100 Documents That Changed the World

by Scott Christianson

  At the time, most educated Europeans considered dreams devoid of psychological importance. But Freud, while on a summer retreat at Bellevue, Austria, in the summer of 1895, conceived the idea for a daring new analysis.

  In 1899 he published a study on the subject in German, which was entitled Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams). The grey-covered monograph introduced his complex theory of dream interpretation, involving the ‘unconscious’. Freud said all dreams are forms of ‘wish fulfilment’ or attempts to resolve inner conflicts of one sort or another. He posited that the genesis of a dream often lies in the events of the day preceding the dream – events which he called the ‘day residue’. The work also introduced many other new concepts such as ‘condensation’ (the idea of multiple meanings), and ‘repression’. By far the most controversial parts of his theory involved sexuality, such as his assertion that children had a repressed desire to have sexual relations with the parent of the opposite sex (the ‘Oedipus complex’).

  Although very few copies were sold at first and it earned him only $209, Freud considered his theory a breakthrough and said of the original insight, maybe ‘someday a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words: In this house on 24 July 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud.’ Nevertheless, interest in the work was so low that the initial press run didn’t sell out for eight years.

  Over time, Freud frequently revised the book to keep up with his evolving theory. As it was about to be translated into English, his English publisher, George Allen & Company, required him to remove several sexual references, which he painfully agreed to do. By the 1920s, The Interpretation of Dreams was considered the seminal work in psychoanalysis.

  After correcting the page proofs, Freud threw away the original manuscript, but a number of later editions and letters remain preserved in the Sigmund Freud Collection of the Library of Congress. In keeping with his prediction, a plaque was later erected at the site where he had hatched his momentous theory.

  Freud at his writing desk and the first edition of Die Traumdeutung. Although the printed date says 1900, it was actually released on 4 November 1899.

  Sinking of the Titanic

  (1912)

  On the night of 14 April 1912, the cramped message room of the largest and most luxurious vessel afloat turns into a maelstrom of frantic wireless activity as two young telegraphists issue a flurry of desperate distress calls – the unsinkable ship has struck an iceberg and she is going down.

  As the biggest and finest ship of its day, RMS Titanic measured 270 metres, 23 centimetres long with a maximum breadth of 28 metres, 15 centimetres and a total height from the base of the keel to the top of the bridge of 32 metres. Its pinnacle, a four-wire Marconi 500 kHz antenna suspended between the ship’s two masts, standing a full 75 metres above the sea, served the world’s most powerful communications equipment, which had a guaranteed working range of 250 miles and a nighttime range of up to 2,000 miles.

  In the tiny radio room, two wireless operators, Jack Phillips, aged 25, and his 22-year-old deputy, Harold Bride, kept up a brisk traffic of communications that included both navigational messages and telegrams for passengers that were sent and received as the elegant vessel continued its maiden voyage across the frigid North Atlantic.

  At about 11:40 PM on 14 April, however, as the ship was cruising about 370 miles south-southeast of the coast of Newfoundland, she struck an iceberg and everything changed. The surviving messages covering the next two hours left behind a dramatic real-time record of what happened that night.

  The operators remained at their posts even after the captain released them from their duties, and they continued to transmit distress signals until three minutes before the ship foundered. Just before they fled, Bride’s final message reported water flooding into the wheelhouse. He was later pulled from the icy waves just in time to save his life. But Phillips perished and his body was never recovered. He subsequently came under criticism when it was revealed that before the collision another radio operator of the Californian had tried to warn him about the approaching ice field, but Phillips had responded, ‘Shut up! I am busy, I am working Cape Race!’

  The sinking resulted in the loss of 1,595 passengers and crew. Only 745 were saved, in part because the ship carried only enough lifeboats for half of those aboard and they were reserved mostly for women and children. The newspapers told how the wealthiest passenger, Col. John Jacob Astor IV, was last seen assisting his pregnant wife into a lifeboat, and calmly smoking a cigarette before the ship went down. Another passenger, Col. Archibald Gracie, also went down with the vessel but he later surfaced and was rescued.

  Over the years, some of the telegrams from the Titanic have fetched high prices at auction. One of the most famous, saying ‘We have struck iceberg,’ along with the Olympic’s response, ‘…are you steaming toward us?’, sold for $110,000 at Christie’s.

  A collection of the Titanic messages, translated from Morse code, has been dramatized on stage.

  An original ticket for the Titanic, which was launched into Belfast Lough on 31 May 1911 by Harland & Wolff, then the largest shipyard in the world.

  The increasingly distressing messages sent from the Titanic between 11:50 PM and 1:40 AM on 14–15 April 1912.

  Sykes and Picot’s map (which they signed on 8 May 1916) showed that Britain (‘B’) would receive control over the red area, which is known today as Jordan, southern Iraq and Haifa in Israel. France (‘A’) would obtain the blue area (today’s Syria, Lebanon, northern Iraq, Mosul and southeastern Turkey, including Kurdistan).

