1. Manuel Anzana
   Francisco Franco
2. Vincente Rojo Lluch
   Euzko Gudarostea

The Spanish Civil War was a conflict that lasted between 1936 and 1939 and resulted in the deaths of between 500,000 and 1 million people. The democratically elected Republican government fought with communists and anarchists against the right-wing Nationalist forces, which received endorsement from the Vatican and substantial military support from Nazi Germany and Italy. Francisco Franco emerged as the head of the Nationalists and ruled a dictatorship in Spain following the war until his death.

1. Tokyo
   Los Angeles
2. Montreal
   Munich

An act of violence overshadowed the athletics at the 1972 Munich Olympic games. The Palestinian terrorist group Black September kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes in an attempt to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners. A botched rescue attempt led to the death of all the hostages.

1. Chilean Coup
   Berlin Blockade
2. Cuban Missile Crisis
   Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia

The Cuban Missile Crisis had the entire world on edge for 13 days in October 1962, when the U.S. and USSR had a major showdown with the use of nuclear missiles on the table. The drama surrounded Soviet plans to install missiles in Cuba just a few miles off the coast. The Soviet response was retaliation for the U.S. installing missiles right on its border in Turkey.

1. Jesse Owens
   Babe Ruth
2. Joe Frazier
   Forrest Towns

Jesse Owens stunned the racist Western world in 1936 when he won four gold medals in track and field right in the backyard of Adolf Hitler, dealing a major blow to his theories of racial superiority. Owens ran for the United States, a country that was still segregated and dealing with racial animosity.

1. Hungary
   Romania
2. Czechoslovakia
   Greece

The Iron Curtain symbolizes the border between NATO-bloc states and Warsaw Pact states. These seven countries were under Soviet hegemony and operated communist governments. Greece did not belong to the group, opting to join the US-led NATO defense bloc.

1. Dust Bowl
   The Wastelands
2. Barren Plains
   The Doldrums

Things went from bad to worse for the impoverished farmers living in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas when a series of terrible dust storms and drought made life unbearable for those living in the area. Many migrated west to California, as detailed in the novel "Grapes of Wrath."

1. Suzie Azar
   Faye Gillis
2. Amelia Earhart
   Opal Kunz

Amelia Earhart is one of the most famous adventurers from the exciting early days of flying. She was the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a plane and held many other records before her disappearance in 1937. The other women on the list were pilots in the female flight club Earhart founded, the Ninety-Nines.

1. Blitzkrieg
   Rattenkrieg
2. Mansteinkrieg
   Balkenkrieg

Germany was dragged down into a slow, grinding war of attrition in World War I. They wanted to make sure to avoid the same mistake the next time around and developed a fast doctrine of Lightening War called Blitzkrieg.

1. Salzburg
   Munich
2. Brandenburg
   Nuremberg

The most famous trial of the 20th century took place between 1945 and 1946 when an international tribunal tried the senior figures in the Nazi government for their part in orchestrating the Holocaust and other war crimes. Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler had already committed suicide, but other senior members were imprisoned or executed.

1. Indonesia
   Argentina
2. Brazil
   Nigeria

The Falklands War saw the British and Falklands square off over a cluster of sparsely inhabited islands off the coast of Argentina. The British wanted to continue using the islands as a naval base, while Argentina claimed the islands belonged to them. A short conflict resulted in a British victory.

1. Cesar Chavez
   Che Guerrero
2. Daniel Ortega
   Joan Baez

Cesar Chavez experienced the worst challenges of being a migratory Mexican-American farm worker firsthand. Taking a cue from other labor movements across the world, he started the United Farm Workers union. He organized peaceful strikes and boycotts, earning him a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

1. Hanoi Affair
   Laos Triangle Incident
2. Gulf of Tonkin Incident
   Mekong Collision

A clash between North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonking led to the passing of a resolution by the same name that would eventually justify full-fledged warfare by the United States against North Vietnam. No damage was done, and no U.S. lives were lost in the incident. The declassified Pentagon Papers later revealed that the U.S. misrepresented events to justify war with Vietnam.

1. Bulgaria
   Austro-Hungarian Empire
2. Ottoman Empire
   Denmark

World War I was called the War to End All Wars, starting with the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Germany, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria represented the rest of what is known as the Central Powers, each with their own military goals.

1. Bismark
   Kaladi
2. Kruger
   Hindenburg

The future of air travel moved distinctly in the direction of airplanes after the explosion of the German airship LZ 129 Hindenburg in New Jersey. Newsreel caught the tragedy, which led to 36 fatalities and played all over the world. The zeppelin was soon retired from the air.

1. Přemyslid
   Wittelsbach
2. Hohenzollern
   Habsburg

A shadowy terrorist from the Black Hand group in Serbia brought the world to the brink of war when he assassinated the visiting Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Austria-Hungary had ruled Serbia after wresting the province from the Ottoman Empire.

1. Guatemalan Revolution
   Cuban Revolution
2. Nicaraguan Revolution
   Haitian Revolution

Che Guevara was an Argentinian-born physician who became one of the most important revolutionary figures in the 20th century and remained a powerful counter-cultural signal. While he operated in several countries throughout Latin America and Africa, he is most known for helping the Castro brothers overthrow dictatorship in Cuba.

1. Philippe Petain
   Charles de Gaulle
2. Paul Reynaud
   Georges Clemenceau

Charles de Gaulle developed bold new strategies of tank warfare that were largely ignored by the French army, but used by German Panzercorps, during the invasion of France in 1940. Following the fall of France, de Gaulle formed the Free French and continued the fight in other theaters of war. He later became president.

