1888
Brazil Abolishes Slavery
Princess Isabel, regent while her father Dom Pedro II was in Europe, signed the Lei Aurea - the Golden Law - abolishing slavery in Brazil without compensation to owners. It was the last country in the Americas to do so. The planters never forgave the monarchy. A year later a military coup ended the empire and proclaimed the republic.
Kodak Launches
George Eastman began selling a pre-loaded box camera with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest." Photography, until now a chemist's craft, became a pastime. You mailed the whole camera back and got your prints and a reloaded camera returned. The snapshot - and the modern image flood - had just been invented.
Wilhelm II Becomes Kaiser
Within ninety-nine days, three German emperors sat on the throne: old Wilhelm I died in March, his dying son Friedrich III in June, and the crown passed to Friedrich's twenty-nine-year-old son Wilhelm II. Impulsive, theatrical, and contemptuous of Bismarck, the new Kaiser would dismiss the Iron Chancellor within two years and pilot Germany toward 1914.
Jack the Ripper
The first of five canonical murders by an unknown killer in London's Whitechapel slums electrified the city and the new mass press. Five prostitutes were mutilated over three autumn months. The killer was never caught. The case would launch a genre - true crime - and invent, accidentally, the modern tabloid.
Brazil Abolition Aftermath
With the Lei Aurea signed and seven hundred thousand enslaved people freed, Brazil's plantation oligarchy turned furiously against the monarchy that had failed to compensate them. Imperial support collapsed within a year. Freedom for the enslaved had been bought, inadvertently, at the price of the Brazilian empire. The new republic offered the freed little enough.