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Important Events of the 1910s

1910

Movies
As It Is in Life, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Mary Pickford; Dr, Lafleurs Theory, starring Maurice Costello and Clara Kimball Young; The Fire Chief's Daughter, starring Kathlyn Williams; His Trust/His Trust Fulfilled, directed by D. W. Griffith; In the Days of the Thundering Herd, starring Tom Mix; A Romance of the Western Hills, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Mary Pickford; The Saloon Next Door, Ye Vengeful Vagabonds.
Fiction
Mary Austin, The Basket Woman; Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley Says; Hamlin Garland, Other Main-Travelled Roads; Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and the Little Boy; O. Henry, Strictly Business; Robert Herrick, A Life for a Life; Henry James, The Finer Grain; Owen Johnson, The Varmint; Jack London, Burning Daylight; Clarence Mulford, Hopalong Cassidy; David Graham Phillips, The Husband's Story; Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Franklin Winslow Kane; Edith Wharton, Tales of Men and Ghosts.
Verse
Robert Underwood Johnson, Saint-Gaudens, an Ode; Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Town Down the River.
Popular Songs
"Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life," by Victor Herbert; "Any Little Girl That's a Nice Little Girl Is the Right Little Girl for Me," by Fred Fisher and Thomas Gray; "Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon," by Irving Berlin; "Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine," by Fred Fisher and Alfred Bryan; "Down by the Old Mill Stream," by Tell Taylor, "Dynamite Rag," by Rüssel Robinson; "Every Girl Loves Me but the Girl I Love," by Herbert Ingrananti and Beth Slater Whitson; "Grizzly Bear," by Irving Berlin; "Heaven Win Protect the Working Girl," by A. Baldwin Sloane; "Hilarity Rag," by James Scott; "I'm Falling in Love with Someone," by Victor Herbert and Rida Johnson Young; "Let Me Call You Sweetheart," by Leo Friedman and Beth Slater Whitson; "Lovey Joe," by Joe Jordan; "Play that Barber Shop Chord," by Lewis F. Muir and William Tracey; "Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey," by Albert Von Tilzer and Junie McOree; "Stoptime Rag," by Scott Joplin; "Under the Yum Yum Tree," by Harry Von Tilzer and Andrew B. Sterling.
  • The Poetry Society of America is founded at the National Arts Club in New York City.
28 Feb.
Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova makes her American debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
18 Mar.
The Metropolitan Opera presents its first production of an opera by an American composer, Frederick Shepherd Converse's The Pipe of Desire.
21 Mar.
Gustav Mahler conducts for the last time at the Metropolitan Opera.
28 Mar.
Pablo Picasso's first one-man show opens at Alfred Stieglitzes 291 gallery in New York City.
1 Apr.
Some two thousand people attend the opening of the Exhibition of Independent Artists in New York City. The show continues through 28 April.
20 June
Fanny Brice makes her debut in the Ziegfeld Follies.
3 Nov.
The Chicago Grand Opera opens with a production of Giuseppe Verdi's Aida.
7 Nov.
Victor Herbert's operetta Naughty Marietta has its premiere at the New York Theatre.
10 Dec.
In New York City Ruth St. Denis opens in Egypta, a play that features the modern dances she has based on traditional Eastern dance forms.

Giacomo Puccini's La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), based on David Belasco's play of the same name, becomes the first opera to have its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.

