Welcome fellow researchers. Genealogy is a great past time that can open new vistas of understanding our family and our history. It is easy to fall into the trap of focusing on the name or the date. I feel it is important to understand the times in which our ancestors lived. This page is an evolving timeline for the decades in which I have research for my family. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
In1603 James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England upon the death of Elizabeth I.
Jamestown was founded on May 14, 1607, by a small group led by Captain Christopher Newport, who was hired by the London Company to transport colonists. Many settlers died from famine and disease in the winter of 1609-10. The survivors were encouraged to stay in Jamestown by the arrival of new settlers and supplies the following June. In 1612 tobacco growing was started. The colony prospered and became the capital of Virginia.
Pocahontas, (1595?-1617), was the daughter of the Native American chief Powhatan. She was born in Virginia. Her real name was Matoaka; the name Pocahontas means "playful one." According to a legend, in 1608 Pocahontas saved the life of Captain John Smith by holding his head in her arms as he was about to be clubbed to death by her father's warriors. Many historians doubt the story, which is not found in Smith's detailed personal narrative written at the time. The story first appeared in Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia (1624). In 1612 Pocahontas was captured by the English and taken to Jamestown. She became a convert to Christianity and took the name Rebecca. In 1614 she married John Rolfe, one of the colonists, with the blessings of both the governor and her father. Eight years of peace between the Native Americans and the English followed the marriage.
Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618) was an English adventurer and writer, who was prominent at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and became an explorer of the Americas. In 1578 Raleigh sailed to America with his half brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a voyage that may have stimulated his plan to found an English empire there. In 1585, Raleigh sponsored the first English colony in America on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina. The colony failed, as did another one in 1587. His explorations in South America fared little better; his search in 1595 in what is now Guyana for El Dorado, the city of gold, achieved no practical success. In 1603 he was accused of plotting against the king and was convicted and sentenced to death. King James, however, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and Raleigh was sent to the Tower of London, where he remained for the next 13 years. Raleigh was beheaded on October 29, 1618 after a disasterous expedition in 1616 in which he engages Spanish forces in South America.
The Mayflower was a vessel in which the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the New World in 1620. The Mayflower, about 180 gross tons and carrying 102 passengers, started from Plymouth, England, on September 16, 1620. The ship was headed for Virginia, where the colonists had been authorized to settle. As a result of stormy weather and navigational errors, the vessel failed to make good its course, and on November 21 the Mayflower rounded the end of Cape Cod and dropped anchor off the site of present-day Provincetown, Massachusetts.
In 1632 Galileo publishes Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, in which he compares the Copernican and Ptolemaic solar systems. In 1637 Rene Descartes publishes his Discourse on Method, in which he lays the foundation for modern philosophy.
A man named Beaumont laid rails on a highway in England to transport coal from the Newcastle mines. This is the first railroad known in history.
In 1635 the Peace of Prague ends conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Kingdom of Saxony. Thirty Years War continues, however, between Sweden and France against the House of Hapsburg.
The birth of King Louis XIV was a grand affair of state, an event falling short of being miraculous; King Louis XIII and the Queen had been married for thirteen years and detested each other. Louis XIV was born on September 5, 1638. At the age of five, Louis XIV succeeded Louis XIII after his death in 1643.
The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was the last native Chinese dynasty in the history of China. Spanning almost three centuries between the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty, the Ming reunited what is now called China proper after almost 400 years of foreign incursion and occupation. The Ming contributed greatly to Chinese literature, art, and philosophy. It is noted for its sea explorations, even though, when the effort was not followed up, the results failed to register any permanent value. It is best known for its strong and complex central government, which unified and controlled the empire. Ironically, it was this same complexity that prevented the Ming government from being able to adapt to changes in society and eventually led to its decline.
In 1646 the English Civil War ends with the defeat of the Royal army.
The Taj Mahal is a mausoleum in Agra, India, and is regarded as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan had it built in memory of his wife, Arjumand Banu Bagam, known as Mumtaz Mahal (Persian for "Elect of the Palace"), who died in 1631. Building commenced about 1632. The mausoleum was complete by about 1643 and the surrounding complex of buildings and gardens was complete by about 1653. Inside the Taj Mahal, the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal stands at the center of an octagonal hall, while the slightly larger tomb of Shah Jahan, who died in 1666, is off to one side. Both are elaborately carved and inlaid with semiprecious stones, illuminated by sunlight filtering through an elaborately carved marble screen that is also studded with jewels.
