1871
German Empire Proclaimed
In the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles - where Louis XIV had once received ambassadors - German princes proclaimed Wilhelm I of Prussia emperor of a unified German Reich. Bismarck stood at the foot of the dais in a white uniform. The French, besieged a few miles away, heard the cheering. A new, unbalanced Europe had arrived.
Iwakura Mission
The Meiji government sent half its senior officials - including the foreign minister Iwakura - on a two-year tour of the United States and Europe, studying everything from factories to prisons. They came home convinced that Japan had to modernize or be colonized. The wholesale Westernization of Meiji institutions dates from this trip.
Great Chicago Fire
A barn fire on the city's west side - not, despite legend, started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow - spread in a dry October wind and burned for two days. Three hundred died; a hundred thousand were left homeless. Chicago rebuilt so energetically with iron and brick that by the nineties it was the capital of a new architecture: the skyscraper.
Stanley Finds Livingstone
At Ujiji on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, the American reporter Henry Morton Stanley - hired by the New York Herald to find the lost Scottish missionary - raised his hat to a frail figure in a faded cap and asked, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" The greeting became famous. Livingstone refused to leave and died in Africa two years later.
Treaty of Frankfurt
France paid five billion francs in war indemnity and ceded Alsace and most of Lorraine to the new German Empire. Strasbourg became Strassburg. The statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde was draped in mourning crape and stayed that way until 1918. France now had a grievance designed to last a generation, and did.
Paris Commune
Rather than accept disarmament and humiliating peace terms, working-class Paris rose, declared itself a commune, and governed itself for seventy-two days - with women's rights, secular schools, and free museums. The provisional government in Versailles answered in May with a week of massacres. Twenty thousand Communards died. The Left took note.