Anniversaries mark the passage of time, recall our triumphs, and honor our losses. Two thousand twenty-four witnessed many significant anniversaries: the tenth anniversary of Russia’s seizure of Crimea, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of NATO, and the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the First Continental Congress to name a few. Two thousand twenty-five will also see milestone anniversaries of significant historical events. Here are ten to note:
The Centennial of Benito Mussolini’s Assumption of Dictatorial Powers, January 3, 1925. Dictators sometimes come to power through the ballot box. Benito Mussolini began his political career as an ardent socialist. He was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party, however, after he broke with the party’s pacifism and backed Italy’s entrance into World War I. He responded by abandoning socialism and forming a new political movement that eventually became the National Fascist Party. Mussolini championed a revolutionary nationalism that blamed Italy’s many economic and political challenges in the wake of World War I on socialists, communists, unionists, and other groups. In his rise to power, he relied heavily on the paramilitary blackshirts to beat and intimidate opponents. In 1921, Mussolini won election to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies. The next year, he led a march on Rome to force the resignation of Italy’s prime minister. Mussolini’s bid for power succeeded. The prime minister resigned and Italy’s king named Mussolini to the post. Over the next two years, he revamped Italy’s election laws and consolidated his hold on power. Even so, some of his followers thought he was moving too slowly to crush his opponents and enact his political promises. On December 31, 1924, they threatened to abandon him unless he acted. He did. On January 3, he delivered a speech to the Chamber of Deputies assuming dictatorial powers. Il Duce ruled for two decades before being captured and executed by Italian partisans as his government collapsed following the Allied invasion of Italy.
More on:
The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Announcement That the United States Will Develop a Hydrogen Bomb, January 31, 1950. One lesson of history is that technology progresses even when people wish it did not. The United States emerged from World War II as the only nuclear-armed country. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 were fission weapons that produced an explosion by slamming a neutron into a larger atom. But scientists knew that the power unleashed by that reaction paled in comparison to the force unleashed by forcing atomic nuclei to combine. The question was whether the United States should build the so-called superbomb. Edward Teller, who did pathbreaking work on the concept of a fusion weapon as part of the Manhattan Project, argued for it. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project, argued against it. The discovery in September 1949 that the Soviet Union had detonated its own atomic bomb forced the issue. Oppenheimer chaired a committee that recommended against developing a hydrogen bomb. Rather than accept the recommendation, President Harry Truman convened another committee that made the opposite recommendation. He immediately announced that he had directed “the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.” The United States detonated “Mike,” the world’s first hydrogen bomb, on November 1, 1952. The advantage that the United States gained was fleeting. The Soviet Union tested its first crude hydrogen bomb nine months later. The U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race was on.
The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Claim That Communists Had Infiltrated the State Department, February 9, 1950. A speech can change the national political conversation, and not always in a good way. Take Joe McCarthy’s address to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He was starting his fourth year of a Senate tenure that had been decidedly undistinguished; the Senate press corps had voted him “the worst U.S. senator.” But that night in Wheeling, McCarthy leveled an incendiary charge: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [people] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” The accusation struck a chord with Americans even though the number of communists McCarthy cited changed with every speech he gave. Communism was on the march in 1950—just months before the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb and Mao Zedong had seized power in China. A few brave leaders like Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine criticized the Wisconsin demagogue for leveling charges without providing evidence. But most politicians, including Dwight D. Eisenhower when he ran for president, curried favor with McCarthy. He did not get his comeuppance until 1954, when the army’s chief lawyer asked during a television hearing: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Decades later, “McCarthyism” remains a stain on American democracy.
The Two-Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775. All revolutions begin with a single act that changes everything. In the case of the American Revolution, that act might just be what happened in Lexington and Concord, some fifteen miles west of Boston, on the morning of April 19, 1775. Agitation had been growing in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for years over England’s ham-handed efforts to force the colonists to pay for the cost of the Seven Years’, or French and Indian, War. Fed up with the resistance he faced from the locals, British General Thomas Gage ordered seven hundred British Army regulars to set out from Boston at night to arrest leading dissidents Samuel Adams and John Hancock in Lexington and to capture weapons that the colonists had stockpiled in Concord. The colonists caught wind of the move. Paul Revere and others rode to warn the countryside that the British were coming. Revere arrived in time to warn Adams and Hancock. British troops exchanged their first shots with the local militiamen, known as the Minutemen, at dawn on Lexington Green. The Minutemen then fell back to Concord, where the two sides exchanged further gunfire. The British troops eventually retreated to Boston, with the Minutemen firing at them along the way. The “shot heard round the world” was followed up two months later at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British won a tactical victory but suffered heavy losses, thereby inspiring the colonists. The American Revolution had begun.
