1902
Boer War ends at Vereeniging
After three years of farmhouse burnings, barbed-wire camps, and guerrilla ambushes, Boer commandos signed the peace at a tent in the veld. Britain had won South Africa's gold and diamonds but exposed its own brutality to the watching world. Twenty-six thousand Boer women and children had died in the camps.
Mount Pelee incinerates Saint-Pierre
On Martinique, the mountain that locals called peaceful exhaled a glowing cloud of superheated gas that rolled down at two hundred miles an hour. The Caribbean town of thirty thousand vanished in under a minute. Only two survivors emerged, one a prisoner in a stone cell. The volcano had coughed once and swallowed a city.
Anglo-Japanese Alliance signed
Britain, alarmed by Russian expansion in East Asia, signed a formal alliance with Japan, its first with any non-European power. It was a recognition that Japan had entered the first rank of modern states. The alliance would hold for two decades and provide cover for Japan's victory over Russia in 1905 and its WWI role.
First permanent movie theater opens
In Los Angeles, the Electric Theater began charging a dime for one hour of moving pictures. Within a decade, nickelodeons were everywhere in American cities, drawing immigrant families and working women who had nowhere else to go. A new mass art form was taking its first paying audiences. Hollywood was six years away.
Aswan Low Dam completed
British engineers finished the first major dam across the Nile near Aswan, controlling the river's flood for the first time in Egyptian history. Thousands of years of silt-dependent farming began to change. A far larger dam upstream would come sixty years later under Nasser, drowning Nubian villages and ancient temples.