The first annual prizes are awarded, under the terms of Joseph Pulitzer's will, for the best new US novel, play, history and biography

Race riots against migrant southern blacks in East St Louis, Missouri, leave forty-eight dead

The US Congress passes the Eighteenth Amendment, legislating for the introduction of Prohibition

A deciphered telegram, from the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann, inflames US public opinion by promising Texas and more to Mexico

Woodrow Wilson, president of the USA, declares war on Germany

In My Antonia Willa Cather's heroine survives setbacks on the Nebraska frontier

President Woodrow Wilson formulates fourteen detailed proposals as a basis for world peace once the conflict has ended

Quia Pauper Amavi contains the first three of Ezra Pound's eventually more than 100 cantos

H.L. Mencken's The American Language traces the gradual evolution of American from English

US boxer Jack Dempsey defeats Jess Willard for the world heavyweight title, sending him from the ring with a broken jaw

At least thirty-eight people are killed in a race riot in Chicago

Lillian Gish stars as a Cockney girl in D.W. Griffith's inter-racial film romance Broken Blossoms, set in London's slums

President Woodrow Wilson suffers a severe stroke that renders him largely incapable during the final seventeen months of his presidency

The actors Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin establish United Artists with the director D.W. Griffith

Boston Red Sox sell their star player, Babe Ruth, to the New York Yankees for $125,000

Sherwood Anderson establishes a reputation with a collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio

To President Wilson's profound disappointment the US Congress, by failing to ratify the treaty of Versailles, opts out of the League of Nations

Prohibition comes into effect in the USA, three months after the Volstead Act has provided guidelines for enforcement

Ezra Pound publishes Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a poem that reflects on the practice of poetry itself

Edith Wharton publishes her best-known novel, The Age of Innocence

The publication of Scott FitzGerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, brings him instant success

The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees women the right to vote

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart work together as Columbia University students, creating the musical Fly With Me

Charles Ives publishes his Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-60, usually known as the Concord Sonata

Douglas Fairbanks makes the first of his swashbuckling adventure movies, The Mark of Zorro