  Sykes–Picot Agreement

  (1916)

  Even before the final outcome of the Great War has been determined, Great Britain, France and Russia secretly discuss how they will carve up the Middle East into ‘spheres of influence’ once the Ottoman Empire is defeated. Their controversial secret treaty will alter the geography of the region for decades to come.

  The Ottoman Empire had been in decline for centuries prior to World War I, so the Allied Powers already had given some thought to how they would divide up the considerable spoils in the likely event they defeated the Turks. Britain and France already had some significant interests in the region between the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf, but a victory offered a great deal more. Russia as well hungered for a piece.

  From November 1915 to March 1916, representatives of Britain and France negotiated an agreement, with Russia offering its assent. The secret treaty, known as the Sykes–Picot Agreement, was named after its lead negotiators, the aristocrats Sir Mark Sykes of England and François Georges-Picot of France. Its terms were set out in a letter from Sir Edward Grey (British Foreign Secretary) to Paul Cambon (France’s Ambassador to Great Britain) on 16 May 1916.

  The colour-coded partition map and text provided that Britain (‘B’) would receive control over the red area (known today as Jordan, southern Iraq and Haifa in Israel); France (‘A’) would obtain the blue area (today’s Syria, Lebanon, northern Iraq, Mosul and southeastern Turkey, including Kurdistan); and the brown area of Palestine (excluding Haifa and Acre) would become subject to international administration, ‘the form of which is to be decided upon after consultation with Russia, and subsequently in consultation with the other allies, and the representatives of the sheriff of Mecca’ (Sayyid Hussein bin Ali). Besides carving the region into British and French ‘spheres of influence’, the arrangement specified various commercial relations and other understandings between them for the Arab lands.

  Russia’s change of status, brought on by the Revolution and the nation’s withdrawal from the war, removed it from inclusion. But when marauding Bolsheviks uncovered documents about the plans in government archives in 1917, the contents of the secret treaty were publicly revealed. The exposé embarrassed the British, since it contradicted their existing claims through Col. T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) that Arabs would receive sovereignty over Arab lands in exchange for supporting the
Allies in the war. Indeed, the treaty set aside the establishment of an independent Arab state or confederation of Arab states, contrary to what had previously been promised, giving France and Britain the rights to set boundaries within their spheres of influence, ‘as they may think fit’.

  After the war ended as planned, the terms were affirmed by the San Remo Conference of 1920 and ratified by the League of Nations in 1922. Although Sykes–Picot was intended to draw new borders according to sectarian lines, its simple straight lines also failed to take into account the actual tribal and ethnic configurations in a deeply divided region. Sykes–Picot has affected Arab–Western relations to this day.

  A portrait of Colonel Sir Mark Sykes by Leopold Pilichowski. Sykes died in 1919 at the age of 39 after contracting Spanish flu.

  Balfour Declaration

  (1917)

  A brief letter from the British Foreign Secretary to a prominent Jewish leader expresses support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ once the Ottomans are defeated in the Great War. The ‘scrap of paper’ will change history and later lead to the creation of modern Israel.

  Chaim Weizmann was a Russian-born Jewish chemist in Britain who had invented a chemical process that provided a vital ingredient needed for artillery shells, without which Britain wouldn’t have stood a chance in the deadlocked Great War against chemical-rich Germany.

  So, when the British Foreign Secretary and former Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) asked Weizmann how he wished to be compensated for his contribution to the war effort, the outspoken Zionist responded from the heart. ‘There is only one thing I want,’ he replied. ‘A national home for my people.’ Balfour knew that for Weizmann, the Jewish ‘homeland’ meant Palestine, the geographic region in Western Asia between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – the ‘Holy Land’.

  Weizmann’s advocacy of Zionism was one of the factors that influenced Balfour to draft a letter that would change the course of history. Like several other leading British statesmen of his day, Balfour was a Christian Zionist who identified with the importance of the Holy Land as a spiritual home, albeit for Christians as well as Jews, and he supported the idea of allowing the Jews to settle in their ancient homeland once Britain had defeated the Ottomans in the war. He also wanted funding for the British war effort.

  On 2 November 1917, Balfour sent a letter to Weizmann’s close friend Lord Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild, the financier who was the top leader of Britain’s Jewish community and a prominent Zionist. The letter stated the position, recently endorsed by the British cabinet, that Britain would support Zionist plans for a Jewish ‘national home’ in Palestine, provided that nothing would be done to infringe the rights of communities already existing there. Thus the reference covered both indigenous Christians and Muslims.

  The letter, which soon became famous as the Balfour Declaration, used deliberately vague language for diplomatic reasons. But its message was clear.

