1639
Sakoku Completed
The Tokugawa shogunate expelled all remaining Portuguese traders from Japan and sealed the country. Only Dutch and Chinese merchants were permitted, and only at Dejima, an artificial island in Nagasaki harbor. Japan entered two centuries of enforced isolation from the Christian powers of Europe, developing in the sealed quiet a distinctive urban culture of extraordinary refinement.
Russians Reach the Pacific
Ivan Moskvitin, a Cossack ataman, led twenty men through the forests of eastern Siberia and reached the shore of the Sea of Okhotsk, becoming the first Russian to stand on the Pacific. The conquest of northern Asia by fur trappers and small expeditions had just connected Moscow to the eastern ocean.
Fundamental Orders of Connecticut
Representatives from three Connecticut River towns adopted what some historians consider the first written constitution in the Americas: a frame of government limiting magistrates and providing for elected officials answerable to freemen. Connecticut had invented, quietly, a small-scale republican experiment that would echo through the constitutional conventions of the following century and help shape the idea of written governance.
Horrocks Observes Transit of Venus
The twenty-year-old Lancashire curate Jeremiah Horrocks, correcting Kepler's tables in his spare time, predicted and then actually observed Venus crossing the face of the sun from a darkened room in Much Hoole. He was the first human being to see the transit. Astronomy had its first serious English observer, a young genius who would die at twenty-two with most of his work unpublished.