1890
Bismarck Dismissed
After twenty-eight years of running Germany, the Iron Chancellor was pushed into retirement by the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted to be his own minister. Bismarck went home to Friedrichsruh and brooded. Within three years the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapsed - as he had warned - and the alliance system began its slide toward 1914.
Wounded Knee Massacre
On a frozen creek in South Dakota, the 7th Cavalry - Custer's old regiment - opened fire on a disarmed Lakota encampment. Between 150 and 300 men, women, and children died, shot as they fled through the snow. It was the last great act of the Indian wars, and the one the army most wanted to forget.
Sherman Antitrust Act
Passed almost unanimously by Congress in a burst of populist fury against the railroad and oil monopolies, the Sherman Act outlawed "every contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of trade." For years it was used mostly against unions. A decade later Theodore Roosevelt would turn it, at last, against the trusts it was named for.
Van Gogh Dies
In Auvers-sur-Oise, Vincent van Gogh shot himself in a wheatfield and lingered two days before dying in his brother Theo's arms. He was thirty-seven. He had sold one painting in his life. Within a generation his blazing canvases would redefine color for the twentieth century and his name would be everywhere.
Ghost Dance Spreads
A Paiute prophet named Wovoka had a vision that the dead would return, the buffalo come back, and the whites vanish if native people danced. The Ghost Dance swept across the Plains tribes with terrible hope. Federal agents saw it as a prelude to war. It was not. But the fear it provoked led directly to Wounded Knee that December.
How the Other Half Lives
Jacob Riis, a Danish-born police reporter, published a book of photographs and text documenting the tenements of New York's Lower East Side. His magnesium flash had caught sleeping families in airless rooms. Theodore Roosevelt, then New York's police commissioner, read it and called it revelation. Muckraking journalism had a founding text.
Ibsen's Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen's chilly drama of a bored officer's wife who burns a manuscript and shoots herself with her father's pistol scandalized Europe. Audiences walked out; critics were baffled. Within a decade it would be recognized as the starting point of modern psychological theater, and Hedda one of the great female roles in the repertoire.