1905 Society

Society

1905. A Russian revolution begins. Peasants seize their landlords' land, crops, and livestock.

1905. Russian sailors aboard the armored cruiser Potemkin mutiny in July at Odessa, a general strike is called in October and on October 17 Nicholas II is obliged to grant a constitution, establish a parliament (Duma), and grant civil liberties to placate the people.


1905. V.I. Lenin returns from exile. The czar withdraws his concessions one by one; the revolt begun December 9 under the leadership of the Moscow Soviet is bloodily repressed by Christmas.

1905. New pogroms begin in Russia. Terrorists of the anti-Semitic "Black Hundreds" will kill an estimated 50,000 Jews by 1909.

1905. English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst begins propagandizing her cause with sensationalist methods that will include arson, bombing, hunger strikes, and window smashing.

1905. "Sensible and responsible women do not want to to vote," writes former president Grover Cleveland in the April Ladies' Home Journal.

1905. The Wright brothers improve their flying machine of 1903 to the point where they can fly a full circle of 24.5 miles in 38 minutes, a feat they demonstrate at Dayton, Ohio.

1905. Swiss theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, 26, at Bern, publishes a paper on the special theory of relativity that revises traditionally held Newtonian views of space and time.

1905. German surgeon Heinrich Braun introduces Novocain into clinical use.

1905. Compulsory vaccination laws are upheld by the Supreme Court which rules in the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts that enacting and enforcing such laws is within the police power of any state.

L.C. Smith & Brothers sells its first typewriter to the New York Tribune for the paper's newsroom. The Syracuse, NY, firm will for years be the largest producer of typewriters. In 1995, they will file for bankruptcy, the victim of changing technology--the computer and word processing.

1905. Les Fauves create a sensation at the Salon d' Automne in Paris with paintings that free color to speak with new and unprecedented intensity. Artists who include Henri Matisse are called by critic Louis Vauxcelles "wild bests."

1905. Isadora Duncan, 27, opens a dancing school for children at Berlin. The U.S. dancer has developed a spontaneous style that tries to synthesize music, poetry and elements of nature.

1895. "Claire de Lune" by Claude Debussy is published as part of a suite for piano.

1905. Popular songs: "Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie"; "May Gal Sal or They Called Her Frivolous Sal"; "Daddy's Little Girl"; "In MY Merry Oldsmobile"; "I Don't Care"; "In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree."

1905. Ty Cobb signs with the Detroit Tigers to begin an outstanding baseball career.

1905. The Massachusetts legislature rejects a bill that would require patent medicine bottles to carry labels showing their ingredients.

1905. Upton Sinclair exposes U.S. meat-packing conditions in The Jungle. The 308-page best seller has eight pages devoted to such matters as casual meat inspection, lamb and mutton that is really goat meat, deviled ham that is really red-dyed minced tripe, sausage that contains rats killed by poisoned bread, and lard that sometimes contains the remains of employees who have fallen into the boiling vats. Many readers turn vegetarian, sales of meat products fall off, and Congress is aroused.