Events, Verisoph

July 1938 The Kamba resist forced destocking 0 cit. In 1938 the colonial government ordered the Kamba to sell off large numbers of cattle, claiming their herds were destroying the land. The Ukamba Members Association, led by Muindi Mbingu, organised protests and a march of around two thousand people who camped in Nairobi to demand a hearing. The campaign forced the government to back down, a rare early victory against colonial rule. economy / politics ●●

July 1938 Muindi Mbingu and the Ukamba destocking protest 6 cit. Samuel Muindi Mbingu led the Ukamba Members Association against a colonial policy that forced Kamba herders to sell off cattle the government judged to be surplus. In July 1938 he led about three thousand livestock owners on a march to Nairobi, where they camped in protest. The government arrested him in October and deported him to Lamu, but the pressure worked and compulsory destocking was dropped by the end of the year. He became a lasting figure of Kamba resistance. economy / politics ●●

1938 Moi moves through Kapsabet mission and government schooling 1 cit. By the late 1930s Moi had moved from Kabartonjo to Africa Inland Mission schooling at Kapsabet and then to Government African School at Kapsabet. This placed him inside both mission and colonial-government education rather than inside independent African schooling or the forest-resistance world. religion / society ●●

23 August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 0 cit. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression pact with a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe between them. politics ●●●●

1 September 1939 Invasion of Poland 0 cit. Germany invades Poland; Britain and France declare war two days later. The Second World War begins in Europe. war ●●●●●

April 1939 Dividend increase permits required ai_extracted 1 cit. Beginning in April 1939, firms with dividend rates of 10 percent or more needed a Ministry of Finance permit to raise their dividend rate, making stock investment less attractive. ●●

1939 Hitler dismisses Schacht and nationalizes the Reichsbank ai_extracted 1 cit. In 1939 Hitler sacked Schacht as Reichsbank president after disagreements and took more direct control over the central bank through a new law; he nationalized the Reichsbank the same year. ●●●

January 1939 Reichsbank renamed and subordinated to the Reich government ai_extracted 1 cit. In January 1939 the Reichsbank Law was changed, renaming the bank the Deutsche Reichsbank and making it directly accountable and subordinate to the Reich government rather than private shareholders or the Reparations Commission. ●●●

22 May 1939 Pact of Steel 0 cit. Full military and political alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, committing each to join the other's wars. It bound Italy to Germany on the eve of the Second World War. diplomacy / politics / war ●●●

28 September 1939 German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty 0 cit. Treaty dividing conquered Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union after their September invasions, with secret protocols adjusting spheres of influence and pledging suppression of Polish resistance. It supplemented the earlier Nazi-Soviet pact. diplomacy / politics / war ●●

1 January 1939 Founding of Hewlett-Packard 0 cit. Bill Hewlett and David Packard formalize their partnership, working from a Palo Alto garage now marked as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. HP grows into a leading maker of instruments, computers, and printers. economy / technology ●●●

8 September 1939 Creation of the Executive Office of the President 0 cit. Following the Brownlow Committee's warning that the president needs help, Roosevelt's Executive Order 8248 creates the Executive Office of the President and moves the Budget Bureau into it. The modern institutional presidency, with its large White House staff, dates from this reorganization. politics ●●●

1 April 1939 Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War 0 cit. Francisco Franco declares victory over the Spanish Republic after three years of civil war fought with German and Italian support. His authoritarian regime rules Spain until his death in 1975. politics / war ●●●●

1 September 1939 to 1945 The Second World War and the Empire 0 cit. The empire again mobilized on a vast scale, but the war drained Britain's wealth and strength. Victory came at the cost of the resources and prestige needed to hold the empire together. war ●●●●●

17 September 1939 Soviet Invasion of Poland 0 cit. Following the secret protocol, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland weeks after Germany attacked from the west. The Soviets annexed the territory, including western Ukrainian and Belarusian lands. politics / war ●●●

30 November 1939 to 1940 Winter War with Finland 0 cit. The Soviet Union attacked Finland after it refused territorial demands, meeting fierce resistance and heavy Soviet losses. Finland ceded land in the peace but kept its independence. war ●●●

