1755
Lisbon Earthquake
On All Saints' morning, with the churches full and the candles lit, the ground heaved. Fires broke out; a tsunami followed. Tens of thousands died in minutes. Voltaire read the news and lost his faith in benevolent Providence; Candide is unthinkable without the rubble of Lisbon. The Marquis de Pombal, the prime minister who rebuilt the city on a rational grid, became an Enlightenment hero in the process.
Qing Forces Destroy the Dzungar Khanate
Qianlong's armies crossed the Altai, took Ili, and shattered the last great steppe confederacy. What followed was deliberate: smallpox, starvation, massacre. Modern scholars call it a genocide - perhaps a million Dzungars, perhaps more, ceased to exist as a people. Xinjiang became Chinese territory. The vast pasturelands of Dzungaria were resettled with Manchu bannermen, Uighur farmers, and Chinese colonists, erasing the nomadic world that had flourished there.
Braddock's Defeat on the Monongahela
General Edward Braddock marched 1,400 British regulars into the Pennsylvania forest in parade order. French and Indians shredded them from behind trees. Braddock was mortally wounded; Washington, his aide, had two horses shot from under him and buried his general in the road so wagons would hide the grave. The disaster taught the colonies that European tactics could fail catastrophically in American wilderness.
Johnson's Dictionary Published
After nine years of solitary labor, Samuel Johnson delivered the two-folio Dictionary of the English Language - 42,773 entries defined with wit, prejudice, and startling precision. He defined 'lexicographer' as 'a harmless drudge.' The English language, for the first time, had an authority. It happened to have a personality too.
Expulsion of the Acadians
British authorities in Nova Scotia rounded up 11,500 French Catholic farmers and shipped them to the thirteen colonies, to France, to Louisiana. Families were split on different boats; many drowned. The 'Grand Derangement' scattered an entire people - and seeded the bayous with the ancestors of the Cajuns. Longfellow's poem Evangeline, published a century later, turned the deportation into one of America's most familiar tragedies.