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October 11, 1922

Armistice of Mudanya

The agreement that ended the fighting carries no Greek signature. Athens accepted it three days after it was signed.

Four generals, no Greek delegate

At Mudanya on the Sea of Marmara on 11 October 1922, İsmet Pasha signed an armistice for the Ankara government with the British, French and Italian military representatives — Generals Charles Harington, Georges Charpy and Ernesto Mombelli — after negotiations held from 3 to 11 October.

Greece did not sign. Its representatives had not participated directly in the talks, and the Greek government accepted the armistice on 14 October.

Contemporary reports differ over whether the final signing happened shortly before midnight on 10 October or before dawn on the 11th; the accepted treaty date is 11 October.

Eastern Thrace, without another battle

The terms required the Greek army to evacuate Eastern Thrace within fifteen days, with civil administration passing to Turkey under temporary Allied supervision over the thirty days after that.

The agreement converted Turkey's battlefield victory in Anatolia into a commitment that Eastern Thrace would be returned without another Turkish–Greek battle there.

It entered into force at midnight on 14–15 October, once Greece had accepted.

An armistice, not the settlement

This was not the Treaty of Lausanne. Lausanne was signed on 24 July 1923 and the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed separately on 29 October 1923, so Lausanne could not have recognised an already existing republic.

Greece did not return to its pre-war borders either. It kept Western Thrace, acquired after the First World War, while surrendering Eastern Thrace, and Lausanne adjusted the border near Karaağaç.

The compulsory population-exchange convention was a separate instrument signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923, and it expressly exempted established Greeks of Constantinople and Muslims of Western Thrace.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The convention is formally dated 11 October 1922. Greek accounts may also give 28 September under the Julian calendar then used in Greece.
Contemporary reports differ over whether the final signing occurred shortly before midnight on 10 October or before dawn on 11 October, but the accepted treaty date is 11 October.
Calling 11 October the exact day the war 'ended' is imprecise: Greece accepted on 14 October, the armistice took effect on 15 October, and the final peace treaty was signed in 1923.

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November 15, 1923

Rentenmark

The first Rentenmark notes were dated 1 November. A printers' strike meant nobody could spend one until the fifteenth.

One new mark for a trillion old ones

The Deutsche Rentenbank first placed Rentenmark notes into circulation on 15 November 1923. The first series was dated 1 November, but production had been delayed by a strike at the state printing works.

One Rentenmark was valued at one trillion Papiermark, and one U.S. dollar was set equal to 4.20 Rentenmark. In mid-November a loaf of bread cost more than 230 billion Papiermark.

Papiermark notes did not disappear that day; they continued circulating while the limited supply of new notes was introduced.

Backed by farms and factories

Germany lacked sufficient gold reserves, so the Rentenbank's capital was secured through compulsory charges on agricultural, industrial, commercial and business property. The Rentenmark was not conventionally backed by redeemable gold.

Issue was capped at 3.2 billion Rentenmark. Hans Luther as Reich finance minister and Hjalmar Schacht as currency commissioner drove the stabilisation; Schacht was not yet Reichsbank president on 15 November.

Gustav Stresemann led the coalition government under which the reform occurred, but he did not personally abolish the Papiermark.

"Height of hyperinflation" is a label, not a measurement

15 November is solid as the date of the Rentenmark's first issue, not as a uniquely measurable single-day peak of inflation.

The familiar 4.2-trillion-Papiermark dollar quotation follows from the reform parities, and Bundesbank material dates general conversion at one trillion to one from 20 November — so pinning the fully stabilised dollar rate to 15 November alone conflates stages of the reform.

By the Bundesbank's calculation, inflation reduced 154 billion pre-inflation marks of German war debt to the purchasing equivalent of 15.4 pfennigs.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The date 15 November is solid for the Rentenmark's first issue, not for a uniquely measurable single-day 'height' of inflation.
The familiar figure of 4.2 trillion Papiermark per dollar follows from the reform parities. Bundesbank material dates general conversion at that ratio from 20 November, so attaching the fully stabilized dollar rate exclusively to 15 November conflates stages of the reform.

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April 6, 1924

1924 Italian general election

A law triggered by 25 percent of the vote handed the leading list two-thirds of every seat in the Chamber.

