1854
Kanagawa Treaty
Commodore Perry returned with a larger squadron and a firmer tone, and the Tokugawa shogunate signed a treaty opening two ports and guaranteeing American shipwrecked sailors good treatment. It was the thin end of the wedge. Within fifteen years the shogunate would fall and Japan would choose, violently, to modernize rather than be colonized.
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Stephen Douglas's bill opened Kansas and Nebraska to slavery by 'popular sovereignty,' repealing the Missouri Compromise. The North erupted. Within months, pro- and anti-slavery settlers were shooting each other in 'Bleeding Kansas.' The Whig Party collapsed; the Republican Party was born. The Civil War had moved much closer. Abraham Lincoln, roused from political retirement by the act's passage, began the speeches that would carry him to the presidency.
John Snow Removes the Broad Street Pump Handle
A London physician named John Snow, mapping cholera deaths in Soho with obsessive precision, traced the epidemic to a single contaminated water pump on Broad Street. He persuaded the parish to remove the handle. The epidemic ebbed. Epidemiology - the science of tracing disease to its source - had its founding act in a pump handle.
Snow Maps Cholera
During the Broad Street cholera outbreak in Soho, the anesthetist John Snow mapped cases and noticed they clustered around a single pump. He removed the handle. The epidemic ebbed. The link between cholera and contaminated water had been demonstrated - though the miasma theory would take twenty years to die, and epidemiology as a discipline had a founding story.
Nightingale Sails for Scutari
Florence Nightingale arrived at the barrack hospital at Scutari with thirty-eight nurses and a mania for cleanliness and statistics. The sick were dying of typhus and cholera faster than of Russian bullets. She cleaned drains, opened windows, and kept numbers. The death rate collapsed. Modern hospital nursing began in a Turkish barracks.
Charge of the Light Brigade
At Balaclava, through a muddled order, six hundred and seventy British cavalry charged straight up a valley lined with Russian guns. They took the battery and rode back; fewer than two hundred returned unwounded. Tennyson wrote a poem within weeks. The officer corps had just given a demonstration of aristocratic incompetence.