May 1939 The 1939 White Paper 0 cit. Britain's 1939 White Paper sharply limited Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. It angered the Zionist movement, especially as Jews sought refuge from Europe. politics ●●●

1 September 1939 to 1941 Nazi T4 program begins murdering disabled people 1 cit. Under the T4 "euthanasia" program, Nazi doctors murdered more than 70,000 disabled and mentally ill people they judged unworthy of life. The killing methods pioneered here were later used in the death camps. politics / science ●●●

1939 to 1945 Pius XII and the Church during the Second World War 0 cit. Pope Pius XII led the Church through the war and the Holocaust, avoiding open condemnation of Nazi genocide while the Vatican sheltered some refugees. His silence remains one of the most debated questions in modern Church history. politics / religion / war ●●●

21 March 1939 Transfer of Czechoslovak gold through the BIS 1 cit. After Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, the BIS acted on instructions to move gold held for the Czech National Bank into an account controlled by Germany's Reichsbank. The episode became the most documented controversy about the bank's wartime conduct. economy / politics / war ●●●●

20 January 1939 Schacht dismissed from the Reichsbank 0 cit. Hitler dismissed Schacht as Reichsbank President after he and the bank's directors warned that runaway military spending would bring inflation. His removal cleared the last check on financing the coming war. economy / politics ●●●

1939 Sanger launches the Negro Project 0 cit. In 1939 Sanger's organization began the Negro Project to expand birth control access in the segregated South, working with Black ministers and doctors. Her private writings about the effort are frequently quoted in later debates, sometimes accurately and sometimes out of context. politics / society ●●

1939 Occupation of Bohemia and Moravia as a turning point ai_extracted 1 cit. Quigley marks Germany's March 1939 occupation of Bohemia and Moravia as the point where the Milner Group turned against appeasement, while the Chamberlain group did not. ●●

1939 Nazi-Soviet pact and invasion of Poland ai_extracted 1 cit. Zuboff traces how just one week after propaganda whitewashed Stalin's regime, he signed a pact with Hitler, attacked Poland in September, and invaded Finland in November. ●●

c. 1939 German Rhodes Scholarships terminated 0 cit. The Rhodes Trust ended the German scholarships as the Second World War began, after the scheme had already been compromised by Nazi control over which German students were allowed to study abroad. The program was never revived after the war in its original form. Germany was only later reintegrated into the scholarship's list of eligible countries. diplomacy / war ●

1939 Duke of Kent becomes Grand Master, dies in wartime service 0 cit. Prince George, Duke of Kent, son of George V, became Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England in 1939. He continued to hold the office through the early part of the Second World War until his death in an air crash in Scotland in August 1942 while on active RAF service. His death ended a continuous run of royal Grand Masters that had lasted, with brief gaps, since the 18th century. society / war ●●

30 April 1939 New York World's Fair of 1939 0 cit. Built around the theme "The World of Tomorrow," this fair featured the Trylon and Perisphere and previewed television, nylon, and early concepts of highway-based suburban living to Depression-weary Americans. It opened four months before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, and several participating countries' pavilions closed early as the war began. culture / technology ●●

31 August 1939 Gleiwitz Incident 0 cit. SS operatives dressed as Polish soldiers staged an attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, leaving behind a murdered concentration camp prisoner dressed in a Polish uniform as fabricated evidence. Hitler cited the fake attack, along with a wider set of staged border incidents under Operation Himmler, as justification for invading Poland the next morning. The operation was confirmed by postwar testimony from SS officer Alfred Naujocks, who led it. diplomacy / war ●●●

26 November 1939 Mainila Shelling Incident 0 cit. Soviet artillery shelled the Soviet village of Mainila and the government publicly blamed Finland for the attack, despite Finnish forces having withdrawn their artillery out of range beforehand. The Soviet Union used the incident to renounce its non-aggression pact with Finland and launch the Winter War four days later. Soviet officials and archival records later confirmed the shelling was carried out by the Red Army itself. diplomacy / war ●●