1911

Movies
Artful Kate, directed by Thomas Ince, starring Mary Pickford; Bronco Billy's Adventure and Enoch Arden, directed by D. W. Griffith; The Fisher-Maid, directed by Thomas Ince, starring Mary Pickford; From the Manger to the Cross; A Girlish Impulse, starring Florence Lawrence; In the Sultans Garden, directed by Thomas Ince, starring Mary Pickford; A Knight of the Road, directed by D. W. Griffith; The Last Drop of Water, directed by D. W. Griffith; TheLonedale Operator, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Blanche Sweet; A Tale of Two Cities.
Fiction
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden; Margaret Deland, The Iron Woman; Theodore Dreiser, Jennie Gerhardt; Edna Ferber, Dawn O'Hara; Zona Gale, Mothers to Men; Hamlin Garland, Victor Ollnees Discipline; Ellen Glasgow, The Miller of Old Church; O. Henry, Sixes and Sevens; Robert Herrick, The Healer; Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale; Mary Johnston, The Long Roll; Jack London, South Sea Tales; Kathleen Norris, Mother; David Graham Phillips, The Conflict; Gene Stratton-Porter, The Harvester; Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome; Harold Bell Wright, The Winning of Barbara Worth.
Verse
Ezra Pound, Canzoni; George Sterling, The House of Orchids; Sara Teasdale, Helen of Troy.
Popular Songs
"Alexander's Ragtime Band," by Irving Berlin; "All Alone," by Harry Von Tilzer and Will Dillon; "Everybody's Doin' It Now," by Irving Berlin; "Felicity Rag," by Scott Hayden; "Hello, Central, Give Me 603," by Harry Von Tilzer; "I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl that Married Dear Old Dad," by Harry Von Tilzer and Will Dillon; "If You Talk in Your Sleep, Don't Mention My Name," by Nat D. Ayer and A. Seymour Brown; "The Little Millionaire," by George M. Cohan; "Moontime Is Spoontime," by Paul Pratt; "Novelty Rag," by May Aufderheide; "Oh, You Beautiful Doll," by Nat D. Ayer and A. Seymour Brown; 'The Rag-time Violin," by Irving Berlin; "Red Rose Rag," by Percy Wenrich; "A Ring on the Finger Is Worth Two on the Phone," by George W. Meyer and Jack Mahoney; 'Whirlwind Rag," by Rüssel Robinson.
  • The Irish Players from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin tour the United States. Their repertoire includes John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World.
  • Pennsylvania becomes the first state to create a board of motion-picture censors.
21 Mar.
The Winter Garden Theatre opens at Broadway and Fifty-first Street in New York City.
22 Apr.
Variety reports that vaudeville-theater owner Marcus Loew has secured backing, largely from the Shubert organization, to expand his chain of theaters and equip them for showing movies.
23 May
President William Howard Taft dedicates the New York Public Library.
8 Aug.
Pathes Weekly, the first newsreel made in America (produced in New Jersey by the French-owned Pathé company), is released and shown in movie theaters.
9 Dec.
John Philip Sousa and his band conclude their yearlong world tour with a concert at the five-thousand-seat Hippodrome in New York City.
19 Dec.
The Association of American Painters and Sculptors is founded.

1912

Movies
The Bearded Bandit; Ouster's Last Raid, directed by Thomas Ince; Fathers Flirtation; A Feud in the Kentucky Hills, directed by D. W. Griffith; A Girl and Her Trust, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Mary Pickford; The Indian Massacre, directed by Thomas Ince; Lena and the Geese, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Mary Pickford; The Musketeers of Pig Alley, directed by D. W. Griffith; The Old Actor, directed by D. W. Griffith; An Unseen Enemy, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish; War on the Plains, directed by Thomas Ince.
Fiction
Mary Austin, A Woman of Genius; Willa Cather, Alexanders Bridge; Theodore Dreiser, The Financier; Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance; Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Squirrel-Cage; Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Mary Johnston, Cease Firing; Jack London, Smoke Bellew; David Graham Phillips, The Price She Paid; Edith Wharton, The Reef.
Verse
Robinson Jeffers, Flagons and Apples; William Ellery Leonard, The Vaunt of Man; Vachel Lindsay, Rhymes to be Traded for Bread; Amy Lowell, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass; Ezra Pound, Ripostes; Elinor Wylie, Incidental Numbers.
Popular Songs
"And the Green Grass Grew All Around," by Harry Von Tilzer and William Jerome; "Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee," by Henry I. Marshall and Stanley Murphy; "The Bunny Hug," by Harry Von Tilzer, "Clover Blossoms Rag," by E. J. Stark Jr.; "Everybody Two-Step," by Wallie Herzer and Earl C. Jones; "Hitchy Koo," by Lewis F. Muir, Maurice Abrahams, and L, Wolfe Gilbert; "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary," by Jack Judge and Harry H. Williams; "Melancholy (My Melancholy Baby)," by Ernie Burnett and George A. Norton; "On the Eight O'Clock Train," by Russel Robinson; "Scott Joplin's New Rag," by Scott Joplin; "The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi," by Dudleigh Vernor and Byron D. Stokes; 'That Demon Rag," by Russell Smith; "That Mysterious Rag," by Irving Berlin; "The Turkey Trot," by Ribe Danmark (J. Bodewalt Lampe); "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee," by Lewis R Muir and L. Wolfe Gilbert; "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," by Ernest R. Ball, Chauncey Olcott, and George Graff Jr.; "Wise Old Moon," by Artie Matthews.
  • The Little Theater in Chicago and the Toy Theater in Boston, the first influential little theaters in America, are founded.
  • A revival of George M. Cohan's 1906 hit musical, Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, opens in New York City.
  • The Dramatists Guild is founded in New York City.
14 Mar.
Horatio Parker's opera Mona, winner of the Metropolitan Opera's $10,000 prize for the best new American opera, has its premiere in New York City.
22 July
The first of the Shuberts' annual Passing Show musical revues opens at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City.
Aug.
Alfred Stieglitz devotes an issue of his periodical Camera Work to modern art, including Gertrude Stein's word portraits of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
1 Sept.
In Los Angeles the one-thousand-seat Walker Theatre opens—a theater devoted exclusively to showing movies (admission prices range from ten to twenty-five cents).
5 Sept.
Queen Elizabeth, a French feature film starring Sarah Bernhardt, opens in Marcus Loew's New York City movie theaters—after Loew pays $25,000 for the American rights to the movie.
23 Sept.
The first Keystone Comedy movie, the split-reel Cohen Collects a Debt and The Water Nymph, directed by Mack Sennett, is released.