Two-thirds by statute

On 6 April 1924, Italian men voted for all 535 members of the Chamber of Deputies, in the first and only general election conducted under the Acerbo Law.

Mussolini's National List took 4,305,936 votes — 60.09 percent of the 7,165,502 valid votes and the largest national total — clearing the law's 25-percent threshold.

The Acerbo bonus then awarded the main National List 356 of the 535 seats, two-thirds of the Chamber, regardless of its actual vote share.

Not the Fascist Party, and not a free vote

The National List was not identical to the National Fascist Party. It was a broader government coalition of Fascists, nationalists, individual liberals and conservatives, former Popular Party figures and other pro-government candidates.

A separate pro-government National List bis contested minority seats and won nineteen of them with 347,552 votes. Combining the two lists is where the frequently quoted 64.9 percent comes from.

Voting followed a campaign marked by intimidation and violence by Fascist squads directed against socialists, Catholics and other opposition groups.

What Matteotti told the Chamber

Giacomo Matteotti, secretary of the Unitary Socialist Party, was re-elected. On 30 May he denounced the violence and electoral abuses and sought annulment of the majority's election, telling Parliament that Fascist monitors had entered voting booths and that batches of preference votes appeared to have been written by the same hand.

The Acerbo condition is often stated incompletely: the list had to exceed 25 percent and be the nationally most-voted list, so not just any party over the threshold received the bonus.

Mussolini's speech of 3 January 1925 assumed "political, moral, and historical" responsibility for what had happened; it was not a confession that he personally ordered Matteotti's murder.

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October 1924

Taung Child

The famous skull on the fireplace mantel was not the Taung Child. It was the earlier monkey fossil that started the search.

October is not established

The listing dates the discovery to October 1924, but no reliable evidence fixes the quarry recovery to that month. A recent historical reassessment places the limeworker M. de Bruyn's find in late October or sometime in November.

De Bruyn recovered two matching fossil-bearing blocks while blasting limestone at the Buxton Limeworks near Taung, and recognised that the natural brain cast differed from the baboon fossils routinely blasted out there.

Quarry manager A. E. Spiers showed the pieces to a visiting Wits geologist, Robert B. Young, who selected them and brought the critical material back to Johannesburg.

What reached Dart, and when

The specimen came into the hands of the anatomist Raymond Dart at the University of the Witwatersrand at the end of November, conventionally dated 28 November 1924. He matched the natural endocast to a face still embedded in breccia.

He spent weeks freeing it; by 23 December he could see the face from the front. He posted his manuscript to Nature on 6 January 1925, and it appeared on 7 February under the name Australopithecus africanus.

Published accounts conflict over whether Young personally carried the crucial pieces or they arrived among crates sent to Dart, and Dart's much later memoir obscured Young's role.

Four claims that do not hold

The fossil displayed on the Izod mantelpiece was an extinct monkey or baboon skull, not the Taung Child. Josephine Salmons showed Dart that earlier fossil and so began the chain, but she did not recognise or deliver the hominin specimen.

Dart did not excavate the fossil; quarry workers blasted it out. It consists principally of a juvenile face, mandible and natural endocast rather than a skeleton, and its most frequently cited reconstructed endocranial volume is about 404 cubic centimetres, not a species-level 400–500 range.

Dart's 1925 paper proposed an extinct human-like ape intermediate between living anthropoids and humans, and the evidence he cited for upright posture was specifically the forward position of the foramen magnum.

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Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1924-11.

What the sources leave uncertain

No reliable evidence fixes the quarry recovery to October as a whole or to a particular October day. A recent historical reassessment places de Bruyn's find in late October or sometime in November.
The specimen's arrival in Dart's hands is better documented at the end of November, conventionally 28 November 1924.
Published accounts conflict over whether Young personally carried the crucial pieces or they arrived among crates sent to Dart, and Dart's much later memoir obscured Young's role.
The 'discovery' was a chain of events: quarry recovery, Young's selection and transport, Dart's recognition and preparation, and the 1925 scientific announcement.

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January 3, 1925

Speech of 3 January 1925

He read out the constitutional article under which the Chamber could accuse a minister — and then dared the deputies to use it against him.

