January
Main article: January 1912
January 1 – The Republic of China is proclaimed.
January 4 – The Scout Association is incorporated throughout the British Commonwealth by Royal Charter.
January 5 (Old Style December 23, 1911)
Prague Party Conference: Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party break away from the rest of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet opens.
January 6 – New Mexico becomes the 47th state of the United States.
January 8 – The African National Congress is founded as the South African Native National Congress at the Waaihoek Wesleyan Church in Bloemfontein to promote improved rights for black South Africans, with John Langalibalele Dube as its first president.
January 17 – British polar explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott and a team of four become the second expeditionary group to reach the South Pole.
January 22 – The Overseas Railroad opens and the first train arrives in Key West with Henry M. Flagler, the railroad's creator and owner, aboard.
January 23 – The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague.
February
Main article: February 1912
February 12 – The Manchu Qing dynasty of China comes to an end after 268 years with the abdication of Emperor Puyi in favour of the Republic of China.
February 14 – Arizona becomes the 48th U.S. state and the last of the contiguous United States which ends the American frontier.
February 24 – Battle of Beirut: Italy makes a surprise attack on the Ottoman port of Beirut, when the cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi and the gunboat Volturno bombard the harbour, killing 97 sailors and civilians.
February 29 – Serbia and Bulgaria secretly sign a treaty of alliance for a term of eight years, with each pledging to come to the defense of the other during war.
March
Main article: March 1912
March 27: Cherry trees for Washington, D.C.
March 1 – Albert Berry is reported to have made the first parachute jump from a flying airplane.
March 6 – Italian forces became the first to use airships in war, as two dirigibles dropped bombs on Turkish troops encamped at Janzur, from an altitude of 6,000 feet. March 7 – Roald Amundsen in Hobart, Tasmania, announces his success in reaching the South Pole the previous December.
March 12 – The Girl Scouts is founded by Juliette Gordon Low in Savannah, Georgia.
March 16 – Lawrence Oates, dying member of Scott's South Pole expedition, leaves the tent saying, "I am just going outside and may be some time."
March 27 – Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo gives 3,000 cherry trees to be planted in Washington, D.C., to symbolize the friendship between the two countries.
March 29 – The remaining members of Robert Falcon Scott's South Pole expedition die.
March 30 – The French Third Republic establishes the French protectorate in Morocco.
April
Main article: April 1912
April 15: The RMS Titanic sinks.
April 10 – White Star liner RMS Titanic departs from Southampton with 2225 passengers and crew on her maiden voyage bound for New York.
April 11 – RMS Titanic makes her last call, at Queenstown in Ireland.
April 14–15 – Sinking of the RMS Titanic: RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg in the northern Atlantic Ocean and sinks with the loss of 1517 lives. The wreck will not be discovered until 1985. April 16 – Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly across the English Channel.
April 17 – 500 striking gold miners in Siberia are killed or wounded by troops in the Lena massacre.
April 18 – Cunard Line vessel RMS Carpathia arrives in New York with the 708 RMS Titanic survivors.
April 20 – Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts, opens.
April 30 – Carl Laemmle founds Universal Studios as the Universal Film and Manufacturing Company in the United States.
May
Main article: May 1912
May 1 – `Abdu'l-Bahá lays the cornerstone for the Bahá'í House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois
May 5 – The Olympic Games open in Stockholm, Sweden.
May 11 – Alaska becomes a territory of the United States.
May 13 – In the United Kingdom, the Royal Flying Corps (forerunner of the Royal Air Force) is established.
May 23 – The Hamburg America Line's SS Imperator is launched in Hamburg and is the world's largest ship.
May 30 - Wilbur Wright (of the Wright brothers) dies with a case of typhoid fever.
June
Main article: June 1912
June 6 – The Novarupta volcano (290 miles (470 km) southwest of Anchorage) experiences a VEI 6 eruption; the largest eruption in the 20th century.
July
Main article: July 1912
July 1 – Harriet Quimby, who set the record as the first woman to fly the English Channel only 2 months before, dies in Squantum, Massachusetts after her brand-new two-seat Bleriot monoplane crashes, killing both Quimby and her passenger.
July 12 – United States release of Sarah Bernhardt's film Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth is influential on the development of the movie feature. Adolph Zukor, who incorporates Paramount Pictures on May 8, 1914, launches his company as the distributor. Paramount celebrates its centennial in 2012.
July 30 – Emperor Meiji of Japan dies. He is succeeded by his son Yoshihito who becomes Emperor Taishō. In Japanese History, the event marks the end of the Meiji era and the beginning of the Taishō era.