1939 Hewlett-Packard is founded in a Palo Alto garage 0 cit. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, students of Stanford's Frederick Terman, started HP in a garage that is now treated as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. Wartime and Cold War military contracts for electronics gave the young company its first steady business. economy / technology / war ●●

1939 The Highlands Order in Council Seals the Preserve 0 cit. The Kenya (Highlands) Order in Council, made in 1938 and in force from 1939, at last gave the White Highlands the force of statute. It fixed the boundary of the reserved area and set up a Highlands Board controlling who could hold land there, formally barring Africans and Indians alike. The color bar on the best farmland was now written into imperial law, and it stood until the eve of independence. economy / politics ●●●

c. 1939 Reception and the book's later political life 0 cit. The book sold modestly at first and was read mainly by scholars, but it won respect as serious ethnography. In later years it became a foundational nationalist text, cited as evidence of a dignified African civilisation and of the land the settlers had taken. Its author's name, Jomo Kenyatta, became the name of a nation's leader. culture / politics ●●

March 1939 The Bank for International Settlements handles Reichsbank gold 1 cit. The Bank for International Settlements, the Basel clearing house owned by central banks, transferred gold belonging to Czechoslovakia to the German Reichsbank after Germany seized the country in 1939. During the war it went on accepting Reichsbank gold, some of it looted. The transactions later became a case study in how a neutral financial body kept dealing with the Reich. diplomacy / economy ●●●

4 November 1939 Cash and carry replaces the arms embargo 0 cit. The United States revises its Neutrality Acts to let warring nations buy American arms, but only if they pay in cash and carry the goods away in their own ships. The rule keeps America formally neutral while opening its factories to buyers with hard currency. For Britain and France it means every rifle and aircraft must be paid for up front in dollars or gold. diplomacy / economy / war ●●●

c. 1939 Mbiyu Koinange and the independent schools 0 cit. Mbiyu Koinange, a son of Senior Chief Koinange, studied in the United States and Britain and came home to build African-run education outside the mission system. Around 1939 he helped found the Kenya Teachers College at Githunguri, a center of the independent schools movement. During the emergency he worked abroad as a spokesman for the Kenya African Union and the detained leaders. After independence he became a close and powerful figure in Kenyatta's government. He died in 1981. culture / politics ●●

c. 1939 Kibaki starts mission schooling in colonial Nyeri 2 cit. As a child, Kibaki entered the Catholic mission school world around Karima and Gatuyaini in Nyeri. The Presidential Library account says missionaries from Karima Mission were recruiting boys for schooling and that Kibaki was nominated by his father. This was the first institutional step in the route from rural Othaya into colonial-era education networks. religion / society ●●●

27 September 1940 Tripartite Pact wikidata 0 cit. treaty establishing the Axis Powers of World War Two ●●●

10 May 1940 to 25 June 1940 Fall of France 0 cit. Germany conquers the Low Countries and France in six weeks; the British army escapes at Dunkirk without its equipment. war ●●●●

10 July 1940 to 31 October 1940 Battle of Britain 0 cit. The RAF denies the Luftwaffe air superiority; the planned invasion of Britain is shelved. war ●●●●

1940 Proclamation of the New Economic Order ai_extracted 1 cit. In 1940 the Konoe cabinet proclaimed the New Economic Order, composed of a New Financial System, a New Fiscal Policy, and a New Labor System, as Japan approached entry into World War II. ●●●●

1940 Industrial Standardization Law ai_extracted 1 cit. The Industrial Standardization Law of 1940 set norms and standards rigorously enforced by the military, making quality control a lasting feature of Japanese manufacturing. ●●

1940 to 1950 Wartime switch to bank funding ai_extracted 1 cit. Between 1940 and 1950 Japanese firms radically switched their external funding from the stock market to bank borrowing, which averaged 60 percent of liabilities versus 40 percent equity; bank financing predominance persisted until the late 1980s. ●●●

16 September 1940 First Peacetime Draft: The Selective Service System 0 cit. With war spreading in Europe and Asia, Congress passes the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime conscription law in American history. The Selective Service System registers tens of millions of men through World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. society / war ●●

