament presents Charles I with a catalogue of every grievance of his reign — and prints it for the public, an unheard-of appeal to the nation ove
12. 1959 Antarctic Treaty Twelve nations set Antarctica aside for peace and science, banning military activity on an entire continent.
13. 1998 Pamuk's My Name Is Red Orhan Pamuk's metafictional Ottoman mystery; central to his Nobel-winning oeuvre.
14. 1934 Murder of Sergei Kirov The assassination of a Politburo leader gives Stalin a pretext to begin mass repression.
15. 1948 Costa Rica abolishes its army Victorious junta leader José Figueres symbolically sledgehammers the walls of the Bella Vista barracks and abolishes the Costa Rican army, diverting military spending to education