August
Main article: August 1912
August 4 – United States occupation of Nicaragua: U.S. Marines land from the USS Annapolis in Nicaragua to support the conservative government at its request. August 12 – Sultan Abd al-Hafid of Morocco abdicates.
August 21 - First Eagle Scout.
August 25 – The Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalist party, is founded.
March 7: Amundsen and the South Pole
September
Main article: September 1912
September 28 – William Christopher Handy's "Memphis Blues" is published.
October
Main article: October 1912
October 8 – The First Balkan War begins: Montenegro declares war against the Ottoman Empire.
October 10 – The Maternity Allowance Act goes into effect in Australia, but excludes minorities.
October 14 – John Flammang Schrank attempts to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt.
October 16 – Bulgarian pilots Radul Minkov and Prodan Toprakchiev perform the first bombing with an airplane in history, at the railway station of Karaagac near Edirne against Turkey.
October 17 – Krupp engineers Benno Strauss and Eduard Maurer patent austenitic stainless steel. October 18 – Italy and the Ottoman Empire sign a treaty in Ouchy near Lausanne ending the Italo-Turkish War.
October 24 – First Balkan War: Battle of Kumanovo: Serbian forces defeat the Ottoman army in Vardar Macedonia.
October
Edgar Rice Burroughs' character Tarzan first appears in Tarzan of the Apes in American pulp magazine The All-Story.
Sax Rohmer's character Fu Manchu first appears in the first story of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu in English pulp magazine Story-Teller.
November
Main article: November 1912
November 5, 1912: New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson wins U.S. presidential election
November 5 - Governor of New Jersey Woodrow Wilson wins U.S. presidential election
November 11 – William Lawrence Bragg presents his derivation of Bragg's law for the angles for coherent and incoherent scattering from a crystal lattice, creating the field of x-ray crystallography, and making possible the eventual imaging of the double helix of DNA November 28 – Albania declares independence from the Ottoman Empire.
December
Main article: December 1912
December 18 – Piltdown Man, thought to be the fossilized skull of a hitherto unknown form of early human, presented to the Geological Society of London. It is revealed to be a hoax in 1953.
December 24 – Merck files patent applications in Germany for synthesis of the entactogenic drug MDMA (Ecstasy), developed by Anton Köllisch. December 30 – The First Balkan War ends temporarily: Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia (the Balkan League countries) sign an armistice with Turkey, ending the two-month-long war.
Main article: January 1912
January 1 – The Republic of China is proclaimed.
January 4 – The Scout Association is incorporated throughout the British Commonwealth by Royal Charter.
January 5 (Old Style December 23, 1911)
Prague Party Conference: Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party break away from the rest of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet opens.
January 6 – New Mexico becomes the 47th state of the United States.
January 8 – The African National Congress is founded as the South African Native National Congress at the Waaihoek Wesleyan Church in Bloemfontein to promote improved rights for black South Africans, with John Langalibalele Dube as its first president.
January 17 – British polar explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott and a team of four become the second expeditionary group to reach the South Pole.
January 22 – The Overseas Railroad opens and the first train arrives in Key West with Henry M. Flagler, the railroad's creator and owner, aboard.
January 23 – The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague.
February
Main article: February 1912
February 12 – The Manchu Qing dynasty of China comes to an end after 268 years with the abdication of Emperor Puyi in favour of the Republic of China.
February 14 – Arizona becomes the 48th U.S. state and the last of the contiguous United States which ends the American frontier.
February 24 – Battle of Beirut: Italy makes a surprise attack on the Ottoman port of Beirut, when the cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi and the gunboat Volturno bombard the harbour, killing 97 sailors and civilians.
February 29 – Serbia and Bulgaria secretly sign a treaty of alliance for a term of eight years, with each pledging to come to the defense of the other during war.
March
Main article: March 1912
March 27: Cherry trees for Washington, D.C.
March 1 – Albert Berry is reported to have made the first parachute jump from a flying airplane.
March 6 – Italian forces became the first to use airships in war, as two dirigibles dropped bombs on Turkish troops encamped at Janzur, from an altitude of 6,000 feet. March 7 – Roald Amundsen in Hobart, Tasmania, announces his success in reaching the South Pole the previous December.
March 12 – The Girl Scouts is founded by Juliette Gordon Low in Savannah, Georgia.
March 16 – Lawrence Oates, dying member of Scott's South Pole expedition, leaves the tent saying, "I am just going outside and may be some time."
March 27 – Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo gives 3,000 cherry trees to be planted in Washington, D.C., to symbolize the friendship between the two countries.
March 29 – The remaining members of Robert Falcon Scott's South Pole expedition die.
March 30 – The French Third Republic establishes the French protectorate in Morocco.