A dare, from the government bench

On Saturday 3 January 1925, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini addressed the Chamber of Deputies of the Kingdom of Italy in Rome. The Chamber's official historical portal dates the sitting and preserves its stenographic record.

He invoked Article 47 of the Albertine Statute — the provision under which the Chamber could bring a formal accusation against a minister — and challenged the deputies to use it.

He defended Fascism against the charge that it was a criminal association, and said that if that premise were accepted, he was its leader.

Responsibility, precisely worded

Mussolini assumed political, moral and historical responsibility for what Fascism had done. He did not assume material responsibility for personally ordering Giacomo Matteotti's murder, and the passage is routinely reported as a confession that it was not.

Matteotti, the opposition deputy kidnapped and murdered by Fascists in June 1924, was the crisis the speech answered. Cesare Rossi's newly published memorandum had implicated Mussolini's circle in organised political violence.

Three days earlier, 33 Fascist militia consuls had confronted Mussolini and demanded that he crush the opposition.

Forty-eight hours

He warned that the political situation would be resolved throughout Italy within forty-eight hours. That night, Interior Minister Luigi Federzoni sent instructions to prefects to restrict opposition organisations, meetings and newspapers.

Arrests, searches, newspaper seizures and closures followed within days, converting the threat into an overt national crackdown.

Treating the speech as the exact instant dictatorship began is a historical periodisation: repression accelerated immediately, while the legal architecture of dictatorship was enacted over the following months and years.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The date and location are firmly established by the Chamber’s official record.
Accounts often say Mussolini “confessed” to Matteotti’s murder. His words assumed political, moral, and historical responsibility for Fascist conduct; they were not an admission that he personally ordered or physically participated in the killing.
Calling the speech the exact instant dictatorship began is a historical periodization. Repression accelerated immediately, while the legal architecture of dictatorship was enacted over the following months and years.

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October 2, 1925

John Logie Baird

The first face the apparatus rendered clearly belonged to a ventriloquist's dummy — a painted head could endure lighting that made a person recoil.

Stooky Bill, then a clerk from downstairs

On 2 October 1925, in his attic laboratory at 22 Frith Street in Soho, London, John Logie Baird reproduced an image with gradations of light and shade rather than the crude silhouettes his equipment had previously produced.

The first subject was the head of a ventriloquist's dummy known as Stooky Bill, whose painted face tolerated the very strong lighting better than a person could. The mechanical apparatus produced a recognisable face with tones and detail.

Baird then hurried downstairs and brought up William Edward Taynton, a 20-year-old office worker from a business in the building.

Half a crown to stay put

When Taynton moved away from the intense lamps the picture disappeared. Baird paid him half a crown — two shillings and sixpence — to remain in position, and Taynton's recognisable face then appeared on the receiver.

The reported image rate was five pictures per second. This was mechanical television using rotating scanning discs, not the later fully electronic form.

Sources disagree on the line count: several technical and biographical accounts say 30 lines, while the Science Museum's reconstruction and some later accounts say 32.

A private test between two rooms

Nothing was broadcast. Transmitter and receiver stood in Baird's own laboratory, and the widely cited public scientific demonstration came at the Royal Institution on 26 January 1926.

The "first television" label depends on defining television as a recognisable live image with tonal gradation; earlier systems, Baird's included, had already transmitted silhouettes and crude shapes.

His biographers note that the precise final adjustment responsible for the breakthrough is unknown.

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What the sources leave uncertain

Sources consistently support 2 October 1925, but disagree on the precise line count. Several technical and biographical sources say 30 lines; the Science Museum’s reconstruction and some later accounts say 32 lines. The fact sheet therefore does not treat either number as definitively verified for this particular experiment.
The “first television” label depends on defining television as a recognizable live image with tonal gradation. Earlier systems, including Baird’s, had already transmitted silhouettes and crude shapes.

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May 20, 1927

Spirit of St. Louis

Car headlights on the roads near Le Bourget helped him find the landing field in the dark, after more than 33 hours awake in an unheated cockpit.