The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975. Wars can begin with dreams of glory and end in ignominy. When President Lyndon Johnson sent the first U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam in March 1965, few Americans understood that they were entering a war that would leave a lasting scar on American politics. South Vietnamese schoolgirls met the arriving Marines and placed garlands of flowers around their necks. Rather than quickly rout the Viet Cong rebels, the United States found itself drawn deeper and deeper into the war. By 1968, it had nearly 550,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. Johnson began peace negotiations in 1968 in the wake of the Tet Offensive, which showed that a battlefield victory was not imminent. The negotiations dragged on, however, even as Richard Nixon became president and escalated U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. A deal was finally reached in January 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and required North Vietnam to release all American prisoners of war. The accords did not, however, guarantee the political integrity of South Vietnam, the reason the United States had fought, and North Vietnamese troops remained in the country. That proved pivotal. In March 1975, North Vietnam launched an offensive that quickly overran South Vietnamese forces. The collapse of South Vietnam’s government triggered a chaotic withdrawal from Saigon as helicopters landed at the U.S. embassy in 10-minute intervals, evacuating over 7,000 people in less than 24 hours. The second Indochina War was over.
The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Start of the Cambodian Genocide, April 17, 1975. Spillover effects. Social scientists use that bloodless term to highlight how events in one place have unintended effects elsewhere. Sometimes those unintended effects are catastrophic. The United States and North Vietnam fought a war over South Vietnam that destabilized neighboring Cambodia and facilitated one of the worst genocides in history. North Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in April 1970, attacking the U.S.-backed government and handing the territory they gained over the Cambodian Communist Party, better known as the Khmer Rouge. It was led by Saloth Sâr or, as history knows him, Pol Pot. The United States responded by bombing eastern Cambodia and then temporarily invading it. The move backfired by encouraging many Cambodians to rally around the Khmer Rouge. The group grew in power and captured Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, on April 17, 1975. Pol Pot closed the country’s borders and declared the creation of a classless agrarian society. The result was “the killing fields” as the Khmer Rouge systematically killed people deemed unfit for the new communist utopia. Some two million Cambodians, or about a quarter of the country’s population, died under Pol Pot’s rule. In 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and toppled the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot evaded capture, with China and Thailand at times giving him refuge. He died in his sleep in 1998 in the jungles of northern Cambodia, nearly twenty-three years to the day after Khmer Rouge forces marched into Phnom Penh. Cambodia marks May 20 as the Day of Remembrance for the genocide.
More on:
The Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Start of the Korean War, June 25, 1950. The term “Cold War” is a misnomer. The U.S.-Soviet superpower competition saw many “hot” wars. The first was in Korea. The Soviet Union entered the war in the Pacific against Japan in August 1945 at the urging of the United States. The Soviets seized control of Korea, which Japan had ruled since 1910, north of the 38th parallel. The United States controlled the territory to the south. The two powers failed to agree on a unification plan and set up rival governments. Faced with multiple flashpoints around the world, South Korea was a low priority for the United States. On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson told the National Press Club that America’s defense perimeter in east Asia covered Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. He failed to mention South Korea. But it became the priority for U.S. foreign policy five months later when North Korea invaded. President Harry Truman decided immediately that he could not allow North Korea to succeed: “If we let [South] Korea down, the Soviet[s] will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another.” Combat lasted for three years, saw China intervene in November 1950 on North Korea’s side, highlighted the limits of the United Nations, cemented the U.S. policy of containment, greatly expanded presidential power, and killed millions. The July 1953 armistice left the border between the two countries roughly the same as when the war began. The world continues to deal with the consequences.
