1911

• In a nearly bloodless coup, a coalition of revolutionary groups rallying around Sun Yat-Sen to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and establish the Republic of China.
• Flooding of China's Yangzi River kills more than 100,000 people.
• Italy launches Italo-Turkish War by invading Libya, which it will succeed in conquering from the Ottoman Empire the following year.
• The Mona Lisa is stolen by Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia (who simply walks out the door with the painting under his coat) at the behest of con man Eduardo de Valfierno, who hopes to make money selling forgeries of the painting as the stolen original.
• 145 people - mostly young women immigrants - are killed in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City, leading to the establishment of new fire and building codes across the nation.
• The US Supreme Court finds the Standard Oil Company in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and orders its breakup into 34 new companies, including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Chevron, Arco, and Conoco.
• English physicist Ernest Rutherford deduces the existence of atomic nuclei from the deflection of particles in what is now known simply as the "Rutherford Experiment".
• Dutch physicist Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity.
• Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen becomes the first to reach the South Pole.
• Yale historian Hiram Bingham rediscovers Machu Picchu.
• Ishi, the last Native American still living as a hunter-gatherer, wanders out of the forest near Oroville, California following the murder of his family by Indian Hunters.
• Monarch, the last remaining California Grizzly Bear, dies in captivity in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
• Eugene Ely becomes the first man to land an airplane on a ship when he lands on a specially constructed platform on the armored cruiser USS Philadelphia.
• Glenn Curtiss invents the aileron, which helps him conduct the first successful flight of a seaplane.
• Ray Harroun wins the inaugural running of the Indianapolis 500 with an average speed of 74.59 mph.
• Irving Berlin pens "Alexander's Ragtime Band".

These people were born in 1911:

• Blues deity Robert Johnson
• Future US President Ronald Reagan
• Auschwitz concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele
• Legendary American mandolinist Bill Monroe, the creator of bluegrass music
• Polish poet Czesiaw Milosz
• Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz
• American dramatist Tennessee Williams
• Babe Didrikson Zaharias, widely held to be the greatest female althlete of all time
• Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin Jack Ruby
• American actress Lucille Ball
• American statesman Hubert H. Humphrey, future vice president under Lyndon Johnson
• Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan, who famously declared, "The medium is the message"
• Vietnamese communist leader Le Duc Tho
• American poet Elizabeth Bishop
• American science fiction author and founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard
• American horror movie star Vincent Price
• American actress and dancer Ginger Rogers, born Virginia Katherine McMath.
• American Western film star Roy Rogers
• Mexican film legend Cantinflas
• American actress Jean Harlow, born Harlean Carpentier
• Legendary American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson
• American gag musician Spike Jones
• American baseball great Josh Gibson
• American baseball great Hank Greenberg

These people died in 1911:

• Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, assassinated in a Kiev opera house by revolutionary Dmitry Bogrov
• Austrian composer Gustav Mahler
• American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer
• English dramatist William Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan
• Proactive American temperance advocate Carrie Nation
• Dutch chemist Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, winner of the inaugural Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1901.
• American author and illustrator Howard Pyle

1910 - 1911 - 1912