In 1660 Robert Boyle (1627-1691) publishes New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of the Air, in which he states his laws of gases. In 1662 The Royal Society of London is founded. In 1666 The French Academy of Science is founded.
In 1677 Anton von Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), using a microscope, discovers male spermatoza. In 1678 Christian Huygens (1629-1695) proposes the wave theory of light.
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) was one of the greatest composers of the late baroque period (1700-1750) and, during his lifetime, perhaps the most internationally famous of all musicians. Handel was born February 24, 1685, in Halle, Germany, to a family of no musical distinction. His own musical talent, however, manifested itself so clearly that before his tenth birthday he began to receive, from a local organist, the only formal musical instruction he would ever have.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was a German organist and composer of the baroque era. He was one of the greatest and most productive geniuses in the history of Western music. Bach was born on March 21, 1685, in Eisenach, Thüringen, into a family that over seven generations produced at least 53 prominent musicians, from Veit Bach to Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach. Johann Sebastian received his first musical instruction from his father, Johann Ambrosius, a town musician. When his father died, he went to live and study with his elder brother, Johann Christoph, an organist in Ohrdruf.
One of the last outbreaks of witch-hunting took place in colonial Massachusetts in 1692, when belief in diabolical witchcraft was already declining in Europe. Twenty people were executed in the wake of the Salem Witch Trials, which took place after a group of young girls became hysterical while playing at magic and it was proposed that they were bewitched. The subsequent witch hunt took place in the context of deep divisions between the church and a controversial minister. Personal differences were exacerbated in a small, isolated community in which religious beliefs-including belief in the reality of diabolical witchcraft-were deeply held. By the time the hysteria had run its course, little enthusiasm for the persecution of witches remained in Massachusetts or elsewhere.
Blackbeard who's real name was Edward Teach (1680?-1718) was an English pirate, probably born in Bristol. He was widely known and feared for his robberies and atrocities throughout the West Indies and along the coast of the North Carolina and Virginia colonies. In 1718 the governor of Virginia sent two British ships to attack Blackbeard, who was spending the winter in a North Carolina inlet; the pirate was killed in the engagement.
(Franz) Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) was an Austrian composer, recognized as a dominant force in the development of the musical style of the classical era (circa 1750-circa 1820). Of humble origins, Haydn was born in the village of Rohrau, near Vienna, on March 31, 1732. When eight years old he was accepted into the choir school of Saint Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, where he received his only formal education. Dismissed from the choir at the age of 17, he spent the next several years as a struggling free-lance musician. He studied on his own the standard textbooks on counterpoint and took occasional lessons from the noted Italian singing master and composer Nicola Porpora. In 1755 Haydn was engaged briefly by Baron Karl Josef von Fürnberg, for whom he apparently composed his first string quartets. A more substantial position followed in 1759, when he was hired as music director by Count Ferdinand Maximilian von Morzin. Haydn's marriage in 1760 to Maria Anna Keller proved to be unhappy as well as childless.
In 1735 Carolus Linnaeus publishes his Systema Naturae, which establishes the science of taxonomy.
The French and Indian War (1754-1763), last of four North American wars waged from 1689 to 1763 between the British and the French, with their respective Native American and colonial allies, for domination in the New World. Britain's eventual victory stripped France of its North American empire, thus concluding the series of conflicts, which were known collectively as the French and Indian Wars. Although the war began in America, it expanded (1756-1763) into Europe as the Seven Years' War, and into Asia as the Third Carnatic War. The war originated in the breakdown of a three-way balance of power, in which the Iroquois Confederacy had occupied the middle ground between French and British colonies and had successfully excluded both from the strategically critical Ohio Valley. The Iroquois had rendered all previous conflicts indecisive by playing off French against British interests and maintaining their own freedom of action. In the late 1740s, the Ohio Company, a land-speculating syndicate based in Virginia, began making efforts to found a settlement at the forks of the Ohio (the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, later the site of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). These developments convinced the governors-general of Canada that in order to protect their own strategic interests in the American interior they would have to dominate the Ohio Valley militarily. Thus, in 1753 the French began building a chain of forts from Lake Erie to the forks of the Ohio, where in 1754 they built Fort Duquesne. In 1753 Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia tried unsuccessfully to warn them of their intrusion into English territory; the next year he sent an armed force under the command of George Washington to expel them. The French defeated Washington's troops at the Battle of Fort Necessity (July 3-4, 1754) and sent them back to Virginia. The French and Indian War had begun.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) was an Austrian composer, a centrally important composer of the classical era, and one of the most inspired composers in Western musical tradition. Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, and baptized Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, he was educated by his father, Leopold Mozart, who was concertmaster in the court orchestra of the archbishop of Salzburg and a celebrated violinist, composer, and author.