1 March 1940 Franco's Spain represses Freemasonry 0 cit. Franco's regime passed the Law for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism in 1940, making membership a crime. Many Spanish Freemasons were imprisoned, exiled, or executed. politics / religion ●●

16 September 1940 First peacetime draft under the Selective Service Act 0 cit. Congress passed the first peacetime conscription law in US history as war spread in Europe and Asia. It built the mass army the country used in the Second World War. politics / war ●●

1940 to 1945 Krupp uses forced and slave labour in the Second World War 0 cit. During the Second World War Krupp used tens of thousands of prisoners of war, forced labourers and concentration camp inmates in its plants. Conditions were often brutal and many workers died. society / war ●●●●

2 September 1940 The destroyers-for-bases deal ties Britain to American support 0 cit. The United States gave Britain fifty aging destroyers in exchange for 99-year leases on bases in British Atlantic and Caribbean territories. The deal traded imperial real estate for American aid as Britain stood nearly alone against Germany. politics / war ●

1 January 1940 to 1945 The BIS keeps operating under wartime pressure 1 cit. With American Thomas McKittrick as president, the BIS stayed open throughout World War II while much of its board and business were tied to Axis powers. Critics later charged that it handled looted gold and served German interests, while defenders said it preserved a neutral channel among central banks. economy / politics / war ●●●●

7 September 1940 The Blitz bombing campaign against Britain 0 cit. The Luftwaffe shifted from targeting RAF airfields to sustained night bombing of London and other British cities, killing over 40,000 civilians before the campaign wound down in mid-1941. The bombing was intended to break British morale and force surrender, but it failed to do so and instead hardened public resolve. The Blitz became a defining example of strategic bombing aimed at civilian populations. war ●●

c. 1940 Kwame Nkrumah is initiated into Prince Hall Freemasonry unproven 0 cit. Kwame Nkrumah, later the first president of Ghana, was initiated into Prince Hall Freemasonry while a student in the United States between 1935 and 1945. The precise date is not well pinned down in available sources, so it is marked approximate, but the initiation itself is recorded in histories of Freemasonry in Ghana and Prince Hall Masonic scholarship, distinguishing it from the unverified claims made about other African leaders below. politics / society ●●

c. 20 January 1940 Bletchley Park breaks Enigma traffic 0 cit. Codebreakers at the Government Code and Cypher School's wartime station, Bletchley Park, achieved their first sustained breaks into German Enigma-encrypted traffic, building on earlier Polish cryptanalytic work. The resulting decrypted intelligence, codenamed Ultra, gave Allied commanders access to German military communications for the rest of the war. Historians credit Ultra with shortening the war, though its full extent stayed classified until the 1970s. technology / war ●●●

16 September 1940 National Guard federalized before World War II 0 cit. As war spread in Europe and Asia, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, and President Roosevelt ordered the entire National Guard, about 300,000 soldiers, into a year of federal active duty starting that month. Guard divisions such as the 34th 'Red Bull' Division later fought in North Africa and Italy, and other Guard units fought across the Pacific. The 1940 mobilization gave the Regular Army a badly needed trained cadre well before Pearl Harbor. war ●●●

1940 Banning of the Kikuyu Central Association 0 cit. In 1940 the colonial government proscribed the Kikuyu Central Association and several allied bodies, arresting leaders and using wartime emergency powers against African political organising. The ban showed how readily the state moved from surveillance to suppression. Driven underground, the grievances the association voiced fed into later, harder resistance. politics ●●

1940 Sengier ships Congolese uranium to New York 0 cit. Edgar Sengier, a director of Union Miniere, foresaw war and had roughly 1,200 tons of high-grade Shinkolobwe uranium ore shipped to New York, where it sat in a warehouse on Staten Island. In 1942 he sold it to the United States Army for the secret atomic bomb program. The ore was far richer than American or Canadian sources, and its origin in a Belgian colony was kept quiet. economy / technology / war ●●●