The Two-Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Birth of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, June 14, October 13, and November 10, 1775. The creation of a new country requires the creation of a military to defend and advance its interests. Even before the United States declared itself independent of Great Britain in 1776, the Continental Congress established three different military services. On June 14, 1775, the Continental Congress voted to create a Continental Army to oppose the occupying British forces. The next day, Congress unanimously named George Washington to command the newly formed army. Four months later, the Continental Congress voted to outfit two vessels with guns to intercept British ships. This legislation created the Continental Navy, the predecessor of today’s U.S. Navy. The following month, the Continental Congress passed a resolution calling for two battalions of Marines to be raised for service. These three services combined to defeat what was then the world’s most formidable military power and ensured America’s independence. Over the intervening two-and-a-half centuries, the United States has repeatedly called on all three services to defend its interests. From the beaches of Normandy to the seas around Midway to the shores of Tripoli, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Marine Corps have responded with honor and valor. Today the U.S. military consists of six services with more than 1.3 million active-duty personnel and nearly 800,000 National Guard and Reserves. They remain the gold standard of military forces around the globe.
The Tenth Anniversary of the Signing of the Iran Nuclear Deal, July 14, 2015. Deciding when a diplomatic agreement is “good enough” is one of the thorny problems of international relations. The battle over the agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear activities offers an example. Concerns that Iran was pursuing a clandestine nuclear program first surfaced in the early 2000s. The UN Security Council passed several resolutions demanding that Iran stop enriching uranium. Tehran ignored the demands. In 2009, President Barack Obama announced that Iran had built a secret enrichment facility. It took more than three years, however, before Iran agreed to negotiate with the P5+1—the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany. In November 2013, the two sides signed an interim agreement that traded sanctions relief for a pause in Iran’s nuclear activities. The more extensive Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was agreed to in July 2014. It limited Iran’s nuclear development activities for at most fifteen years. That, and that fact that the JCPOA said nothing about Iran’s ballistic missile program or its malign regional activities, triggered fierce opposition to the deal in the United States and the Persian Gulf. In 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA, believing that a policy of “maximum pressure” would force Tehran’s hand. It did not. Joe Biden sought to revive the JCPOA upon taking office in 2021. Those efforts went nowhere. Iran now appears capable of producing the material needed to build a nuclear weapon with two weeks’ notice.
The Tenth Anniversary of the Decision to Open Combat Roles in the U.S. Military to Women, December 13, 2015. In The Iliad, Hector dismissed his wife’s military advice with the comment: “War is men’s business.” That claim has never strictly been true. Throughout history, women have traveled with armies providing what today would be called logistical support and sometimes fighting. As the exploits of Queen Boudica battling Roman rule and Joan of Arc breaking the siege of Orléans attest, women have even led forces into battle. The inclusion of women in the U.S. military began to become more the norm than the exception in World War II when some 350,000 women served. The 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act formally allowed women to serve in the military. They were nonetheless still barred from serving in most military positions, including combat roles. Those barriers slowly eroded. During the Gulf War, more than 40,000 women servicemembers were deployed to combat zones, though they remained barred from combat. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order allowing women to serve everywhere in the military except for direct combat roles. That barrier gave way in 2015 when Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced that all combat roles in the U.S. military would be open to women. Today women account for 17.5 percent of U.S. servicemembers. Nonetheless, some critics, including secretary-of-defense nominee Pete Hegseth, argue that women should not be allowed to serve in combat. So the question of whether women will continue to serve in combat could be reopened.
Other anniversaries in 2025. January 7 marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine that killed twelve people. February 9 is the bicentennial of the vote by the U.S. House of Representatives to make John Quincy Adams president, triggering the claim that Adams had stuck “a corrupt bargain” with rival candidate Henry Clay to win the office. March 2 is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the conviction of Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist, for giving atomic weapon secrets to the Soviet Union. April 7 is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the completion of NSC-68, the top-secret report that laid the basis for the policy of militarized containment the United States followed in the Cold War. May 9 is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Schuman Declaration, which called for the creation of the organization that would eventually become the European Union. June 5 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the reopening of the Suez Canal, exactly eight years after it was closed by the 1967 Arab‐Israeli war. July 11 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Camp David Summit, an ambitious but ultimately failed attempt to strike a lasting agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. August 1 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Helsinki Accords, which led to the advancement of human rights in Central and Eastern Europe. September 30 marks the tenth anniversary of Russia’s intervention in Syria, which enabled Bashar al-Assad to re-consolidate his control over the country—at least for a time. October 12 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the suicide bombing of the USS Cole that killed seventeen U.S. sailors. November 1 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of two Puerto Rican nationalists attempting to assassinate President Harry S. Truman at the Blair House in Washington, DC. December 12 is the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Paris Agreement which looks to limit the global average temperature to 1.5 °C.
