1836
Fall of the Alamo
After thirteen days of siege, Santa Anna's army took a Franciscan mission outside San Antonio and killed every defender, including Davy Crockett and James Bowie. The dead numbered under two hundred. The legend made them thousands, and gave a rebellious province a battle cry: Remember the Alamo. Six weeks later Sam Houston's Texans routed Santa Anna at San Jacinto, winning Texan independence in eighteen minutes.
Great Trek Begins
The first parties of Afrikaner Voortrekkers rolled north from the Cape in ox-wagons, looking for land without Englishmen. They fought the Ndebele, the Zulu, and each other, and eventually founded the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The Trek would become the Afrikaner origin myth and the seed of apartheid.
Dickens's Pickwick Papers
A twenty-four-year-old parliamentary reporter named Charles Dickens began serializing comic adventures of a gentleman's club in cheap monthly parts. Sales exploded - from a few hundred to forty thousand per issue. The serial made him a household name and invented, for the English-speaking world, the idea of fiction as a mass entertainment industry.
Battle of San Jacinto
In eighteen minutes on a swampy Texas prairie, Sam Houston's ragged army routed Santa Anna's dozing camp, killed six hundred, and captured the Mexican president himself. Texas was independent. It would be its own republic for nine years before the United States, made nervous by its debts, finally annexed it.
Sam Houston President of Texas
The constitution of the new Republic of Texas having been ratified by popular vote, Sam Houston - victor of San Jacinto, quarrelsome former governor of Tennessee - was inaugurated as its first president in the provisional capital of Columbia. The republic would issue its own currency, maintain its own navy, and try repeatedly to be annexed by the United States.