The first issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, edited by Harriet Monroe, is published in Chicago, with expatriate Ezra Pound as overseas editor. The magazine is dedicated to publishing the work of American poets.

1913

Movies
The Adventures of Kathlyn (serial), starring Kathlyn Williams; The Battle of Gettysburg, directed by Thomas Ince; Caprice, starring Mary Pickford; In the Bishop's Carriage, starring Mary Pickford; The New York Hat, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Mary Pickford; The Prisoner of Zenda, starring James K. Hackett; Tess of the D'Urbervilles, starring Minnie Maddern Fiske; A Versatile Villain.
Fiction
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!; Ellen Glasgow, Virginia; O. Henry, Rolling Stones; Robert Herrick, One Woman's Life; Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna; Gene Stratton-Porter, Laddie; Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country.
Verse
Witter Bynner, Tiger; Paul Laurence Dunbar, Complete Poems; John Gould Fletcher, Fire and Wine; Robert Frost, A Boys Will; Vachel Lindsay, General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems; William Carlos Williams, The Tempers.
Popular Songs
"American Beauty Rag," by Joseph Lamb; "Danny Boy," by Fred E. Weatherly, "The Dogin' Rag," by Rob Hampton; "Don't Blame It All on Broadway," by Bert Grant, Harry Williams, and Joe Young; "The International Rag," by Irving Berlin; "Junk Man Rag," by Luckey Roberts; "Kismet Rag," by Scott Hayden; "Memphis Blues," by W. C. Handy; "On the Old Fall River Line," by Harry Von Tilzer, William Jerome, and Andrew B. Sterling; "Peg o' My Heart," by Fred Fisher and Alfred Bryan; "Sailing Down the Chesapeake Bay," by George Botsford and Jean C. Havez; "Snookey Ookums," by Irving Berlin; "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine," by Harry Carroll and Ballard Macdonald; "When I Lost You," by Irving Berlin; "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)," by James V. Monaco and Joseph McCarthy, "You've Got Your Mother's Big Blue Eyes," by Irving Berlin.
  • The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount Pictures) is founded in Hollywood, California.
  • The New York Motion Picture Company sends director-producer Thomas Ince to California to make Westerns.
17 Feb.
The International Exhibition of Modern Art, commonly called the Armory Show, opens in New York City, with more than thirteen hundred paintings and sculptures. For many Americans the show is their first opportunity to see works of avant-garde modern art.
24 Mar.
The million-dollar, eighteen-hundred-seat Palace Theatre opens on Seventh Avenue between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh Streets in New York City, charging a top ticket price of two dollars, twice that of other vaudeville theaters.
1 Apr.
With admission costing as much as one dollar a ticket, Quo Vadis, an eight-reel movie made in Italy, opens at the Astor Theatre in New York City, beginning a twenty-two-week run and fueling Americans' desires for longer movies.
13 Apr.
Arturo Toscanini conducts his first concert in America, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
26 May
The Actors Equity Association is founded.
7 June
In New York City more than one thousand striking silk-mill workers from Paterson, New Jersey, march up Fifth Avenue to Madison Square Garden, where they stage a political pageant intended to dramatize the plight of industrial workers, with sets by theatrical designer Robert Edmond Jones and painted under the direction of artist John Sloan.
20 June
Variety reports that "the feature-length movie is now an establishment.…The future will see little else."
1 Oct.
Director D. W. Griffith leaves Biograph, the company for which he has made more than four hundred movies in five and a half years.