Off Roosevelt Field, alone

On the morning of 20 May 1927, Charles Lindbergh took off alone from Roosevelt Field on Long Island in the single-engine Ryan NYP monoplane Spirit of St. Louis, bound nonstop for Paris. He was 25, a former barnstormer and airmail pilot.

The aircraft carried 1,704 litres of fuel — so much that Lindbergh could not see directly forward and had to use side windows and a periscope.

He flew through the night on compass, stars and dead reckoning, meeting fog, rain, sleet, cold and low cloud over the Atlantic, sometimes only metres above the waves.

Le Bourget, 10:22 p.m. the next day

He landed at Le Bourget outside Paris at 10:22 p.m. local time on 21 May, after 33 hours 30 minutes in the air over a ratified distance of 5,809 kilometres.

A crowd estimated at 150,000 surged around the aircraft and carried him away from the field, turning a little-known airmail pilot into an international celebrity on landing.

A sealed barograph carried aboard recorded altitude changes and helped officials verify that the flight had been nonstop; the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale ratified it as a straight-line distance-without-landing world record.

Which first this actually was

It was not the first nonstop transatlantic flight of any kind. John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown had crossed from Newfoundland to Ireland with a two-person crew in June 1919.

Lindbergh's firsts were the solo nonstop crossing and the first nonstop New York–Paris flight. The listing's single date is also incomplete: he took off on 20 May and landed on the evening of the 21st.

Raymond Orteig's $25,000 prize, the decorations and the aviation boom came afterwards, not during the flight.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The event spans two calendar dates. This sheet uses 1927-05-20 because that was the takeoff date; the achievement was completed on 1927-05-21.
Authoritative sources variously give 33 hours 28 minutes or round the duration to 33 hours 30 minutes. The FAI and modern Smithsonian summaries use 33 hours 30 minutes.
The Library of Congress has one catalog description giving 21–22 May, but contemporary records, the Smithsonian, FAI, and the aircraft’s log establish 20–21 May.

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September 7, 1927

Philo Farnsworth

The first image was not a face or a landscape. It was a line that rotated when an assistant turned a glass slide in the next room.

A line that moved when the slide moved

On 7 September 1927, at his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco, the 21-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth switched on an experimental television system built around his image dissector camera tube.

The tube converted an optical test image into an electronic signal sent to a receiver in another room, and a fuzzy line became distinct as the equipment was adjusted.

The test object was a backlit glass slide bearing a simple straight-line or geometric pattern; rotating or moving it made the received image move too, showing that the receiver was reproducing the optical input rather than generating a stationary trace.

Who was in the room

Cliff Gardner, Farnsworth's brother-in-law, had learned glassblowing specifically to fabricate the experimental vacuum tubes, and he manipulated the test slide. Elma "Pem" Farnsworth kept records and helped construct tube components.

The investor George Everson watched the test. He and Leslie Gorrell — professional fundraisers who became investors and business partners, not philanthropists — had supplied $6,000 in initial backing.

The dollar sign often described as television's first image belongs to a later demonstration for backers impatient to see a return.

"First fully electronic" depends on the definition

This was a private laboratory proof, not a public or press demonstration. Farnsworth's documented press demonstration followed on 3 September 1928, and live images of people came in 1929.

His system is credited with electronic image capture and electronic display, unlike systems using a mechanical scanning disc. But Kenjiro Takayanagi had displayed an image on a cathode-ray tube in December 1926 with a mechanical camera-side scanner, and earlier work by Vladimir Zworykin makes broad priority claims contentious.

The Patent Office examiner's priority decision in interference No. 64,027 was issued on 27 July 1935, after the final hearing on 24 April 1934.

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Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

The date 7 September 1927 is strongly supported by the Farnsworth archive and Television Academy oral history. An Indiana state-history page gives 27 September, but that conflicts with the principal archival record.
Accounts describe the displayed form as a straight line, the edge of a black triangle, or a line painted on a glass slide. These likely describe the same or successive geometric tests, but the surviving narratives are not identical.
The “first fully electronic television” designation is definition-dependent. Farnsworth’s system is credited with electronic image capture and electronic display, unlike systems with a mechanical scanning disc. Kenjiro Takayanagi had displayed an image on a cathode-ray tube in December 1926, but his camera-side scanner remained mechanical.
Earlier work by Vladimir Zworykin and other experimenters also makes broad claims that Farnsworth simply “invented television” historically contentious.

