1835
Darwin Reaches the Galápagos
HMS Beagle anchored off the volcanic Galápagos Islands, and a seasick young naturalist named Charles Darwin began collecting finches, iguanas, and tortoises. He noticed that mockingbirds differed from island to island. It took him twenty years to understand what he had seen. The five weeks in the Galápagos planted the seed of natural selection.
Texas Revolution Begins
American settlers in Mexican Texas, alarmed by Santa Anna's centralist turn and his abolition of state legislatures, began refusing orders and raising militias. By October shots had been fired at Gonzales over a small cannon the Mexicans had given them and now wanted back. The Lone Star republic was coming.
Andersen's First Fairy Tales
A poor Danish shoemaker's son published a slim booklet of stories - 'The Tinderbox,' 'The Princess and the Pea.' Critics sniffed that the language was too colloquial for children. Children, and then the world, disagreed. Hans Christian Andersen's strange, sad, wise fables would be translated into every major language. His later tales - 'The Little Mermaid,' 'The Ugly Duckling' - became foundational myths of modern childhood.
Macaulay Minute on Indian Education
Thomas Babington Macaulay, Britain's arrogant lawmaker in Calcutta, wrote a memorandum arguing that Indian higher education should be in English and in the Western scientific tradition, not in Sanskrit or Persian. "A single shelf of a good European library," he wrote, "is worth the whole native literature." The minute shaped Indian schooling for a century.