1914

Movies
The Avenging Conscience, directed by D. W. Griffith; The Bargain, directed by Thomas Ince, starring William S. Hart; The Battle of the Sexes, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish; Between Showers, starring Charlie Chaplin; The Call of the North, directed by Oscar Apfel and Cecil B. DeMille; Cinderella, starring Mary Pickford and Owen Moore; Dough and Dynamite, starring Charlie Chaplin; The Eagle's Mate, starring Mary Pickford; The Escape, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Donald Crisp, Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, and Robert Harron; The Exploits of Elaine (serial), starring Pearl White; Hearts Adrift, starring Mary Pickford; Home, Sweet Home, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian and Dorothy Gish; The Horrors of War, In the Latin Quarter, starring Constance Talmadge; Judith of Bethulia, directed by D. W. Griffith; Kid Auto Races at Venice, California, starring Charlie Chaplin; Mabel's Strange Predicament, starring Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand; The Man from Home, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; The Perils of Pauline (serial), starring Pearl White; Pool Shark, starring W. C. Fields; The Squaw Man, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; Tess of the Storm Country, starring Mary Pickford; Tillie's Punctured Romance, directed by Mack Sennett, starring Marie Dressier, Charlie Chaplin, and Mabel Normand; The Virginian, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; War Is Hell; Wildflower, starring Marguerite Clark; The Wrath of the Gods, directed by Thomas Ince.
Fiction
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes; George Washington Cable, Gideon's Band; Theodore Dreiser, The Titan; Hamlin Garland, The Forester's Daughter; Robert Herrick, Clark's Field; Jack London, The Mutiny on the Elsinore; Frank Norris, Vandover and the Brute; Booth Tarkington, Penrod; Harold Bell Wright, The Eyes of the World.
Verse
Conrad Aiken, Earth Triumphant; Emily Dickinson, The Single Hound; Robert Frost, North of Boston; Joyce Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems; Vachel Lindsay, The Congo and Other Poems; Amy Lowell, Sword-Blades and Poppy Seed; James Oppenheim, Songs for the New Age; Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons,
Popular Songs
"Aba Daba Honeymoon," by Arthur Fields and Walter Donovan; "The Boston Stop—Hesitation Waltz," by Henry Lodge; "By the Beautiful Sea," by Harry Carroll and Harold R. Atteridge; "Chevy Chase (A Rag)," by Eubie Blake; "Chicken Tango," by E. J. Stark Jr.; "Fascination Waltz," by Henry Lodge; "Fizz Water (A Rag)," by Eubie Blake; "Hot House Rag," by Paul Pratt; "The Land of My Best Girl," by Harry Carroll and Ballard Macdonald; "The Lily Rag," by Charles Thompson; "Missouri Waltz," by Frederick Knight Logan and J. R. Shannon; "Oh! You Turkey—a Rag Trot," by Henry Lodge; "Play a Simple Melody," by Irving Berlin; "St. Louis Blues," by W. C. Handy, "The Syncopated Walk," by Irving Berlin; "They Didn't Believe Me," by Jerome Kern and Herbert Reynolds; "When You Wore a Tulip and I Wore a Big Red Rose," by Percy Wenrich and Jack Mahoney, "Yellow Dog Blues," by W. C. Handy.
  • Heiress and sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founds the Whitney Studio Club (later the Whitney Museum) in New York City.
13 Feb.
The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) is founded in New York City.
Mar.
Mabel's Strange Predicament, the Keystone comedy in which Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character is introduced, is released.
l Apr.
The Strand Theater opens in New York, designed as a vaudeville and movie house for upscale audiences.
27 Apr.
Vernon and Irene Castle begin their twenty-eight-day tour of thirty-two cities, which culminates in a national dance competition held in Madison Square Garden, New York City.
4 June
Finnish composer Jean Sibelius makes his first American appearance, conducting the world premiere of his symphonic poem Oceanides at a music festival in Norwalk, Connecticut.
3 Nov.
The first American show of African sculpture opens at Stieglitz's 291 gallery in New York City.
3 Dec.
The Isadorables, six young European dancers trained by Isadora Duncan, appear at Carnegie Hall in New York City, after escaping with her from war-torn Paris.
8 Dec.
Irving Berlin's first musical, Watch Your Step, starring Vernon and Irene Castle, opens on Broadway.

