1848
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
For fifteen million dollars and the assumption of some debts, a defeated Mexico ceded California, Nevada, Utah, and most of Arizona and New Mexico. The United States gained half a million square miles and an argument about slavery that would end in civil war. Nicholas Trist, who had negotiated it, was fired for insubordination.
Communist Manifesto Published
A pamphlet commissioned by a small league of German exiles appeared in London, beginning "A spectre is haunting Europe." Its authors were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Nobody noticed for twenty years. When they did, it became one of the most consequential political documents ever written, for better and very often for worse.
February Revolution in Paris
A banned reform banquet became a barricade became a revolution. Louis-Philippe fled in a cab disguised as "Mr. Smith." A republic was proclaimed at the Hotel de Ville; the red flag flew beside the tricolor. Within days the contagion would jump the Rhine and reach Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Prague - the Year of Revolutions.
Seneca Falls Convention
In a Methodist chapel in upstate New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened the first women's rights convention in American history. They adopted a Declaration of Sentiments modeled on Jefferson's, demanding, most scandalously, the vote. Frederick Douglass signed it. American feminism had its founding document. The vote itself would not come for another seventy-two years, but the argument that won it was made at Seneca Falls.
Gold at Sutter's Mill
A carpenter named James Marshall, working on a sawmill on the American River, spotted a glittering fleck in the tailrace. By spring San Francisco had emptied into the foothills; by the next year ships from Shanghai, Valparaiso, and Sydney were rotting at anchor in the bay. California's population quintupled in three years.
Metternich Falls
A Viennese crowd surged into the Hofburg demanding reform and Metternich - the man who had run Europe since 1815 - resigned and slipped out of the city in disguise. Three days later Berlin rose, and Prussian troops fired on the crowd before the king, shaken, saluted the dead. The old order was dying in its capitals.
June Days Crushed
In Paris, the new republic's closure of the National Workshops sent thirty thousand unemployed workers to the barricades. General Cavaignac's regulars took four days to clear them with cannon. Ten thousand died; four thousand were deported. The revolution of February had devoured its left wing. Louis-Napoleon would profit by December.