The women's league calls a halt and counts up five years

In the October and November number of La Voix des Femmes in 1940, Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau announced that the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale would withdraw its forces. The league had been organising for five years. In that time the Dominican army had massacred Haitians along the border, economic inequality had deepened, and women still held no vote and no standing in the government of the country. Madeleine was careful about what the announcement meant. The leaders had not been dazzled by what they had built, and they had not been dismantled by it either. The point was that the movement they actually wanted, a wide action taking in large numbers of women from every class and every trade, working through committees that ran themselves, could not be reached by the methods of the first five years. So the league stopped and reassessed. Announcing a retreat in your own newspaper takes a particular confidence, and organisations do it when they expect to still be there in ten years.

For Africans and people of African descent across the Americas, the Second World War started in 1935. Ethiopia was the only genuinely independent state on the continent, and Mussolini wanted it, partly to build a new Roman empire out of Eritrea and partly to avenge the Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896. Through the early 1930s he argued in Europe that Ethiopia was an anachronism, a savage and unstable place that practised slavery and deserved no recognition. Britain and France quietly agreed. Italy invaded in October 1935 claiming an Ethiopian attack near the Somali border. The technological gap that had not existed in 1896 decided everything: armoured columns, aircraft and the occasional illegal use of poison gas. Addis Ababa fell in early 1936 and Haile Selassie went into exile, telling the League of Nations that Europe would be next. The Patriots kept up a guerrilla war throughout. Ethiopia became the focus of pan-African protest and an inspiration for the Rastafarian movement. Allied troops, including West and Central African units, restored Selassie in 1941.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk died on 10 November 1938. The generation that had won the war of liberation and carried through the first reforms had by then reached the end of its creative period, working from goals set in the Young Turk era: a national Turkish state in a modern political form. Karpat's judgement is that they started with a society whose institutions were rooted in Islam, under bad conditions inside and out, and permanently undermined the belief that social arrangements, customs and authority were fixed. Ataturk is described as a soldier ruler rather than a dictator, a man who refused the title and kept insisting on national sovereignty, who ordered, punished and rewarded in the manner of someone used to being obeyed. He was an orphan raised in a village and then in Salonica. His coffin was placed in 1953 in a monumental tomb above Ankara.

Jose Francisco Pena Gomez was born in May 1937 near the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Five months later Trujillo ordered the slaughter of dark skinned residents of that zone, an operation called Operacion Perejil and known more commonly as El Corte, the harvest. The dead were estimated in the tens of thousands, and Pena Gomez's parents were among them. He was raised by an adoptive Dominican family. The circumstances of his birth gave his political opponents their whole line of attack, and for decades he was accused of being Haitian; in the mid 1970s a journalist pressed him to answer the charge in an interview, and the recording and notes were lost. He ran for the presidency and never won it. After his final defeat he said racism was well entrenched in Dominican society, that a bloodbath would have followed had he been elected, and that Dominican society was not yet ready for a black president. He died on 10 May 1998.