1721
Treaty of Nystad
After twenty-one years, the Great Northern War ended with Sweden ceding Estonia, Livonia, Ingria, and Karelia to Russia. Peter the Great took the title of Emperor; the Senate declared him Father of the Fatherland. Stockholm mourned in black while St. Petersburg set off cannon. A new great power had been born.
Boston Smallpox Inoculation
Cotton Mather, having heard of inoculation from an enslaved African named Onesimus, persuaded Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to try it during Boston's epidemic. The town threw a bomb through Mather's window. But of the inoculated, one in fifty died; of the rest, one in six. America had taken a small, contested step toward medicine.
Peter the Great Proclaimed Emperor
After twenty-one years of war, the Russian Senate bestowed upon Peter the titles Emperor and 'the Great.' The tsar had dragged his country westward by the collar - building a navy, shaving boyars' beards, raising Petersburg from a swamp. Russia was no longer a distant Muscovite curiosity. It was a European great power.
Robert Walpole Becomes First Prime Minister
The Norfolk squire, resurrected from political ruin by the South Sea crash he alone had seemed to see coming, took the Treasury and did not let it go for twenty-one years. He refused the title prime minister as an insult, while inventing the office. Cabinet government had quietly begun. His formula was simple and effective: keep the king pleased, keep taxes low, and keep Britain out of war.