On the lighter side. January 1 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Y2K (Year 2000) Scare, when people around the world worried that their computers would stop working because they were not programmed to handle dates after December 31, 1999. February 1 is the tenth anniversary of the New England Patriots’ victory over the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX when Malcolm Butler intercepted a pass that the Seahawks inexplicably threw on the one-yard line in the final seconds of a game they seemed destined to win. March 31 is the fiftieth anniversary of UCLA defeating Kentucky 92-85, winning its tenth men’s national NCAA basketball championship in twelve seasons in what was legendary coach John Wooden’s last game. April 10 is the centennial of the publication of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the great novels of American literature. May 17 is the sesquicentennial of the first Kentucky Derby, when former enslaved person Oliver Lewis rode the thoroughbred Aristides to victory. June 20 is the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of Jaws, which is properly regarded as the first summer blockbuster movie. July 23 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of Tiger Woods’s victory at The Open Championship, which made him the youngest person to achieve a career Grand Slam in men’s professional golf. August 25 is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Bruce Springsteen’s third studio album, Born to Run, which provided an anthem for a generation. September 12 is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd’s ninth, and possibly best, studio album, Wish You Were Here. October 11 is the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Saturday Night Live, which became a television phenomenon. November 19 is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, one of the best movies of the 1970s. December 17 is the centennial of the publication of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, a classic of tale of ambition and social climbing gone wrong.
Oscar Berry, Max Fisher, and Stephen Stamas assisted in the preparation of this post.
Other posts in this series:
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2024
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2023
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2022
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2021
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2020
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2019
Ten Historical Anniversaries of Note in 2018
Ten Historical Anniversaries of Note in 2017
Ten Anniversaries to Note in 2025
Reuters/Bettmann Archive
Anniversaries mark the passage of time, recall our triumphs, and honor our losses. Two thousand twenty-four witnessed many significant anniversaries: the tenth anniversary of Russia’s seizure of Crimea, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of NATO, and the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the First Continental Congress to name a few. Two thousand twenty-five will also see milestone anniversaries of significant historical events. Here are ten to note:
The Centennial of Benito Mussolini’s Assumption of Dictatorial Powers, January 3, 1925. Dictators sometimes come to power through the ballot box. Benito Mussolini began his political career as an ardent socialist. He was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party, however, after he broke with the party’s pacifism and backed Italy’s entrance into World War I. He responded by abandoning socialism and forming a new political movement that eventually became the National Fascist Party. Mussolini championed a revolutionary nationalism that blamed Italy’s many economic and political challenges in the wake of World War I on socialists, communists, unionists, and other groups. In his rise to power, he relied heavily on the paramilitary blackshirts to beat and intimidate opponents. In 1921, Mussolini won election to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies. The next year, he led a march on Rome to force the resignation of Italy’s prime minister. Mussolini’s bid for power succeeded. The prime minister resigned and Italy’s king named Mussolini to the post. Over the next two years, he revamped Italy’s election laws and consolidated his hold on power. Even so, some of his followers thought he was moving too slowly to crush his opponents and enact his political promises. On December 31, 1924, they threatened to abandon him unless he acted. He did. On January 3, he delivered a speech to the Chamber of Deputies assuming dictatorial powers. Il Duce ruled for two decades before being captured and executed by Italian partisans as his government collapsed following the Allied invasion of Italy.
