1810
Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores
Before dawn in the Bajio, a rural priest rang his church bell and shouted for his parishioners to rise against the gachupines. Miguel Hidalgo's ragged army of Indians and mestizos swelled to eighty thousand and nearly took Mexico City. He was shot within a year; the war he lit ran for eleven.
May Revolution in Buenos Aires
A crowd in the Plaza Mayor demanded the removal of the Spanish viceroy and got a junta of criollos instead. News of Napoleon's capture of Seville had made royal authority a joke. Argentine independence would not be declared for six more years, but Spain's American empire had begun to unravel from the south.
Krupp Steelworks Founded
In a dusty Essen back lot, Friedrich Krupp opened a small forge to make cast steel. He would die broke. His son Alfred would turn the family firm into the armorer of the German empire, and the Krupp name into a synonym for the cannon that unified, and then destroyed, the fatherland.
Kamehameha Unifies Hawaii
After three decades of campaigns, the warrior-king Kamehameha I brought the last of the Hawaiian islands - Kauai and Niihau - under his rule by a negotiated settlement. The archipelago was a single kingdom for the first time. He had used captured European muskets and advisors, and a coconut-fiber ceremonial staff, to become the Napoleon of the Pacific.
Colombian Cry of Independence
A trumped-up quarrel over a borrowed flower vase in a Bogota market touched off a crowd that by nightfall had deposed the Spanish viceroy. The junta they formed would declare independence within weeks. Gran Colombia's long war had begun over crockery, in a reminder that revolutions sometimes choose their own small pretexts.
Chilean Independence Junta
In Santiago, a cabildo abierto replaced the Spanish governor with a local junta and, in theory, kept loyalty to the captive king Ferdinand VII. In practice, Chile had just begun its march toward independence. The date is still Chile's national holiday. The empire of Charles V was disintegrating in autumn assemblies all over South America.