1847
Semmelweis's Discovery
In a Vienna maternity ward, Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that mothers attended by doctors who came straight from autopsies died of childbed fever far more often than those seen by midwives. He ordered chlorinated handwashing; deaths collapsed. The medical establishment ridiculed him. He died in an asylum, twenty years before Pasteur confirmed his guess.
Brigham Young Reaches Salt Lake
After a seventeen-hundred-mile walk from Nauvoo, the Mormon pioneers reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Young, sick in a wagon, is said to have declared "This is the right place." Within twenty years they had irrigated a desert, founded a hundred settlements, and built a theocracy that still defines Utah.
Liberia Independent
The small settler republic on the West African coast, founded by the American Colonization Society, declared itself independent - partly to escape the ambiguity of being governed by a private organization. Its constitution was modeled on the American one, right down to the seal reading "The love of liberty brought us here."
Jane Eyre Published
The small Yorkshire village of Haworth produced, in a short burst that winter, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey - three sisters writing under male pseudonyms. Jane Eyre was the sensation: a governess who insists on being treated as a soul. English fiction had just acquired a new kind of heroine.