August 1940 Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee in Marseille 0 cit. The Emergency Rescue Committee sends journalist Varian Fry to Vichy France, where he helps thousands of artists, writers and intellectuals escape the Nazis, among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall and Max Ernst. Fry worked with forged papers and secret mountain routes into Spain. The committee later merged with the International Relief Association. culture / politics / war ●●●

1940 Roosevelt's order builds a classification machine 0 cit. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8381, the first presidential order to set rules for classifying government information. It gave the marking system a legal footing rooted in the president's own authority rather than an act of Congress. From here the American secrecy regime would grow through a chain of executive orders, each rewriting the last. politics / war ●●

14 May 1940 Britain forms the Local Defence Volunteers 0 cit. As German forces overran France and invasion loomed, War Secretary Anthony Eden called by radio for men not in the army to enrol as Local Defence Volunteers. Within weeks hundreds of thousands had signed up, many too old or too young for regular service. The force was meant to watch the coast and countryside and to slow any German landing until the army could respond. society / war ●●●

July 1940 The Local Defence Volunteers are renamed the Home Guard 0 cit. Churchill pressed for a stronger name, and the Local Defence Volunteers became the Home Guard. Membership passed a million men and later reached about 1.5 million. At first they were badly short of weapons, drilling with shotguns, pikes and improvised gear until arms arrived from Britain and the United States. society / war ●●

c. 1940 Farm Labour in Wartime Sussex 0 cit. Through the Second World War Kenyatta lived in the English countryside, working as an agricultural labourer on a farm at Storrington in Sussex and lecturing on Africa for the Workers' Educational Association and to British troops. The years among ordinary English working people, far from colonial officialdom, deepened his ease in Britain. He kept up his political writing and contacts with other anti-colonial activists throughout. economy / society ●

1940 The Kikuyu Central Association Is Banned at the Outbreak of War 3 cit. In 1940, as the Second World War began, the colonial government banned the Kikuyu Central Association along with the Ukamba Members Association and the Taita Hills Association, citing security fears, and detained several of its leaders. With Kenyatta away in Britain and its main African political vehicle outlawed, organized Kikuyu politics was pushed underground for the duration of the war. The ban left the government chiefs and the mission-aligned elite as the recognized African voices, strengthening the loyalist establishment just as grievances over land and labour were sharpening. politics / society / war ●●

c. 1940 Kenyans Fight in the King's African Rifles 0 cit. Tens of thousands of Kenyan Africans served in the King's African Rifles during the Second World War, first in the East African campaign that drove the Italians from Somaliland and Ethiopia, then in the brutal jungle fighting against Japan in Burma. They fought alongside white soldiers, saw the wider world, and learned that colonial rule was neither universal nor invincible. The estimated hundred thousand or so Kenyans who served came home with new skills, expectations, and a sharpened sense of the injustice they had left behind. society / war ●●●

c. 1940 The 1940 age-set and wartime conscription 0 cit. The name Anake a 40, the Young Men of 40, points to the year 1940. Among the Kikuyu, men initiated in the same period shared an age-set identity, and many of this cohort were drafted into the British colonial forces from 1940 as the Second World War spread. The shared year of service and initiation gave the group its name and a strong sense of common generation. society / war ●●

1940 The KCA is banned and goes underground 0 cit. The colonial government banned the Kikuyu Central Association in 1940, during the Second World War, treating it as a security risk. Driven underground, the association kept its members bound through secret oaths, which now held a network the state could not see. This underground oathing tradition carried the movement through the 1940s. When mass politics revived after the war, the oath was ready to hand. politics / society ●●

1940 Fabian Imperialism and the Colonial Bureau 0 cit. The Fabians who founded the LSE were, in the early twentieth century, socialist imperialists: their 1900 manifesto Fabianism and the Empire rejected abrupt decolonization in favour of a reformed, efficient empire. In 1940 the Fabian Society set up the Fabian Colonial Bureau, led substantially by Rita Hinden, which strongly shaped the Attlee government's colonial policy and the gradualist, managed path to independence that favoured moderate, constitutional successors over radicals. Historians cite this Fabian tradition of permeation and managed decolonization as a documented mechanism by which the metropole helped shape a compatible post-colonial elite. politics / society ●●