1915

Movies
The Arab, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; The Bank, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; The Battle Cry of Peace, starring Norma Talmadge; The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, and Miriam Cooper; The Captive, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Blanche Sweet; Carmen, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Geraldine Farrar and Wallace Reid; The Champion, starring and directed by Charlie Chaplin; Chimmie Fadden, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Victor Moore; The Coward, directed by Thomas Ince; Esmeralda, starring Mary Pickford; The Fairy and the Waif, starring Mary Miles Minier; A Fool There Was, starring Theda Bara; The Girl of the Golden West, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; The Goose Girl, starring Marguerite Clark; Graustark, starring Francis X, Bushman; Hell's Hinges, directed by Thomas Ince, starring William S. Hart; His New Job, starring and directed by Charlie Chaplin; The Iron Strain; The Lamb, starring Douglas Fair-banks; Mistress Nell, starring Mary Pickford; My Valet, directed by Mack Sennett; The New Exploits of Elaine (serial), starring Pearl White; A Night Out, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; Rags, starring Mary Pickford; The Romance of Elaine (serial), starring Pearl White; The Tramp, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; The Warrens of Virginia, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Blanche Sweet; The Whirl of Life, starring Vernon and Irene Castle; The Wild Goose Chase, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Ina Claire; Work, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin.
Fiction
Willa Gather, The Song of the Lark; Irvin S. Cobb, Old Judge Priest; Theodore Dreiser, The "Genius"; Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Bent Twig; Jack London, The Scarlet Plague; Ernest Poole, The Harbor; Booth Tarkington, The Turmoil; Harry Leon Wilson, Ruggles of Red Gap.
Verse
Stephen Vincent Benét, Five Men and Pompey; John Gould Fletcher, Irradiations: Sand and Spray; Ring W. Lardner, Bib Ballads; Archibald MacLeish, Songs for a Summers Day; Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology; John G. Neihardt, The Song of Hugh Glass; Ezra Pound, Cathay; Sara Teasdale, Rivers to the Sea,
Popular Songs
"Agitation Rag," by Shelton Brooks; "Babes in the Wood," by Jerome Kern; "Down Among the Sheltering Palms," by Abe Olman and James Brockman; "The Girl on the Magazine Cover," by Irving Berlin; "Hesitating Blues," by W. C. Handy; "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier," by Al Piantatosi and Alfred Bryan; "I Love a Piano," by Irving Berlin; "The Jelly Roll Blues," by Jelly Roll Morton; "Joe Turner Blues," by W. C. Handy; "The Little House Upon the Hill," by Harry Puck, Ballard Macdonald, and Joe Goodwin; "Memories," by Gus Kahn and Egbert Van Alstyne; "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag and Smile, Smile, Smile" [British], by Felix Powell and George Asaf; "There's a Broken Heart for Every Light on Broadway," by Fred Fisher and Howard Johnson; "Weary Blues," by Artie Matthews; "When I Leave the World Behind," by Irving Berlin; "You'll Always Be the Same Sweet Girl," by Harry Von Tilzer and Andrew B. Sterling.
  • Modern dancers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, who were married on 13 August 1914, found the Denishawn School of Dancing in Los Angeles.
8 Feb.
Despite protests by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), D. W. Griffith's twelve-reel movie The Birth of a Nation, about the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Reconstruction South, has its world premiere at Clune's Theater in Los Angeles.
20 Mar.
The Russian Symphony Orchestra plays the premiere performance of Aleksandr Scriabin's symphony Prometheus at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The performance includes the projection of color images onto a screen.
21 May
Variety notes that "the bottom has apparently fallen out" of the market for one-reel movies.
Summer
Thomas Ince's Kay Bee studio, Mack Sennett's Keystone studio, and D. W. Griffith's Reliance-Majestic studio are combined to form the Triangle Film Corporation.
15 July
The Provincetown Players give their first performance: a double-bill production of Constancy by Neith Boyce and Suppressed Desires by Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

