1893
New Zealand Women Vote
Largely because Kate Sheppard and her temperance activists collected 32,000 signatures on a petition, the Liberal government of New Zealand gave women the vote in parliamentary elections. It was the first self-governing country in the world to do so. Australian states followed in 1902; Britain and the United States, decades later.
Franco-Russian Alliance
The French Third Republic and the Russian autocracy - two states with nearly nothing in common except resentment of Germany - signed a secret military convention pledging mutual support against any Triple Alliance attack. Bismarck had warned against exactly this. Europe's alliance blocks had set, and the countdown to a general war had quietly begun.
Chicago World's Fair
The World's Columbian Exposition opened in a plaster 'White City' along Lake Michigan, celebrating Columbus four hundred years late. Twenty-seven million people came to see the Ferris wheel, Cracker Jack, and the future of electric light. Frederick Jackson Turner read a paper announcing the end of the American frontier. The fair's dazzling White City inspired the City Beautiful movement that reshaped urban planning across the United States.
Hawaiian Monarchy Overthrown
With the help of US Marines from the cruiser Boston, American sugar planters in Honolulu deposed Queen Liliuokalani and proclaimed a provisional republic. President Cleveland refused to annex the islands and called it a gross injustice. His successor had fewer scruples. Hawaii would be annexed outright in 1898. The queen's protest song 'Aloha Oe' became a lasting emblem of Hawaiian sovereignty and loss.
Panic of 1893
The failure of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad precipitated a financial collapse that became the worst American depression of the nineteenth century. Over five hundred banks and fifteen thousand businesses failed; unemployment hit nearly twenty percent. The crisis fueled populism, the free-silver movement, and William Jennings Bryan's coming "Cross of Gold" campaign.
Diesel Patents His Engine
Rudolf Diesel, a German mechanical engineer, patented a new kind of internal-combustion engine that ignited fuel by compression alone, without a spark. It was more efficient than the gasoline engine and would eventually drive ships, locomotives, trucks, and submarines. Diesel himself would disappear over the side of a Channel steamer in 1913.