  The document proved prescient, because barely a month later General Sir Edmund Allenby would lead the British forces in the conquest of Jerusalem, becoming its first Christian conqueror since the Crusades. When Germany and its allies were defeated, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire that had ruled the Middle East since the 11th century would lead to a redrawing of the map. The notions floated in the Balfour Declaration would later be incorporated into both the Sèvres peace treaty of 1920 that ended the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate for Palestine of 1923, which established ‘a national home for the Jewish people’, provided that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

  The anniversary of the Declaration is commemorated in Israel as Balfour Day, and observed as a day of mourning and protest in Arab countries.

  Arthur James Balfour, the first Earl of Balfour, became one of the richest men in Britain when he inherited a £4 million fortune at the age of twenty-one.

  Balfour’s brief letter, which expressed support for ‘a national home for the Jewish people’, would lead to the creation of modern Israel.

  The telegram that changed the course of history. This encrypted message, from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German Minister to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckhardt, offered US territory to Mexico on the condition that they backed the German cause.

  The Zimmermann Telegram

  (1917)

  After British code-breakers discover a secret German plot against the still-neutral United States, and Germany’s own ambassador confirms the telegram’s authenticity, it pushes America to join the Allied cause in the Great War.

  Room 40 of the British Admiralty buzzed with excitement as a team of its best cryptologists used captured German codebooks to decipher a top-secret message dated 16 January 1917 from the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassador of Mexico. The decoded telegram revealed that Germany was planning to carry out unrestricted submarine warfare against US ships, beginning on 1 February. Germany presumed that the US would regard such attacks tantamount to a declaration of war, so if hostilities ensued, the German ambassador was instructed to approach Mexico’s president with a proposal: Germany would offer Mexico a reward of money plus the territories of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas in exchange for becoming an ally of the Axis powers against the US. That way, the US would be too busy dealing with Mexico to focus on the war in Europe.

  The Zimmermann telegram was hot stuff. But the officer in charge of the intelligence division, Captain Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, held back from alerting even his own superiors, fearing that any such disclosure would reveal Britain’s code-breaking ability and hamstring his unit’s future intelligence activities in the war. So, incredibly, before finally sharing the telegram with anyone, Hall waited for 20 days. By then the German Empire had indeed already commenced unrestricted submarine warfare, which had resulted in the US breaking off diplomatic relations with Germany. In an effort to protect his intelligence, Hall scrambled to concoct an elaborate cover story that would explain how Britain had obtained the text.

  On 19 February the decoded telegram was finally shown to an official of the American Embassy in London. Within days, British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour reported to President Woodrow Wilson regarding the telegram, and Wilson alerted the press. Some editors were wary of falling prey to a propaganda ploy or getting drawn into another ‘newspaper war’. But any such reservations were dispelled by Zimmermann himself, who told an American reporter on 3 March, ‘I cannot deny it. It is true.’ The German also gave a speech admitting the telegram was genuine.

  As a result, and in the face of Germany’s deadly submarine attacks on passenger and merchant vessels flying the American flag, American public opinion became inflamed. On 6 April 1917, Congress formally declared war on Germany.

  The Zimmermann telegram entered the history books. A copy of the version shared with the United States is held in the US National Archives. The original records from Room 40 are in Britain’s National Archives. According to David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers, ‘No other single cryptanalysis has had such enormous consequences.’

  Wilson’s 14 Points

  (1918)

  Speaking before a joint session of Congress, President Woodrow Wilson offers his high-minded and detailed plan for ending World War I and establishing a new international order that can ensure postwar peace – but how will the world’s powers (and his own country) respond?

  By January 1918 the Great War had been raging for three-and-a-half years and the US was nearing the end of its first year of costly combat. Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution had also made the need for peace all the more pressing as far as the Western Powers were concerned.

  President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), a former president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, had already convened a group of experts know
n as The Inquiry to advise him on economic, social and political factors that might come up in peace discussions, so he was equipped with a huge volume of foreign policy analysis. Wilson tapped these resources to lay the groundwork for an ambitious blueprint for world peace. He also enlisted the aid of the intellectual journalist Walter Lippmann, who, as an assistant to the Secretary of War, helped him craft a major political speech.

  On 8 January 1918, the President addressed Congress on ‘War Aims and Peace Terms’ by calling for 14 points as ‘the only possible programme, as we see it.’ Confronting what he perceived as the causes for the World War, Wilson responded with a detailed list of proposed solutions, including the abolition of secret treaties; absolute freedom of the seas; free trade; reduced armaments; ‘an absolutely impartial adjustment in colonial claims’ in the interests of both native peoples and colonists; evacuation and restoration of all Russian territory, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro; readjustment of the Italian frontiers; opportunities for autonomous development for the peoples of Austria-Hungary; secure sovereignty for the Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire; establishment of an independent Poland; and a league of nations to enforce the peace.

  ‘It will be our wish and purpose,’ Wilson said,

  that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world.