January 1940 Mao Zedong publishes On New Democracy 0 cit. Mao set out a model of revolution led by a communist party but rooted in the peasantry and aimed first at foreign domination and landlordism. His stress on rural guerrilla struggle in a poor, mostly agrarian country spoke to conditions across the colonized world more directly than Soviet industrial doctrine. Historians credit the Maoist model with shaping liberation movements from Asia to Africa. politics / war ●●

25 July 1940 General Guisan's Rütli Report and the National Redoubt 0 cit. After the fall of France left Switzerland fully surrounded by the Axis, General Henri Guisan gathered his officers at the Rütli meadow, the Confederation's founding site, and set out a plan to withdraw the army into an Alpine fortress and fight on if invaded. The National Redoubt aimed to make conquering Switzerland more costly than it was worth. The stance is often cited as armed neutrality, though the country's survival also owed much to its economic usefulness to Germany. war ●●

c. 1940 Britain ships its gold across the Atlantic 0 cit. To meet the cash-and-carry rule, Britain sends gold and dollar securities across the Atlantic to pay for American supplies. Some shipments travel by warship under guard. The purchases keep the war going but steadily drain the reserves the country needs to buy anything from abroad. economy / war ●●●

December 1940 Britain's reserves near exhaustion 0 cit. By late 1940 Britain's gold and dollar reserves are close to running out. The Treasury warns that the country can no longer pay cash for the American arms it depends on. Churchill puts the problem directly to President Roosevelt, saying Britain will soon be unable to pay in full for shipping and supplies. diplomacy / economy / war ●●●

c. 1940 American Viscose, Courtaulds' prize in America 0 cit. The American Viscose Corporation is the United States rayon business owned by the British textile firm Courtaulds. It is highly profitable and one of the most valuable British-owned companies in America. As Britain's dollars run low, this healthy overseas asset becomes a target for sale to raise cash. economy ●●

c. 1940 Britain liquidates its American investments 0 cit. Through 1940 and 1941 the British government requisitions and sells off British-owned direct investments in the United States to raise dollars. Company after company held by British owners is cashed in to pay for the war. The policy strips Britain of the overseas holdings that had underpinned its financial strength for decades. economy / war ●●●

c. 1940 More gold leaves the country 0 cit. Alongside the sale of companies, Britain keeps shipping gold abroad to settle its bills. Reserves that took generations to build are handed over in a matter of months. The critic Andrew Boyle and others later called this stretch the selling of the family silver, the disposal of the nation's accumulated wealth to stay in the fight. economy / war ●●

c. 1940 Yaaku stigmatised as il-torrobo 2 cit. Even after adopting Maasai ways, the Mukogodo were looked down on by Maasai and Samburu as il-torrobo, a slur for hunter-gatherers without cattle. The stigma of their foraging past shaped marriage, status, and belonging. It pressed many to distance themselves from the old identity. society ●

22 June 1941 Operation Barbarossa 0 cit. Germany invades the Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometre front, the largest invasion in history. war ●●●●●

7 December 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor 0 cit. Japan strikes the US Pacific Fleet; the United States enters the war, and Germany declares war on America four days later. war ●●●●●

14 August 1941 Atlantic Charter 0 cit. Joint declaration by Roosevelt and Churchill setting out principles for the postwar world, including self-determination and freer trade. It became a founding reference for the United Nations. diplomacy / politics / war ●●●

1941 Gershom Scholem founds academic Kabbalah studies 0 cit. With Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem established the scholarly study of Kabbalah as a serious field of history. His research reshaped how both scholars and the public understood the tradition. religion / science ●●●●

8 September 1941 to 1944 Siege of Leningrad 0 cit. German and Finnish forces encircled Leningrad for nearly 900 days, cutting off food and fuel. Hundreds of thousands of residents died, most from starvation, before the blockade was broken. society / war ●●●●

1941 to 1945 The Holocaust 1 cit. Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million European Jews during the Second World War. The genocide became a central argument for Jewish statehood. society / war ●●●●●

