1826
Auspicious Incident
Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II surrounded the mutinous Janissary corps in their Istanbul barracks and burned them inside. For four centuries the Janissaries had made and unmade sultans. Their destruction opened the way for a European-style army, and for the long reform program the Ottomans called the Tanzimat. Thousands of Janissaries were killed or exiled across the empire, and their military order was formally dissolved overnight.
Adams and Jefferson Die
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the two men who had drafted and defended it died within hours of each other - Jefferson at Monticello, Adams at Quincy. Adams's last words, famously wrong, were "Thomas Jefferson still survives." The founders were passing; the quarrels they bequeathed were not.
Treaty of Yandabo
Ending the First Anglo-Burmese War, this Burmese surrender ceded Assam, Manipur, Arakan, and Tenasserim to the British and imposed a crushing indemnity. It was one of the longest and most expensive wars the East India Company had yet fought. The kingdom of Ava's frontiers had shrunk forever, and British India had a Bay of Bengal shoreline.
Zoological Society of London Founded
Sir Stamford Raffles, fresh from founding Singapore, persuaded London's learned men to establish a scientific society for the study of animals. Raffles died before the Zoo opened its gates in Regent's Park two years later. It became the first scientific zoo in the world - a place where taxonomy met spectacle and the public paid to watch.