1853
Perry at Edo Bay
Four black-hulled American warships - two of them steamers, trailing smoke the Japanese had never seen - anchored off Uraga and demanded a trade treaty. Commodore Matthew Perry refused to leave until his letter had been accepted. Two centuries of Japanese seclusion cracked in a single afternoon. Perry returned the following year with more ships, and the resulting treaty opened Japanese ports and began the transformation that led to the Meiji Restoration.
Crimean War Begins
A squabble between Catholic and Orthodox monks over the keys to the Church of the Nativity escalated, via the ambitions of Napoleon III and the paranoia of Tsar Nicholas I, into a war between Russia and an alliance of Britain, France, the Ottomans, and eventually Sardinia. It would be the bloodiest European war between 1815 and 1914.
Haussmann Remakes Paris
Napoleon III put Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann in charge of rebuilding Paris. Over the next seventeen years, Haussmann would drive wide boulevards through the medieval slums, lay sewers, plant plane trees, and erect the limestone apartment buildings that made the city look like itself. Artillery could now clear any street. The price, in displaced poor, was enormous.
Verdi's Il Trovatore and La Traviata
In a single astonishing year, Giuseppe Verdi premiered two of the operas that would define the nineteenth-century Italian repertoire. La Traviata was booed on opening night, largely because the prima donna was too stout to play a consumptive. Within a decade both were sung in every capital in Europe. Verdi had become Italy in a tenor voice.