11 March 1941 The Lend-Lease Act makes Britain dependent on American supply 0 cit. Lend-Lease let the United States ship arms, food, and materiel to Britain and other allies without immediate payment, keeping them in the war. It deepened Britain's reliance on American industry and finance and hastened the shift in global leadership. economy / war ●●●

14 August 1941 The Atlantic Charter sets Anglo-American war aims 0 cit. Churchill and Roosevelt met at sea and issued a joint statement of principles for the postwar world, including self-determination and free trade. Its call for self-determination pointed toward the eventual dismantling of empires, including Britain's. politics / war ●●

c. 1941 Parsons is initiated into the Ordo Templi Orientis 0 cit. Parsons joined the Agape Lodge, the California branch of Aleister Crowley's occult order the Ordo Templi Orientis. He embraced Crowley's religion of Thelema and its motto, Do what thou wilt. religion ●●●

c. August 1941 Parsons helps invent jet-assisted takeoff rockets 0 cit. Parsons developed solid propellants for JATO units that gave overloaded aircraft extra thrust on takeoff. The successful flight tests proved the military value of the Caltech group's work. science / war ●●●

July 1941 Hubbard is commissioned as a US Navy officer in World War II 0 cit. Hubbard served as a naval officer during the war, later greatly embellishing his wartime record. His actual service was modest and marked by disputed command incidents. war ●●

25 June 1941 Executive Order 8802 bans discrimination in defense industry 0 cit. President Franklin Roosevelt signed an order banning racial discrimination in the defense industry and federal government, issued under pressure from a threatened March on Washington led by labor leader A. Philip Randolph. It created the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce the policy. It was the first federal action against employment discrimination since Reconstruction. economy / politics ●●

2 January 1941 XX Committee runs the Double-Cross System 0 cit. MI5 stood up the Twenty (XX) Committee to coordinate the Double-Cross System, under which nearly every German agent sent to Britain was identified, captured, and turned into a double agent feeding false information back to German intelligence. The system fed deception operations through the war, including the D-Day deception plan Fortitude. It is regarded as one of MI5's major wartime successes. politics / war ●●●

14 August 1941 The Atlantic Charter sketches a postwar world 0 cit. Meeting aboard warships off Newfoundland, Roosevelt and Churchill set out shared aims for the world after the war, including the right of peoples to choose their own government. The term United Nations was first used soon after for the wartime alliance against the Axis. The charter's language of self-determination would echo through the decolonization decades, even as its authors still ruled vast empires. diplomacy / politics ●●

1941 to 1945 The Holocaust destroys the Ashkenazi heartland 1 cit. Nazi Germany's murder of six million Jews fell hardest on the Ashkenazi heartland of Eastern Europe. Mobile killing units and death camps in occupied Poland wiped out the great communities of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus, in some countries killing about nine in ten Jews. This is a shared chapter in the wider story of the Holocaust, but its epicenter was the Yiddish-speaking world. politics / society / war ●●●

1941 Gershom Scholem revives the study of Kabbalah 0 cit. With Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem overturned the rationalist dismissal of Kabbalah and established it as a serious field of history. His scholarship restored the mystical tradition to the center of the Jewish story and reframed the long dialogue between reason and mysticism. religion / science ●●●

c. 1941 The Home Guard's real role behind the Dad's Army image 0 cit. Popular memory, fixed later by the television comedy Dad's Army, pictures the Home Guard as bumbling old men. The record is more serious: they guarded key sites, manned anti-aircraft and coastal batteries, and were meant to fight delaying actions against paratroops and invasion. Historians note the force freed regular troops for other duties and would have faced heavy losses had Germany landed. society / war ●●