April
Main article: April 1912
April 15: The RMS Titanic sinks.
April 10 – White Star liner RMS Titanic departs from Southampton with 2225 passengers and crew on her maiden voyage bound for New York.
April 11 – RMS Titanic makes her last call, at Queenstown in Ireland.
April 14–15 – Sinking of the RMS Titanic: RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg in the northern Atlantic Ocean and sinks with the loss of 1517 lives. The wreck will not be discovered until 1985. April 16 – Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly across the English Channel.
April 17 – 500 striking gold miners in Siberia are killed or wounded by troops in the Lena massacre.
April 18 – Cunard Line vessel RMS Carpathia arrives in New York with the 708 RMS Titanic survivors.
April 20 – Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts, opens.
April 30 – Carl Laemmle founds Universal Studios as the Universal Film and Manufacturing Company in the United States.
May
Main article: May 1912
May 1 – `Abdu'l-Bahá lays the cornerstone for the Bahá'í House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois
May 5 – The Olympic Games open in Stockholm, Sweden.
May 11 – Alaska becomes a territory of the United States.
May 13 – In the United Kingdom, the Royal Flying Corps (forerunner of the Royal Air Force) is established.
May 23 – The Hamburg America Line's SS Imperator is launched in Hamburg and is the world's largest ship.
May 30 - Wilbur Wright (of the Wright brothers) dies with a case of typhoid fever.
June
Main article: June 1912
June 6 – The Novarupta volcano (290 miles (470 km) southwest of Anchorage) experiences a VEI 6 eruption; the largest eruption in the 20th century.
July
Main article: July 1912
July 1 – Harriet Quimby, who set the record as the first woman to fly the English Channel only 2 months before, dies in Squantum, Massachusetts after her brand-new two-seat Bleriot monoplane crashes, killing both Quimby and her passenger.
July 12 – United States release of Sarah Bernhardt's film Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth is influential on the development of the movie feature. Adolph Zukor, who incorporates Paramount Pictures on May 8, 1914, launches his company as the distributor. Paramount celebrates its centennial in 2012.
July 30 – Emperor Meiji of Japan dies. He is succeeded by his son Yoshihito who becomes Emperor Taishō. In Japanese History, the event marks the end of the Meiji era and the beginning of the Taishō era.
August
Main article: August 1912
August 4 – United States occupation of Nicaragua: U.S. Marines land from the USS Annapolis in Nicaragua to support the conservative government at its request. August 12 – Sultan Abd al-Hafid of Morocco abdicates.
August 21 - First Eagle Scout.
August 25 – The Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalist party, is founded.
March 7: Amundsen and the South Pole
September
Main article: September 1912
September 28 – William Christopher Handy's "Memphis Blues" is published.
October
Main article: October 1912
October 8 – The First Balkan War begins: Montenegro declares war against the Ottoman Empire.
October 10 – The Maternity Allowance Act goes into effect in Australia, but excludes minorities.
October 14 – John Flammang Schrank attempts to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt.
October 16 – Bulgarian pilots Radul Minkov and Prodan Toprakchiev perform the first bombing with an airplane in history, at the railway station of Karaagac near Edirne against Turkey.
October 17 – Krupp engineers Benno Strauss and Eduard Maurer patent austenitic stainless steel. October 18 – Italy and the Ottoman Empire sign a treaty in Ouchy near Lausanne ending the Italo-Turkish War.
October 24 – First Balkan War: Battle of Kumanovo: Serbian forces defeat the Ottoman army in Vardar Macedonia.
October
Edgar Rice Burroughs' character Tarzan first appears in Tarzan of the Apes in American pulp magazine The All-Story.
Sax Rohmer's character Fu Manchu first appears in the first story of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu in English pulp magazine Story-Teller.
November
Main article: November 1912
November 5, 1912: New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson wins U.S. presidential election
November 5 - Governor of New Jersey Woodrow Wilson wins U.S. presidential election
November 11 – William Lawrence Bragg presents his derivation of Bragg's law for the angles for coherent and incoherent scattering from a crystal lattice, creating the field of x-ray crystallography, and making possible the eventual imaging of the double helix of DNA November 28 – Albania declares independence from the Ottoman Empire.
December
Main article: December 1912
December 18 – Piltdown Man, thought to be the fossilized skull of a hitherto unknown form of early human, presented to the Geological Society of London. It is revealed to be a hoax in 1953.
December 24 – Merck files patent applications in Germany for synthesis of the entactogenic drug MDMA (Ecstasy), developed by Anton Köllisch. December 30 – The First Balkan War ends temporarily: Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia (the Balkan League countries) sign an armistice with Turkey, ending the two-month-long war.