1. San
   Igbo
2. Tutsi
   Akan

The Holocaust, Armenian Genocide and the genocide in East Timor were a few of the horrific atrocities committed in the 20th century. Among the worst was the Rwandan Genocide, when the Hutu majority massacred up to 1 million of their Tutsi countrymen and moderate Hutus who opposed the violence.

1. Rhodesia
   Afrikaners
2. Timor
   Antwerpers

The Dutch established a colony on the Cape of Good Hope way back in the 17th century and remained an important political presence in South Africa even after the fall to the British in the Boer War. They were instrumental in the apartheid regimes which began following WWII and lasted until 1994.

1. France
   Japan
2. Germany
   Brazil

The French government under Charles de Gaulle advocated for a policy of self-determination, wanting to make sure that they did not have to rely on the United States for defense. France tested its first nuclear warhead in 1960, becoming the fourth country to become a nuclear power.

1. North Yemen War
   Sinai War
2. Yom Kippur War
   Six-day War

Following WWII and the Holocaust, the Zionist goal of Israel was achieved when Britain agreed to cede the colony of Palestine over to Israelis for a new homeland. This decision caused considerable geopolitical unrest in the Middle East, with the Arab League attempting multiple times to oust the Israeli state. Israel did not participate in the North Yemen Civil War between royalist and republican forces.

1. Laotian Small Pox
   Antonine Plague
2. Spanish Flu
   Tuberculosis B

The Spanish Flu of 1918 spread like wildfire following the end of WWI, claiming the lives of anywhere between 3-6% of the world's entire population. The estimated death toll tragically even managed to exceed the 37 million lives lost during WWI. Unlike most diseases that claim the elderly and sick, the Spanish Flu took the lives of many who were otherwise young and healthy.

1. Egypt
   Nigeria
2. Ethiopia
   Zimbabwe

European powers carved up Africa during the late 20th century, with empires including France, the UK, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands ruling over African people. Italy owned territory in North Africa but failed to conquer Ethiopia in a war. They tried again in 1936, using chemical weapons and aid from Germany to briefly control the nation.

1. Apollo 1
   Sputnik 1
2. Mercury 1
   Vostok 1

The Soviet Union scored the first win in the technological race between East and West to transcend Earth's stratosphere and reach space. Their Sputnik 1 satellite began circling Earth's orbit on October 4th, 1957.

1. Surrealism
   Expressionism
2. Futurism
   Cubism

A series of technological innovations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries collapsed traditional perspectives of time and space. To capture this new experience of perception, artists like Picasso and Braque portrayed objects in an abstracted form from many different angles simultaneously.

1. 1985
   1989
2. 1992
   1990

East Germany constructed the Berlin Wall in 1961 to stem the flow of migration into the western portion of the city, where people could then escape communist rule. The 96-mile long wall divided the city until 1989 when the East German government announced people could freely cross.

1. The Lost Generation
   The Greatest Generation
2. La Belle Epoque
   Victorians

Gertrude Stein coined the term "Lost Generation" to describe the young men and women who endured the hardships and trials of World War I, in which over 37 million people lost their life. The typical attitude of the generation includes self-exile and spiritual suffering.

1. 18th Amendment
   20th Amendment
2. 19th Amendment
   21st Amendment

After decades of lobbying in an effort that began at the Seneca Falls Convention, white women achieved full suffrage in 1919 after many failed attempts to move the legislation through Congress. Participation in the war effort helped sway favor in their direction, and white women were allowed full suffrage in the 1920 presidential election.

1. Japan
   Finland
2. Sweden
   Mongolia

While Nazi Germany was busy fighting in Poland and planning an invasion of Western Europe, USSR invaded neighboring Finland with the intention of setting up a puppet government. Finnish guerrilla tactics, temperatures reaching 45 degrees below zero, and an unprepared Soviet force led to a massive amount of Soviet casualties in the opening months of the conflict.

1. The Difficult Years
   The Feud
2. The Scuffles
   The Troubles

The Troubles were a clash between the United Kingdom and Catholic Irish separatists in Northern Ireland, with the majority of the violence taking place between the 1970s and 1990s. Warfare included bombings, police massacres and violent street conflict.

1. Moldova
   Ukraine
2. Belarus
   Russia

The Chernobyl Disaster occurred in 1986 when a nuclear reactor melted down near the Ukrainian city of Pripyat. The fallout was caused by an overheated reactor core and led to widespread death, shortened life expectancy and environmental catastrophe.

1. Whites
   Remainers
2. Nationalists
   Dragoons

Fed up with the autocratic rule, devastating losses during WWI, and terrible poverty, the Russian Bolsheviks upended the Tsar's government in 1917. The conflict didn't end there, though, with the Bolshevik Reds fighting the Whites for control of Russia in a brutal civil war that would last years.

1. Knut Hamsun
   Jean-Paul Sartre
2. Ernest Hemingway
   Octavio Paz

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to an outstanding author since 1901 by the Swedish Academy. All of the authors on this list were awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature during the 20th century, but the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre refused the award for personal reasons, leading to a scandal.

1. East Timor
   Cambodia
2. Philippines
   Fiji

Japanese imperial conquest began with incursions into the Korean peninsula and north China in the early 20th century. By 1942, the Japanese had conquered many of their neighbors in Asia and the Pacific, but their control never extended to the islands of Fiji.

1. Theory of the Big Bang
   Cloning of a sheep
2. Discovery of radioactivity
   Theory of general relativity

The French physicist Henri Becquerel first discovered radioactivity in 1896, just missing the cutoff for this list. Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity in 1915, Georges Lemaitre advanced the Big Bang Theory in 1927, and Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996.