1916

Movies
The Apostle of Vengeance, starring William S. Hart; Behind the Screen, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; Civilization, directed by Thomas Ince; The Dream Girl, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; The Eternal Grind, starring Mary Pickford; The Fall of a Nation; Fatty and Mabel Adrift, directed by Mack Sennett, starring Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand; The Floorwalker, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; The Good Bad Man, starring Douglas Fairbanks; The Heart of Nora Flynn, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; Huida from Holland, starring Mary Pickford; Intolerance, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh; Less than the Dust, starring Mary Pickford; Maria Rosa, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Geraldine Farrar and Wallace Reid; One A.M., directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; Patria, starring Irene Castle; The Pawnshop, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; Pearl of the Army, starring Pearl White; Poor Little Peppina, starring Mary Pickford; The Rink, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; Temptation, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Geraldine Farrar, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; The Vagabond, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; The Vixen, starring Theda Bara; War Brides, starring Alla Nazimova and Richard Barthelmess; The Wharf Rat, starring Mae Marsh.
Fiction
Sherwood Anderson, Windy McPhersons Son; James Branch Cabell, The Certain Hour; Margaret Deland, The Rising Tide; Hamlin Garland, They of the High Trails; Ellen Glasgow, Life and Gabriella;Williamm Dean Howells, The Leather-wood God; Ring W. Lardner, You Know Me Al; Booth Tarkington, Seventeen; Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger; Edith Wharton, Xingu and Other Stories; Harold Bell Wright, When a Mans a Man.
Verse
Conrad Aiken, Turns and Movies; John Gould Fletcher, Goblins and Pagodas; H. D., Sea Garden; Robert Frost, Mountain Interval; Edgar A. Guest, A Heap oy Livin'; Robinson Jeffers, Californians; Sarah Orne Jewett, Verses; Alfred Kreymborg, Mushrooms; Amy Lowell, Men, Women, and Ghosts; Edgar Lee Masters, Songs and Satires; James Oppenheim, War and Laughter; Ezra Pound, Lustra; Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Man Against the Sky; Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems; Alan Seeger, Poems.
Popular Songs
"Beale Street Blues," by W. C. Handy; "Bugle Call Rag," by Eubie Blake; "Chromatic Rag," by Will Held; "Everybody Rag with Me," by Gus Kahn and Grace LeBoy; "Have a Heart," by Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse; "Homesickness Blues," by Cliff Hess; "Mama and Papa Blues," by James P. Johnson; "Mother (Her Soldier Boy)," by Sigmund Romberg and Rida Johnson Young; "Nola," by Felix Arndt; "Oh! How She Could Yacki, Hacki, Wicki, Wacki, Woo," by Albert Von Tilzer, Stanley Murphy, and Charles McCarron; "Poor Butterfly," by Raymond Hubbell and John L. Golden; "Pretty Baby," by Gus Kahn, Tony Jackson, and Egbert Van Alstyne; "Prosperity Rag," by James Scott; "Springtime Rag," by Paul Pratt; "There's a Little Bit of Bad in Every Good Little Girl," by Fred Fisher and Grant Clarke; "Twelfth Street Rag," by Euday L. Bowman; "You Belong to Me," by Victor Herbert and Harry B. Smith,
Jan.-May
Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes performs at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
Spring
Charlie Chaplin signs with Mutual for $10,000 a week, plus a $150,000 signing bonus.
12 Apr.
Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky makes his American debut.
24 June
Mary Pickford negotiates a new contract with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Company for more than $1 million over the next two years.
28 July
At the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the Provincetown Players stage Bound East for Cardiff, the first production of a Eugene O'Neill play.
5 Dec.
The Society of Independent Artists is established.

