1919: peace conference begins in Paris

History.com has this for 19 January:

On 19 January 1918, in Paris, France, some of the most powerful people in the world met to begin the long, complicated negotiations that would officially mark the end of the First World War.
Leaders of the victorious Allied powers— France, Great Britain, the United States, and Italy— would make most of the crucial decisions in Paris over the next six months. For much of the conference, American President Woodrow Wilson (photo, right) struggled to support his idea of a “peace without victory” to make sure that Germany, the leader of the Central Powers and the major loser of the war, was not treated too harshly. On the other hand, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France and Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain argued that punishing Germany adequately and ensuring its weakness was the only way to justify the immense costs of the war. In the end, Wilson compromised on the treatment of Germany in order to push through the creation of his pet project, an international peacekeeping organization called the League of Nations.
Representatives from Germany were excluded from the peace conference until May of 1918, when they arrived in Paris and were presented with a draft of the Versailles Treaty. Having put great faith in Wilson’s promises, the Germans were deeply frustrated and disillusioned by the treaty, which required them to forfeit a great deal of territory and pay reparations. Even worse, the infamous Article 231 forced Germany to accept sole blame for the war. This was a bitter pill many Germans could not swallow.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after a Serbian nationalist’s bullet ended the life of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand , whose assassination sparked the beginning of World War One. In the decades to come, anger and resentment of the treaty and its authors festered in Germany. Extremists like Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party capitalized on these emotions to gain power, a process that led almost directly to the exact thing Wilson and the other negotiators in Paris in 1919 had wanted to prevent: a second, equally devastating global war.

Rico says that that worked, for awhile...