More on:
The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Announcement That the United States Will Develop a Hydrogen Bomb, January 31, 1950. One lesson of history is that technology progresses even when people wish it did not. The United States emerged from World War II as the only nuclear-armed country. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 were fission weapons that produced an explosion by slamming a neutron into a larger atom. But scientists knew that the power unleashed by that reaction paled in comparison to the force unleashed by forcing atomic nuclei to combine. The question was whether the United States should build the so-called superbomb. Edward Teller, who did pathbreaking work on the concept of a fusion weapon as part of the Manhattan Project, argued for it. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project, argued against it. The discovery in September 1949 that the Soviet Union had detonated its own atomic bomb forced the issue. Oppenheimer chaired a committee that recommended against developing a hydrogen bomb. Rather than accept the recommendation, President Harry Truman convened another committee that made the opposite recommendation. He immediately announced that he had directed “the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.” The United States detonated “Mike,” the world’s first hydrogen bomb, on November 1, 1952. The advantage that the United States gained was fleeting. The Soviet Union tested its first crude hydrogen bomb nine months later. The U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race was on.
The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Claim That Communists Had Infiltrated the State Department, February 9, 1950. A speech can change the national political conversation, and not always in a good way. Take Joe McCarthy’s address to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He was starting his fourth year of a Senate tenure that had been decidedly undistinguished; the Senate press corps had voted him “the worst U.S. senator.” But that night in Wheeling, McCarthy leveled an incendiary charge: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 [people] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” The accusation struck a chord with Americans even though the number of communists McCarthy cited changed with every speech he gave. Communism was on the march in 1950—just months before the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb and Mao Zedong had seized power in China. A few brave leaders like Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine criticized the Wisconsin demagogue for leveling charges without providing evidence. But most politicians, including Dwight D. Eisenhower when he ran for president, curried favor with McCarthy. He did not get his comeuppance until 1954, when the army’s chief lawyer asked during a television hearing: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Decades later, “McCarthyism” remains a stain on American democracy.
The Two-Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775. All revolutions begin with a single act that changes everything. In the case of the American Revolution, that act might just be what happened in Lexington and Concord, some fifteen miles west of Boston, on the morning of April 19, 1775. Agitation had been growing in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for years over England’s ham-handed efforts to force the colonists to pay for the cost of the Seven Years’, or French and Indian, War. Fed up with the resistance he faced from the locals, British General Thomas Gage ordered seven hundred British Army regulars to set out from Boston at night to arrest leading dissidents Samuel Adams and John Hancock in Lexington and to capture weapons that the colonists had stockpiled in Concord. The colonists caught wind of the move. Paul Revere and others rode to warn the countryside that the British were coming. Revere arrived in time to warn Adams and Hancock. British troops exchanged their first shots with the local militiamen, known as the Minutemen, at dawn on Lexington Green. The Minutemen then fell back to Concord, where the two sides exchanged further gunfire. The British troops eventually retreated to Boston, with the Minutemen firing at them along the way. The “shot heard round the world” was followed up two months later at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British won a tactical victory but suffered heavy losses, thereby inspiring the colonists. The American Revolution had begun.
The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975. Wars can begin with dreams of glory and end in ignominy. When President Lyndon Johnson sent the first U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam in March 1965, few Americans understood that they were entering a war that would leave a lasting scar on American politics. South Vietnamese schoolgirls met the arriving Marines and placed garlands of flowers around their necks. Rather than quickly rout the Viet Cong rebels, the United States found itself drawn deeper and deeper into the war. By 1968, it had nearly 550,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. Johnson began peace negotiations in 1968 in the wake of the Tet Offensive, which showed that a battlefield victory was not imminent. The negotiations dragged on, however, even as Richard Nixon became president and escalated U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. A deal was finally reached in January 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and required North Vietnam to release all American prisoners of war. The accords did not, however, guarantee the political integrity of South Vietnam, the reason the United States had fought, and North Vietnamese troops remained in the country. That proved pivotal. In March 1975, North Vietnam launched an offensive that quickly overran South Vietnamese forces. The collapse of South Vietnam’s government triggered a chaotic withdrawal from Saigon as helicopters landed at the U.S. embassy in 10-minute intervals, evacuating over 7,000 people in less than 24 hours. The second Indochina War was over.