1917

Movies
The Adopted Son, starring Francis X. Bushman; Cleopatra, starring Theda Bara; The Clodhopper; The Cure, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; The Fall of the Romanoffs; The Gun Fighter, directed by and starring William S. Hart; The Immigrant, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; Joan, The Woman, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Geraldine Farrar; Just Nuts, starring Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels; The Little American, directed by Cecil B, DeMille, starring Mary Pickford; A Modern Musketeer, starring Douglas Fairbanks; The Poor Little Rich Girl, starring Mary Pickford; Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, starring Mary Pickford; A Romance of the Redwoods, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Mary Pickford; The Spirit of '76; Thais, starring Mary Garden; The Woman God Forgot, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Geraldine Farrar.
Fiction
Sherwood Anderson, Marching Men; Mary Austin, The Ford; James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest; Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky; John Dos Passos, One Man's Initiation; Edna Ferber, Fanny Herself; Henry James, The Ivory Tower; Ring W. Lardner, Gullible's Travels; Jack London, Jerry of the Islands; David Graham Phillips, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise; Ernest Poole, His Family; Upton Sinclair, King Coal; Edith Wharton, Summer.
Verse
Conrad Aiken, Nocturne of a Remembered Spring; Witter Bynner, Grenstone Poems; T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations; Edgar A. Guest, Just Folks; James Weldon Johnson, Fifty Years and Other Poems; Vachel Lindsay, The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems; Archibald MacLeish, Tower of Ivory; Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence and Other Poems; Edwin Arlington Robinson, Merlin; Sara Teasdale, Love Songs; William Carlos Williams, Al Que Quiere!
Popular Songs
"Au Revoir, But Not Goodbye, Soldier Boy," by Albert Von Tilzer and Lew Brown; "The Bells of St. Mary's," by A. Emmett Adams and Douglas Furber; "Dance and Grow Thin," by Irving Berlin; "The Darktown Strutter's Ball," by Shelton Brooks; "Efficiency Rag," by James Scott; "For Me and My Gal," by George W. Meyer, Edgar Leslie, and E. Ray Goetz; "Gum Shoe Fox Trot," by E. J. Stark Jr.; "Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Here," by Theodore Morse, Arthur Sullivan, and D. A. Morse; "Harlem Strut," by James P. Johnson; "Magnetic Rag," by Scott Joplin; "Oh, Johnny! Oh!," by Abe Oleman and Ed Rose; "Over There," by George M. Cohan; "The Ragtime Volunteers Are Off to War," by James F. Hanley and Ballard Macdonald; "Smiles," by Lee S. Roberts and J. Will Callahan; "Tiger Rag," by the Original Dixieland Jass Band; "Till the Clouds Roll By," by Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse;" Till We Meet Again," by Richard A. Whiting and Ray Egan; "When the Boys Come Home," by Oley Speaks and John Hay; "Where Do We Go from Here?," by Percy Wenrich; "Where the Morning Glories Grow," by Richard A. Whiting, Gus Kahn, and Ray Egan; "Whose Little Heart Are You Breaking Now?," by Irving Berlin; "Why Keep Me Waiting So Long?," by Tony Jackson.
  • The Supreme Court rules in favor of ASCAP in a test case concerning the payment of royalties to songwriters for public performances of their works.
  • Eddie Cantor and Will Rogers make their debuts in the Ziegfeld Follies.
  • The New York Philharmonic Orchestra celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary.
  • Seventy-two-year-old French actress Sarah Bernhardt makes her last tour of the United States, playing (among other roles) Portia in The Merchant of Venice.
1 Apr.
Victor becomes the first record company to release a recording of jazz, by the (all-white) Original Dixieland Jass Band.
9 Apr.
On the opening day of its first exhibition the Society of Independent Artists rejects Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, a urinal that he entered as sculpture under the name of Richard Mutt.
11 Apr.
Isadora Duncan, draped in an American flag, performs a modern-dance work called Star-Spangled Banner at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
14 Apr.
President Woodrow Wilson appoints a Committee on Public Information (also known as the Creel Committee, after its head, George Creel) to design a code for voluntary censorship of media and arts during the war.
27 Oct.
Sixteen-year-old Russian prodigy Jascha Heifetz makes his American debut at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
10 Nov.
The Philadelphia Orchestra announces that it will play no works by German composers for the duration of the war.
14 Nov.
Acting on orders originating with Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, the mayor of New Orleans closes Storyville—the city's red-light district, where many African American musicians are employed—prompting an exodus of blues and jazz artists to northern cities.
25 Dec.
The Jesse Lynch Williams comedy Why Marry? opens at the Astor Theatre in New York City.

1918

Movies
Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, starring Mary Pickford; Beware of Boarders, directed by Mack Sennett; A Dog's Life, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; Fatty in Coney Island, directed by Mack Sennett, starring Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton; The Ghost of Rosy Taylor, starring Mary Miles Minter; The Great Love, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish; Hearts of the World, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish; Huns Within Our Gates; Johanna Enlists, starring Mary Pickford; Mickey, directed by Mack Sennett, starring Mabel Normand; Old Wives for New, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; One Hundred Percent American, starring Mary Pickford; Prunella, starring Marguerite Clark; Shoulder Arms, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; Stella Maris, starring Mary Pickford; Tarzan of the Apes, starring Elmo Lincoln; Till I Come Back to You, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; The Venus Model, starring Mabel Normand.
Fiction
Willa Cather, My Ántonia; Theodore Dreiser, Free and Other Stories; Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Edgewater People; Zona Gale, Birth; Zane Grey, The U. P. Trail; Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus Returns; Ring W. Lardner, Treat 'Em Rough; Jack London, The Red One; Ernest Poole, His Second Wife; Thorne Smith, Biltmore Oswald; Wilbur Daniel Steele, Land's End; Edward Streeter, Dere Mable: Love Letters of a Rookie; Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons; Edith Wharton, The Marne.
Verse
Sherwood Anderson, Mid-American Chants; Stephen Vincent Benét, Young Adventure; John Gould Fletcher, The Tree of Life; Amy Lowell, Can Grandes Castle; Edgar Lee Masters, Toward the Gulf; Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers; Margaret Widdemer, Old Road to Paradise.
Popular Songs
"Beautiful Ohio," by Mary Earl (Robert A. King) and Ballard Macdonald; "The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady," by Walter Donaldson and Monty C. Brice; "Dream On, Little Soldier Boy," by Irving Berlin; "Everybody Knows I Love Him," by Russell Smith; "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," by Eddie Green; "Hinky-Dinky Parlezvous," anonymous; "I'll Say She Does," by Gus Kahn; "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," by Harry Carroll and Joseph McCarthy; "I'm Gonna Pin a Medal on the Girl I Left Behind," by Irving Berlin; "The Kaiser's Got the Blues," by W. C. Handy; "K-K-K-Katy," by Geoffrey O'Hara; "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," by Irving Berlin; "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody," by Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis; "Snookums Rag," by Charles L. Johnson; "The U.S. Field Artillery March," by John Philip Sousa; "When Alexander Takes His Ragtime Band to France," by Alfred Bryan, Cliff Hess, and Edgar Leslie.
  • Italian operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, who is extremely popular in America, records George M. Cohan's wartime hit "Over There."
  • The annual O. Henry Awards are created to honor the short-story writer, who died in 1910.
  • The first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for drama (Jesse Lynch Williams's Why Marry?) and fiction (Ernest Poole's His Family),
15 Feb.
Serving as a pilot in the war, dancer Vernon Castle is killed during a training exercise.
Mar.
The Little Review begins serializing James Joyce's Ulysses.
25 Mar.
German-born Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Carl Muck is arrested and imprisoned as an enemy ddlien.
16 Oct.
Congress passes the Alien Act, which allows for the deportation of immigrants and aliens with radical political views. The act is later used to justify the deportation of Muck and the harassment of other German- and Austrian-born artists working in America.
Dec.
The Theatre Guild is founded in New York City.
14 Dec.
Giacomo Puccini's Il trittico, a trilogy of one-act operas—// Tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi—is given its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.

