1818
Frankenstein Published
Mary Shelley's anonymous novel about a student who stitches a man from corpses and flees in horror appeared in three small volumes. Reviewers called it disgusting. It sold. Two centuries later, its central image - the creator running from his creation - would feel more prophetic than Gothic. Shelley was nineteen when she wrote it, during a rain-soaked summer at Lake Geneva in the company of Byron and her husband.
Chilean Independence
A year after Bernardo O'Higgins and San Martin's Army of the Andes crossed the cordillera to surprise the Spanish at Chacabuco, Chile formally declared itself free. The republic was fragile, the church suspicious, and O'Higgins would be exiled within five years. But the continental campaign was rolling north. San Martin was already planning the naval expedition to Peru that would carry the revolution to Spain's colonial capital.
Zulu Kingdom Consolidated
Shaka's decisive victory over his rival Zwide of the Ndwandwe at the Mhlatuze River confirmed Zulu primacy in southeast Africa. Refugees from the fighting streamed north and west, displacing other peoples in a chain of conquest that remade the political map from Natal to the Limpopo. A single African state had become a regional empire.
Anglo-American Convention
British and American negotiators set the border between the United States and British North America along the 49th parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains and agreed to joint occupation of the Oregon Country. It was the most peaceful border the continent had, and the longest undefended one in the world by 1900.
Chile Declares Independence
Bernardo O'Higgins, son of an Irish-born Spanish viceroy and a Chilean criolla, proclaimed Chilean independence in Santiago after José de San Martín's army crossed the Andes and defeated the royalists at Chacabuco. South America's independence wave, already rolling through Argentina and Venezuela, now had the Pacific coast. Spain's grip was slipping finger by finger.