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October 1927

Complementarity (physics)

Einstein missed Bohr's first complementarity lecture at Como. He met the interpretation face to face a month later, in Brussels.

Brussels was not the debut

During the Fifth Solvay Conference, held in Brussels from 24 to 29 October 1927, Niels Bohr repeated and expanded his recently developed account of complementarity before physicists including Albert Einstein.

It was not the principle's first public airing. Bohr had spoken about it at Como on 16 September, and the Brussels version was the more developed one.

The consulted proceedings and archival summaries do not establish a single calendar day for Bohr's Solvay presentation.

What complementarity claimed

Bohr argued that a quantum phenomenon can require mutually exclusive experimental arrangements and classical descriptions — wave and particle descriptions being the familiar example — to give a complete account of the available observations.

That is broader than the slogan that something is simply both a wave and a particle: Bohr tied the applicable description to the complete experimental arrangement. His principle is related to Heisenberg's uncertainty relation historically and conceptually, but the two are not interchangeable.

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz presided over the conference, which was officially devoted to electrons and photons.

Still under construction

Surviving records indicate that interaction with colleagues around the Solvay meeting influenced Bohr's final formulation. Archival research characterises the Como account as embryonic and the Brussels account as improved, with the published version continuing to evolve into 1928.

Einstein, who had missed Como, encountered the interpretation at Brussels and challenged the emerging orthodox reading of quantum mechanics. The meeting did not settle the interpretation or convert him.

The two continued the argument at later Solvay meetings and in later publications, including the 1935 EPR exchange.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The conference dates are secure, but the consulted proceedings and archival summaries do not establish a single calendar day for Bohr's Solvay presentation; the best-supported ISO precision is therefore 1927-10.
Historians dispute how fully developed complementarity was before Brussels. Archival research characterizes the Como account as embryonic and the Brussels account as improved, with the published formulation continuing to evolve into 1928.

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1927

Shanghai massacre

The first attackers wore workers' blue clothing and armbands bearing the character for "labour" — while assaulting actual union offices.

Before dawn, in borrowed clothes

Before dawn on 12 April 1927, more than 1,000 armed Kuomintang men wearing blue labourers' clothing and armbands marked with the character for labour attacked Shanghai General Labor Union offices around the Chinese-administered parts of the city.

National Revolutionary Army troops then arrived ostensibly to mediate, demanded that the union militias surrender their weapons, and opened fire when workers resisted disarmament.

Union leaders were seized as Chiang Kai-shek's conservative Kuomintang faction moved to destroy the CCP-organised labour movement that had helped take the Chinese city from warlord forces in March.

Party, army, business and the Green Gang

The operation combined party, military, business and organised-crime power. Shanghai underworld networks including the Green Gang, with figures such as Du Yuesheng, cooperated with Chiang's faction against the radical unions — gangs that had previously cooperated with parts of the labour movement.

One scholarly synthesis reports about 300 deaths in the 12 April attacks. The union called a strike and protest for the next day; troops fired into the demonstrators, killing at least 100 and wounding several hundred.

That synthesis places 27th Army troops in the 12 April disarmament and 26th Army troops in the 13 April shooting, where shorter accounts assign the whole operation to the 26th Army.

Where the listing overreaches

The First United Front did not end that morning. The left-KMT government at Wuhan continued cooperating with Communists until the crisis of July 1927, so the alliance's endpoint is not simply 12 April — and the front itself was sealed at the KMT congress of January 1924, not in 1923.

Nor did an uninterrupted civil war begin here. The Chinese Civil War is conventionally dated to 1927, often specifically to the Nanchang Uprising of 1 August, and major KMT–CCP hostilities were later interrupted by the wartime alliance against Japan.

Casualty totals vary sharply because sources count different time spans, locations and categories — killed, wounded, executed, arrested or missing.

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Date corrected. The research places this at 1927-04-12.

