1809
Darwin and Lincoln Born
On the same February day, in an English country house and a Kentucky log cabin, two boys were born who would redraw humanity's sense of itself - one through patient observation of finches and barnacles, the other through a presidency that freed four million enslaved people and ended in a theater box.
Aspern-Essling: Napoleon Checked
North of Vienna, Archduke Charles fought Napoleon to a standstill on the Danube flats and forced him back across the river - the emperor's first clear defeat on a battlefield. It cost the Austrians nothing lasting; they lost the campaign at Wagram six weeks later. But the spell was cracked.
Treaty of Fredrikshamn
Defeated in a winter war, Sweden ceded Finland to Russia after seven hundred years of rule. Tsar Alexander, shrewdly, let the Finns keep their Lutheran church, their laws, and their language as an autonomous Grand Duchy. A nation the Swedes had governed was allowed, quietly, to begin imagining itself. Finland's century under Russian rule cultivated a distinct national identity that would declare independence in 1917.
Battle of Wagram
Two hundred thousand Frenchmen and a similar number of Austrians fought for two days on the Marchfeld east of Vienna. Napoleon won, but barely - thirty-seven thousand dead and wounded per side. It confirmed the Austrians as beatable and committed Napoleon to the politics of exhaustion that would ruin him in Russia.