January 1941 The Murder of Lord Erroll 0 cit. In January 1941 Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Erroll and a leading Happy Valley figure, was found shot dead in his car outside Nairobi. Sir Jock Delves Broughton, whose wife had been Erroll's lover, was tried for the murder and acquitted, and the killing was never solved. The scandal exposed the tangled affairs of the settler elite to the world at the height of the war and became the most famous story of Happy Valley excess. culture / society ●

c. 1941 Olenguruone and the Spread of the Oath 8 cit. Squatters moved to the crowded Olenguruone settlement from 1941 refused the government's farming rules and bound themselves together with a mass oath of unity, an early form of the Mau Mau oath. Their long resistance ended in eviction and prosecution around 1950, but the practice of oathing whole communities spread from there into central Kenya. Many historians trace the militant, land-centred core of Mau Mau back to the squatters of Olenguruone. politics / society ●●●

c. 1941 The Squatters Resist at Olenguruone 0 cit. From 1941 the government resettled Kikuyu squatters evicted from settler farms at Olenguruone in the Rift Valley, but only as tenants bound to strict destocking and soil conservation rules, not as owners of the land they cleared. The settlers there refused to accept tenant status or the cultivation and stock limits, insisting the land was theirs, and their long standoff with the administration ran through the 1940s. Historians such as Tabitha Kanogo and Frank Furedi treat Olenguruone as the crucible where squatter grievance hardened into open, organized defiance of the colonial state. economy / politics / society ●●●

1941 Britain conquers Italian Somaliland in the war 0 cit. During the East African campaign of the Second World War, British and Commonwealth forces drove the Italians out and took over both Italian Somaliland and the Ogaden under military administration. For a time Britain governed most Somali lands together, and some British officials floated uniting them. Cold War and colonial rivalries killed the idea, and Italy returned to administer the south under a UN trusteeship. politics / war ●

5 May 1941 Liberation and the restoration of Haile Selassie 0 cit. British, Commonwealth, and Ethiopian patriot forces drove the Italians out during the East African campaign of the Second World War. Haile Selassie re-entered Addis Ababa five years to the day after he had fled, restored to his throne. The Italian occupation had lasted only about five years and was never fully secured against the patriot resistance in the countryside. politics / war ●●

March 1941 Lend-Lease keeps Britain in the war at a price 0 cit. With British cash reserves nearly exhausted, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, letting the United States supply arms and goods without immediate payment. The aid kept Britain fighting, but Washington first pressed Britain to spend down its dollar reserves and sell overseas assets, and it used its leverage to push for opening the closed markets of the British Empire. diplomacy / economy / war ●●●

c. 1941 Britain liquidates its overseas assets to pay for war 0 cit. To buy American supplies before Lend-Lease, Britain sold off large parts of its foreign investment portfolio, including the forced sale of the American Viscose company at a low price. The dismantling of the overseas assets built up over a century stripped Britain of the invisible earnings that had long balanced its books. economy / war ●●

July 1941 Banda re-qualifies as a doctor in Edinburgh 0 cit. Because his American degree is not accepted in the British Empire, Banda moves to Scotland and studies for the Scottish triple conjoint diploma. In July 1941 he is awarded licentiates of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons of Edinburgh and Glasgow, gaining the right to practice as a doctor across British territory. He is now both American-trained and British-qualified. society ●●

1941 Kimathi enlists briefly with the King's African Rifles ai_extracted 1 cit. In 1941 Kimathi joined the King's African Rifles as a sweeper. He deserted soon after, put off by the poor conditions endured by African troops, and his short service was confined to Kenya. ●

1941 Freedom House and the Freedom in the World survey 0 cit. Freedom House, founded in New York in 1941, is a US-based organization that rates political rights and civil liberties worldwide in its annual Freedom in the World report. Most of its budget comes from the US government. Its rankings are widely cited, and its role has drawn the same debate as NED over US-funded advocacy. politics / society ●●

c. 1941 The Swiss National Bank buys looted Nazi gold 2 cit. Through the war the Swiss National Bank bought well over a billion francs of gold from Germany's Reichsbank, providing hard currency that helped Germany pay for war materials. Much of that gold had been looted from the central banks of occupied countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, and some came from the possessions of Holocaust victims. In the 1946 Washington Agreement Switzerland paid 250 million francs to the Allies without admitting wrongdoing; historians divide over whether the trade was active complicity or the pragmatism of a cornered small state. economy / war ●●●