1858
Government of India Act
Parliament abolished the East India Company - a trading corporation that had somehow come to govern a subcontinent - and transferred its powers to the Crown. A Secretary of State for India was created. Victoria issued a proclamation promising religious toleration. The British Raj, in its classical form, had just been born.
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
A tall, awkward lawyer from Springfield and the short, aggressive incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas held seven open-air debates across Illinois on the morality and politics of slavery. Lincoln lost the Senate race but became a national figure. The debates, transcribed and reprinted, made the Republican case to the country. Two years later they would matter.
Hong Kong Treaty of Tientsin
Under the guns of Anglo-French forces that had taken the Taku forts, the Qing signed the Tientsin treaties: more treaty ports, a permanent British minister in Beijing, the legalization of opium, and indemnities. The emperor refused ratification. War would resume the following year, culminating in the burning of the Summer Palace.
Great Stink of London
A hot summer cooked the raw sewage the Thames carried past Westminster. Curtains at the Parliament windows were soaked in lime chloride; MPs fled. Within weeks Bagehot's government authorized Joseph Bazalgette to build a vast system of intercepting sewers - arguably the most consequential public-health project of the century. Bazalgette's network of 83 miles of brick sewers still serves London today, a Victorian monument hidden underfoot.
Visions at Lourdes
A fourteen-year-old shepherdess in the Pyrenean town of Lourdes reported eighteen visitations by a woman in white in a grotto by the river Gave. Bernadette Soubirous's visions were investigated, authenticated, and developed into one of the great Catholic pilgrimage sites of the modern world, drawing millions a year. Bernadette herself entered a convent, refused all celebrity, and died at thirty-five, canonized as a saint in 1933.