1919

Movies
Broken Blossoms, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess; Captain Kidd, Jr., starring Mary Pickford; Daddy Long Legs, starring Mary Pickford; A Days Pleasure, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; Dont Change Your Husband, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Gloria Swanson; The Girl Who Stayed at Home, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Carol Dempster, Girls, starring Marguerite Clark; Heart o' the Hills, starring Mary Pickford; Kathleen Mavourneen, starring Theda Bara; Male and Female, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Gloria Swanson; The Miracle Man, starring Lon Chaney, Sunnyside, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; True Heart Susie, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish.
Fiction
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio; James Branch Cabell, Jurgen; Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley on Making a Will; Ellen Glasgow, The Builders; Fannie Hurst, Humoresque; Ring W. Lardner, Own Your Own Home; Jack London, On the Makaloa Mat; Upton Sinclair, Jimmie Higgins; Albert Payson Terhune, Lad: A Dog.
Verse
T. S. Eliot, Poems; Amy Lowell, Pictures of a Floating World; Edgar Lee Masters, Starved Rock; Ezra Pound, Quia Pauper Amavi; John Crowe Ransom, Poems about God.
Popular Songs
"Alice Blue Gown," by Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy; "Bohemia Rag," by Joseph Lamb; "Castle of Dreams," by Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy; "Daddy Long Legs," by Harry Ruby, Sam M. Lewis, and Joe Young; "Dardanella," by Fred Fisher; "How You Gonna Keep em Down on the Farm," by Walter Donaldson, Sam M. Lewis, and Joe Young; "Indian Summer," by Victor Herbert; "Liberty Loan March," by John Philip Sousa; "The Little Church Around the Corner," by Sigmund Romberg and Alexander Gerber, "Mandy," by Irving Berlin; "Peace and Plenty Rag," by James Scott; "Peggy," by Neil Moret and Harry Williams; "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody," by Irving Berlin; "Rose Room," by Art Hickman; "Swanee," by George Gershwin and Irving Caesar; "You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet," by Al Jolson, Gus Kahn, and B. G. De Sylva.
  • Maid of Harlem, an all-black musical starring Fats Waller, Mamie Smith, Johnny Dunn, and Perry Bradford, is a hit at Lincoln Theater in New York City.
5 Feb.
United Artists is founded in Hollywood by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and other investors.
19 Apr.
The Theatre Guild opens its first production, Jacinto Benavente's The Bonds of Interest, in New York City.
7 Aug.
The Actors Equity strike begins, soon including more than two thousand actors, stagehands, and musicians.
6 Sept.
The Actors Equity strike is settled, with theatrical management meeting the actors' demands on pay, job security, and control over contracts.
24 Oct.
During the opening performance at Capitol Theatre on Broadway, sixty chorus girls dance to George Gershwin's new song "Swanee," which Al Jolson also sings in his Winter Garden show a few weeks later.
31 Oct.
The Provincetown Players stage Eugene O'Neill's play The Dreamy Kid with an all-black cast.