1894
First Sino-Japanese War
Over dominance in Korea, Meiji Japan and Qing China went to war. Within six months the Japanese army and navy, newly modernized, had destroyed Chinese forces on land and sea. The Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan and made Japan a great power. East Asia's hierarchy, stable for centuries, had just been turned upside down.
Dreyfus Arrested
Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer on the French general staff, was arrested on charges of selling secrets to Germany based on handwriting that was not his. Convicted in a secret trial, he was stripped of his rank in a public ceremony and shipped to Devil's Island. The Dreyfus Affair would split France for a decade.
Pullman Strike
Workers at George Pullman's railway car factory outside Chicago walked out over wage cuts. The American Railway Union under Eugene Debs joined them; soon much of the nation's rail traffic was halted. President Cleveland sent federal troops; Debs was jailed and became a socialist. The strike was crushed, but the modern labor-state relationship had been rewritten.
Nicholas II Takes Throne
On the death of Alexander III, his twenty-six-year-old son Nicholas became tsar of all the Russias. He was amiable, pious, devoted to his family, and quite unsuited to running an empire of 130 million people through a revolution. He would rule for twenty-three years and end in a cellar at Ekaterinburg.
Dreyfus Convicted
A French military tribunal met behind closed doors and unanimously convicted Captain Alfred Dreyfus of treason. On January 5 he would be publicly degraded in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, his sword broken, his insignia torn off. Shouts of "Death to the Jew!" came from the crowd. He was shipped to Devil's Island to serve a life sentence.