1900 (idea)

• The Boxer Rebellion erupts in northern China, as a anti-foreign society of destitute peasantry besieges foreign enclaves in Peking and Tientsin for three months with the tacit approval of the Manchu regime. The uprising is suppressed by a multi-national China Relief Expedition.
• The Boer War rages in South Africa. The tide begins to turn against the Boers as massive numbers of British reinforcements arrive under the command of Lord Roberts and his chief-of-staff Horatio Kitchener.
• The Great Galveston Hurricane smashes Galveston, Texas to splinters, killing about 12,000 people in the worst natural disaster in American history.
• The British parliament approves the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia.
• France hosts a World's Fair, the Paris Exposition Universelle.
• President William McKinley signs the Gold Standard Act, requiring US paper money to be backed by gold.
• American temperance advocate Carry Nation turns to violence in Kansas, as she and her followers run amuck smashing saloons and liquor-selling establishments.
• Irish patriot Arthur Griffith founds the Irish nationalist movement Sinn Féin.
• Three investigators independently rediscover Austrian monk Gregor Mendel's groundbreaking discoveries in genetics, which had languished unnoticed for 34 years.
• Max Planck develops quantum theory.
• Ferdinand von Zeppelin invents and successfully flies the first rigid airship, LZ 1.
• Eastman Kodak introduces a $1 box camera, the "brownie," making photography accessible to the average person for the first time.
• Sigmund Freud publishes his seminal work on his psychoanalytic theory, The Interpretation of Dreams.
• American novelist Frank Baum publishes his novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, an allegory about the gold standard.
• French novelist Colette publishes Claudine à l'école, the first novel in her sensationalistic four-part Claudine series.

These people were born in 1900:

• American jazz trumpet immortal Louie Armstrong.
• American composer Aaron Copland.
• French poet Jacques Prévert.
• Austrian born physicist Wolfgang Pauli, formulator of the Pauli exclusion principle.
• German Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler.
• Iranian Shiite fundamentalist religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini.
• Ukrainian-born American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky.
• American quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming.
• American actor Spencer Tracy.
• American journalist Ernie Pyle.
• American statesman Adlai Stevenson.
• American novelist Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind.
• American poet and critic Yvor Winters.
• American composer George Antheil.
• British aristocrat Lord Louis Mountbatten, last viceroy of India.
• Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort.
• American baseball great Lefty Grove.

These people died in 1900:

• German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
• Irish author and witicist Oscar Wilde.
• American novelist Stephen Crane.
• English composer Arthur Sullivan, the musical half of the brilliant oppretta-composing duo Gilbert and Sullivan.
• German philologist Max Müller.
• Japanese statesman Kuroda Kiyotaka, second Prime minister of Japan.
• American railroad magnate Collis Huntington.
• Heroic American locomotive engineer Casey Jones.
• Confederate Civil War spy Belle Boyd.
• Italian king Umberto I, yet another ruler assassinated by an anarchist.
• English philosopher Henry Sidgwick.
• German auto pioneer Gottleib Daimler.

1899 - 1900 - 1901

20th Century