The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Start of the Cambodian Genocide, April 17, 1975. Spillover effects. Social scientists use that bloodless term to highlight how events in one place have unintended effects elsewhere. Sometimes those unintended effects are catastrophic. The United States and North Vietnam fought a war over South Vietnam that destabilized neighboring Cambodia and facilitated one of the worst genocides in history. North Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in April 1970, attacking the U.S.-backed government and handing the territory they gained over the Cambodian Communist Party, better known as the Khmer Rouge. It was led by Saloth Sâr or, as history knows him, Pol Pot. The United States responded by bombing eastern Cambodia and then temporarily invading it. The move backfired by encouraging many Cambodians to rally around the Khmer Rouge. The group grew in power and captured Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, on April 17, 1975. Pol Pot closed the country’s borders and declared the creation of a classless agrarian society. The result was “the killing fields” as the Khmer Rouge systematically killed people deemed unfit for the new communist utopia. Some two million Cambodians, or about a quarter of the country’s population, died under Pol Pot’s rule. In 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and toppled the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot evaded capture, with China and Thailand at times giving him refuge. He died in his sleep in 1998 in the jungles of northern Cambodia, nearly twenty-three years to the day after Khmer Rouge forces marched into Phnom Penh. Cambodia marks May 20 as the Day of Remembrance for the genocide.
More on:
The Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Start of the Korean War, June 25, 1950. The term “Cold War” is a misnomer. The U.S.-Soviet superpower competition saw many “hot” wars. The first was in Korea. The Soviet Union entered the war in the Pacific against Japan in August 1945 at the urging of the United States. The Soviets seized control of Korea, which Japan had ruled since 1910, north of the 38th parallel. The United States controlled the territory to the south. The two powers failed to agree on a unification plan and set up rival governments. Faced with multiple flashpoints around the world, South Korea was a low priority for the United States. On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson told the National Press Club that America’s defense perimeter in east Asia covered Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. He failed to mention South Korea. But it became the priority for U.S. foreign policy five months later when North Korea invaded. President Harry Truman decided immediately that he could not allow North Korea to succeed: “If we let [South] Korea down, the Soviet[s] will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another.” Combat lasted for three years, saw China intervene in November 1950 on North Korea’s side, highlighted the limits of the United Nations, cemented the U.S. policy of containment, greatly expanded presidential power, and killed millions. The July 1953 armistice left the border between the two countries roughly the same as when the war began. The world continues to deal with the consequences.
The Two-Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Birth of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, June 14, October 13, and November 10, 1775. The creation of a new country requires the creation of a military to defend and advance its interests. Even before the United States declared itself independent of Great Britain in 1776, the Continental Congress established three different military services. On June 14, 1775, the Continental Congress voted to create a Continental Army to oppose the occupying British forces. The next day, Congress unanimously named George Washington to command the newly formed army. Four months later, the Continental Congress voted to outfit two vessels with guns to intercept British ships. This legislation created the Continental Navy, the predecessor of today’s U.S. Navy. The following month, the Continental Congress passed a resolution calling for two battalions of Marines to be raised for service. These three services combined to defeat what was then the world’s most formidable military power and ensured America’s independence. Over the intervening two-and-a-half centuries, the United States has repeatedly called on all three services to defend its interests. From the beaches of Normandy to the seas around Midway to the shores of Tripoli, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Marine Corps have responded with honor and valor. Today the U.S. military consists of six services with more than 1.3 million active-duty personnel and nearly 800,000 National Guard and Reserves. They remain the gold standard of military forces around the globe.
The Tenth Anniversary of the Signing of the Iran Nuclear Deal, July 14, 2015. Deciding when a diplomatic agreement is “good enough” is one of the thorny problems of international relations. The battle over the agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear activities offers an example. Concerns that Iran was pursuing a clandestine nuclear program first surfaced in the early 2000s. The UN Security Council passed several resolutions demanding that Iran stop enriching uranium. Tehran ignored the demands. In 2009, President Barack Obama announced that Iran had built a secret enrichment facility. It took more than three years, however, before Iran agreed to negotiate with the P5+1—the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany. In November 2013, the two sides signed an interim agreement that traded sanctions relief for a pause in Iran’s nuclear activities. The more extensive Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was agreed to in July 2014. It limited Iran’s nuclear development activities for at most fifteen years. That, and that fact that the JCPOA said nothing about Iran’s ballistic missile program or its malign regional activities, triggered fierce opposition to the deal in the United States and the Persian Gulf. In 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA, believing that a policy of “maximum pressure” would force Tehran’s hand. It did not. Joe Biden sought to revive the JCPOA upon taking office in 2021. Those efforts went nowhere. Iran now appears capable of producing the material needed to build a nuclear weapon with two weeks’ notice.