What the sources leave uncertain

The date and basic sequence are secure, but casualty totals vary sharply because sources count different time spans, locations and categories—killed, wounded, executed, arrested or missing.
A scholarly synthesis identifies 27th Army troops in the 12 April disarmament and 26th Army troops in the 13 April shooting. Many shorter accounts assign the entire operation to the 26th Army.
The Shanghai purge gravely ruptured the alliance, but the left-KMT government at Wuhan continued cooperating with Communists until the crisis of July 1927. The exact endpoint of the First United Front is therefore not simply 12 April.
The Chinese Civil War is conventionally dated to 1927, often specifically to the Nanchang Uprising of 1 August. Calling the Shanghai massacre itself the first battle of one uninterrupted war through 1949 compresses a disputed and intermittent chronology.

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October 28, 1928

Youth Pledge

Indonesia's future anthem entered the room not as a mass chorus but through one man's violin.

Three venues over two days

On 28 October 1928, the second day of the Second Youth Congress, delegates met in the morning at the Oost-Java Bioscoop in Batavia to discuss national education, and later at the Indonesische Clubgebouw at Kramat 106 to discuss nationalism, democracy and scouting.

The congress had opened the day before and used three venues in all; it was not a single meeting held only at Kramat 106. That house belonged to Sie Kong Lian and had been rented by medical and law students as lodging and study space since 1908.

The Perhimpunan Pelajar-Pelajar Indonesia, an interregional student association, had organised the congress to overcome regional divisions.

One homeland, one nation, one language

At the final session, congress chair Sugondo Djojopuspito read a resolution formulated by the secretary, Mohammad Yamin, affirming one homeland, one nation and a unifying language: Indonesia.

The adopted text did not promise independence. It asked Indonesian nationalist associations — nine were named in the decision — to adopt its principles, and called for it to be published in newspapers and read out at association meetings.

The document remembered as an oath, Sumpah Pemuda, was formally titled the Decision of the Congress.

Played, not adopted

Before the congress closed, Wage Rudolf Supratman performed his composition "Indonesia Raya" on the violin.

It was performed, not adopted there as a national anthem; participant testimony cited by scholarship rejects the later adoption story. "Indonesia Raya" became the national anthem when Indonesia proclaimed independence in 1945.

Nor did the congress immediately unify the population of the Dutch East Indies. Scholarship finds continuing secular–Islamic disagreements among youth movements, and wider acceptance of the national symbols only later in the 1930s.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The date and resolution are well documented. Some later accounts disagree about whether anyone quietly sang during Supratman's performance, but the official museum account securely states that he played the song on violin.
The label Sumpah Pemuda, or Youth Pledge, became attached to a document formally titled the Decision of the Congress; modern wording and punctuation sometimes differ from the 1928 text.

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February 11, 1929

Lateran Treaty

Even after the signing ceremony, Vatican City did not yet legally exist. Another 116 days passed before the ratifications were exchanged.

Three instruments at the Lateran Palace

On 11 February 1929, at the Lateran Palace in Rome, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri signed for Pope Pius XI and Benito Mussolini signed for King Victor Emmanuel III and the Kingdom of Italy.

They signed three linked instruments — a political treaty, a financial convention and a concordat — which together make up the Lateran Pacts. Calling them a single treaty obscures that structure.

The building is what gave the pacts their name.

What the treaty recognised

The treaty recognised the international sovereignty of the Holy See and provided for Vatican City under its exclusive and absolute sovereign jurisdiction — 0.44 square kilometres, or 44 hectares.

The Holy See in turn recognised the Kingdom of Italy with Rome as its capital, and both parties declared the Roman Question definitively and irrevocably settled after some sixty years.

The Holy See and Vatican City are not synonymous: the Holy See is the treaty party and international sovereign, while Vatican City is the territorial state created to guarantee its independence.

Signed, but not in force

The impasse had a signed settlement by the end of the day, but the instruments still awaited ratification. Vatican City did not legally come into being on 11 February; the treaty entered into force when ratifications were exchanged on 7 June 1929.

The attached financial convention settled claims arising from the events of 1870 with 750,000,000 lire in cash and 1,000,000,000 lire nominal value in 5 percent Italian consolidated bonds.

Extraterritorial privileges granted to specified Holy See properties in Italy did not make those buildings part of Vatican City's sovereign territory.

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