April 11, 1921 - Iowa became the first state to impose a cigarette tax.

May 3, 1921 - West Virginia imposed the first state sales tax.

June 25, 1921 - Samuel Gompers, English immigrant who spent a good chunk of his childhood working alongside his father in New York's cigar shops, seized his fortieth term as the President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Rose to prominence in the cigar makers' union, 1886 - spearheaded the cigar union's departure from the Knights of Labor, opting instead to form a new union, the American Federation of Labor. Eschewed labor's left leaning tendencies in favor of more conservative tactics.

October 23, 1921 - In the French town of Chalons-sur-Marne, an American officer, Sergeant Edward Younger, selects the body of the first "Unknown Soldier" to be honored among the approximately 77,000 United States servicemen killed on the Western Front during World War I. According to the official records of the Army Graves Registration Service deposited in the U.S. National Archives in Washington, four bodies were transported to Chalons from the cemeteries of Aisne-Marne, Somme, Meuse-Argonne and Saint-Mihiel. All were great battlegrounds, and the latter two regions were the sites of two offensive operations in which American troops took a leading role in the decisive summer and fall of 1918. As the service records stated, the identity of the bodies was completely unknown: "The original records showing the internment of these bodies were searched and the four bodies selected represented the remains of soldiers of which there was absolutely no indication as to name, rank, organization or date of death." Bearing the inscription "An Unknown American who gave his life in the World War," the chosen casket traveled to Paris and then to Le Havre, France, where it would board the cruiser Olympia for the voyage across the Atlantic. Once back in the United States, the Unknown Soldier was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, DC.

November 23, 1921 - U.S. President Warren Harding signed the Willis Campell Act, better known as the anti-beer bill. It forbids doctors to prescribe beer or liquor for medicinal purposes, which was a loophole in Prohibition.

December 6, 1921 - The Irish Free State, composing four-fifths of Ireland, was declared; part of an historic peace agreement with Great Britain which had rules over the island of Ireland since the 12th century, and Queen Elizabeth I of England encouraged the large-scale immigration of Scottish Protestants in the 16th century. 1916 - Irish nationalists launched the Easter Rising against British rule in Dublin. The rebellion was crushed, but widespread agitation for independence continued. 1919 - the Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched a widespread and effective guerrilla campaign against British forces. 1921 - a cease-fire was declared;  January 1922 - a faction of Irish nationalists signed a peace treaty with Britain, calling for the partition of Ireland, with the south becoming autonomous and the six northern counties of the island remaining in the United Kingdom; December 6, 1922 - civil war broke out and ended with the victory of the Irish Free State over the Irish Republican forces in 1923. A constitution adopted by the Irish people in 1937 declared Ireland to be "a sovereign, independent, democratic state," and the Irish Free State was renamed Ýire; remained neutral during World War II, and in 1949 the Republic of Ireland Act severed the last remaining link with the Commonwealth.

December 23, 1921 - President Warren G. Harding freed Socialist Eugene Debs and 23 other political prisoners.

January 10, 1922 - Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein in 1905 (political party dedicated to independence for all of Ireland; became the unofficial political wing of militant Irish groups in their struggle to throw off British rule) and one of the architects of the 1921 peace treaty with Britain, is elected president of the newly established Irish Free State. Died in the same year just as civil war broke out in Ireland over the partition. The cause of death was ruled overwork. William Cosgrave succeeded him as Dail Eireann leader; 1923 - the Irish Free State, which later grew into the modern Republic of Ireland, defeated Eamon De Valera's Irish Republican forces. Several years later, the IRA was reorganized as an underground movement that continued its struggle for northern independence.

February 27, 1922 - The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, providing for female suffrage, was unanimously declared constitutional.

February 27, 1922 - Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover calls a conference to allocate radio wavelengths (500 stations broadcasting on the same wavelength); 1921 - Americans spent about $10 million on radio sets and parts.

April 3, 1922 - In the USSR, Joseph Stalin was appointed as general secretary of the Communist Party.

May 30, 1922 - Former President William Howard Taft, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, dedicates the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall in Washington, DC.

August 22, 1922 - Irish revolutionary and Sinn Fein (unofficial political wing of militant Irish groups in their struggle to throw off British rule) politician Michael Collins, finance minister in Arthur Griffith's newly established Irish Free State, is killed by Republican extremists in an ambush in west County Cork, Ireland.

October 28, 1922 - Fascism came to Italy as Benito Mussolini took control of the government; October 31, 1922 - Benito Mussolini (Il Duce) becomes premier of Italy.

November 17, 1922 - Siberia voted for union with the USSR.

November 17, 1922 - Kemal Atatürk deposed last sultan of Turkey, Mehmed VI; flees to Malta on British warship.

December 20, 1922 - The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed when 15 eastern European republics merged to form the USSR.

December 30, 1922 - Vladimir Lenin proclaimed the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; comprised a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation (divided in 1936 into the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian republics). Also known as the Soviet Union, the new communist state was the successor to the Russian Empire and the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism. In the USSR, all levels of government were controlled by the Communist Party, and the party's politburo, with its increasingly powerful general secretary, effectively ruled the country. Soviet industry was owned and managed by the state, and agricultural land was divided into state-run collective farms; eventually encompassed 15 republics--Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; 1991 - the Soviet Union was dissolved following the collapse of its communist government.

January 2, 1923 - Albert Fall, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior (responsible for managing the government's vast western land holdings in the public interest), resigns in response to public outrage over the Teapot Dome scandal (ostensibly acting to ensure adequate oil supplies for the navy in the event of war, Fall set aside a large oil deposit in Wyoming known as Teapot Dome, then secretly began to sign leases with big western oilmen allowing them to exploit the supposed reserve - on the verge of bankruptcy, desperate for money, Fall had accepted "loans" of about $400,000 from the same oil men he granted access to Teapot Dome, two of whom were old friends from his New Mexico mining days). Fall's resignation illuminated a deeply corrupt relationship between western developers and the federal government.

January 10, 1923 - Four years after the end of World War I, President Warren G. Harding orders U.S. occupation troops stationed in Germany to return home (after four years of contending with a resentful German populace re: reparations associated with the Treaty of Versailles).

March 5, 1923 - Montana and Nevada adopted legislation that paved the way for state-funded pensions for elderly citizens; handed "qualifying" people over the age of 70 as much as $25; nation's first old age pension laws, pre-dating the federal Social Security Act of 1935.