The Tenth Anniversary of the Decision to Open Combat Roles in the U.S. Military to Women, December 13, 2015. In The Iliad, Hector dismissed his wife’s military advice with the comment: “War is men’s business.” That claim has never strictly been true. Throughout history, women have traveled with armies providing what today would be called logistical support and sometimes fighting. As the exploits of Queen Boudica battling Roman rule and Joan of Arc breaking the siege of Orléans attest, women have even led forces into battle. The inclusion of women in the U.S. military began to become more the norm than the exception in World War II when some 350,000 women served. The 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act formally allowed women to serve in the military. They were nonetheless still barred from serving in most military positions, including combat roles. Those barriers slowly eroded. During the Gulf War, more than 40,000 women servicemembers were deployed to combat zones, though they remained barred from combat. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order allowing women to serve everywhere in the military except for direct combat roles. That barrier gave way in 2015 when Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced that all combat roles in the U.S. military would be open to women. Today women account for 17.5 percent of U.S. servicemembers. Nonetheless, some critics, including secretary-of-defense nominee Pete Hegseth, argue that women should not be allowed to serve in combat. So the question of whether women will continue to serve in combat could be reopened.
Other anniversaries in 2025. January 7 marks the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine that killed twelve people. February 9 is the bicentennial of the vote by the U.S. House of Representatives to make John Quincy Adams president, triggering the claim that Adams had stuck “a corrupt bargain” with rival candidate Henry Clay to win the office. March 2 is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the conviction of Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist, for giving atomic weapon secrets to the Soviet Union. April 7 is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the completion of NSC-68, the top-secret report that laid the basis for the policy of militarized containment the United States followed in the Cold War. May 9 is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Schuman Declaration, which called for the creation of the organization that would eventually become the European Union. June 5 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the reopening of the Suez Canal, exactly eight years after it was closed by the 1967 Arab‐Israeli war. July 11 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Camp David Summit, an ambitious but ultimately failed attempt to strike a lasting agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. August 1 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Helsinki Accords, which led to the advancement of human rights in Central and Eastern Europe. September 30 marks the tenth anniversary of Russia’s intervention in Syria, which enabled Bashar al-Assad to re-consolidate his control over the country—at least for a time. October 12 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the suicide bombing of the USS Cole that killed seventeen U.S. sailors. November 1 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of two Puerto Rican nationalists attempting to assassinate President Harry S. Truman at the Blair House in Washington, DC. December 12 is the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Paris Agreement which looks to limit the global average temperature to 1.5 °C.
On the lighter side. January 1 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Y2K (Year 2000) Scare, when people around the world worried that their computers would stop working because they were not programmed to handle dates after December 31, 1999. February 1 is the tenth anniversary of the New England Patriots’ victory over the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX when Malcolm Butler intercepted a pass that the Seahawks inexplicably threw on the one-yard line in the final seconds of a game they seemed destined to win. March 31 is the fiftieth anniversary of UCLA defeating Kentucky 92-85, winning its tenth men’s national NCAA basketball championship in twelve seasons in what was legendary coach John Wooden’s last game. April 10 is the centennial of the publication of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the great novels of American literature. May 17 is the sesquicentennial of the first Kentucky Derby, when former enslaved person Oliver Lewis rode the thoroughbred Aristides to victory. June 20 is the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of Jaws, which is properly regarded as the first summer blockbuster movie. July 23 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of Tiger Woods’s victory at The Open Championship, which made him the youngest person to achieve a career Grand Slam in men’s professional golf. August 25 is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Bruce Springsteen’s third studio album, Born to Run, which provided an anthem for a generation. September 12 is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Pink Floyd’s ninth, and possibly best, studio album, Wish You Were Here. October 11 is the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Saturday Night Live, which became a television phenomenon. November 19 is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, one of the best movies of the 1970s. December 17 is the centennial of the publication of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, a classic of tale of ambition and social climbing gone wrong.
Oscar Berry, Max Fisher, and Stephen Stamas assisted in the preparation of this post.
Other posts in this series:
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2024
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2023
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2022
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2021
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2020
Ten Historical Anniversaries to Note in 2019
Ten Historical Anniversaries of Note in 2018
Ten Historical Anniversaries of Note in 2017
