January 31: Germany announces it will conduct indiscriminate submarine warfare against American and other neutral shippping supplying Britain.
March: British troops enter Baghdad.
March 8: Senate adopts Rule 22: allowing permitting a vote of cloture on petition of 16 Senators and the termination of debate on a vote of two-thirds of the Senators present and voting. From 1808 until 1917 debate could not be closed off. The rule was changed again in 1975 to allow closing debate on a vote of three-fourths of all Senators.
April 6: U.S. Senate votes to enter the First World War 82 to 6; U.S. House of Representatives votes to enter the First World War 373 to 50.
May 19: Selective Service Act, a.k.a. consscription, a.k.a. the draft, signed by Pres. Woodrow Wilson. Draftees are called "selectees" by the tame patriotic press.
May 29: John F. Kennedy is born in Brookline, Massachusetts to Joe and Rose Kennedy (Fitzgerald).
June: Serbian Intelligence chief and leader in the "Black Hand," D. Dimitrijevic, is executed.
June 4: Polish National Army established.
July: 1,200 IWW strikers in Bisbee, Arizona are arrested, herded onto railroad cars, and dumped in the desert.
August 1: Labor organizer and anti-war activist Frank Little is kidnapped by thugs in Butte, Montana an lynched from a railroad trestle.
October 31: British government agrees to issue the Balfour Declaration. British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour sends letter to Lord Lionel Rothschild pledging Britain to establish a "national home" for the Jews in Palestine.
November 1: Sale of alcoholic beverages is prohibted in Washington, DC under the Sheppard Act: 269 legal retail liquor stores close and bars are closed.
November 2: Public announcement of the Balfour Declaration. Delayed since October 31 so as not to endanger Allenby's miltiary campaign against the Turkish Army in Palestine.
December: French Radical-Socialist Joseph Caillaux is arrested on charges of dealing with the enemy.