Voltaire was the assumed name of François Marie Arouet (1694-1778), French writer and philosopher, who was one of the leaders of the Enlightenment. Voltaire was born in Paris, November 21, 1694, the son of a notary. In 1759 he published Candide.
Catherine the Great (1729-96), empress of Russia (1762-96), the second of that name, who continued the process of Westernization begun by Peter the Great and made Russia a European power. Originally named Sophie Fredericke Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) on May 2, 1729, the daughter of a minor German prince. In 1745, she married Grand Duke Peter of Holstein, heir to the Russian throne. The marriage was an unhappy one, but the intelligent and ambitious Catherine soon managed to build up a circle of supporters in Saint Petersburg. In 1754 she gave birth to a son, the future emperor Paul. Catherine's husband succeeded to the throne as Peter III in 1762. Erratic, unstable, and contemptuous of his Russian subjects, he soon alienated several important groups in Russian society. On July 9, 1762, following a pattern well established in 18th-century Russia, the Imperial Guards overthrew him and placed Catherine on the throne in his stead.
James Watt produced a series of inventions that made possible the modern steam engine. This engine, patented in 1769, greatly increased the economy of previous engines by avoiding the loss of steam that occurred in alternate heating and cooling of the engine cylinder. His did most of his work at the Corson Iron Works, Glasgow, Scotland.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a German composer, and generally considered one of the greatest composers in the Western tradition. Born in Bonn, Beethoven was reared in stimulating, although unhappy, surroundings. His early signs of musical talent were subjected to the capricious discipline of his father, a singer in the court chapel. In 1789, because of his father's alcoholism, the young Beethoven became a court musician in order to support his family. His early compositions under the tutelage of German composer Christian Gottlob Neefe-particularly the funeral cantata on the death of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II in 1790-signaled an important talent, and it was planned that Beethoven study in Vienna, Austria, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Although Mozart's death in 1791 prevented this, Beethoven went to Vienna in 1792 and became a pupil of Austrian composer Joseph Haydn.
American Revolution (1775-1783) was a conflict between 13 British colonies in North America and their parent country, Great Britain. It was made up of two related events: the American War of Independence (1775-1783) and the formation of the American government as laid out by the Constitution of the United States in 1787. First, the war achieved independence from Great Britain by the colonies. Second, the newly created United States of America established a republican form of government, in which power resided with the people. The revolution had many causes. Long-term social, economic, and political changes in the colonies before 1750 provided the basis for an independent nation with representative political institutions. More immediately, the French and Indian War (1754-1763) changed the relationship between the colonies and their mother country. Finally, a decade of conflicts between the British government and the colonists, beginning with the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, led to the outbreak of war in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Adam Smith, a Scottish political economist and philosopher, wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776. This landmark book, fully titled An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, was written during the years of strife between Britain and its colonies and published the same year as the American "Declaration of Independence." The Wealth of Nations became the foremost manifesto against mercantilism and was proof of Smith's role as a distinguished and respected professor.
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was a Scottish novelist and poet, whose work as a translator, editor, biographer, and critic, together with his novels and poems, made him one of the most prominent figures in English romanticism. He was born in Edinburgh, August 15, 1771. Trained as a lawyer, he became a legal official, an occupation that allowed him to write. Scott is the first major historical novelist. In his portraits of Scotland, England, and the Continent from medieval times to the 18th century, he showed a keen sense of political and traditional forces and of their influence on the individual.
British explorer James Cook launched the third and final maritime expedition of his career in July 1776, partly at the request of the Hudson's Bay Company, an English trading firm. The firm's headquarters in Canada hoped Cook would discover a long-sought Northwest Passage around North America that connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a passage that would shorten the sea journey between Europe and Asia. Explorers and traders had searched for such a passage since the 15th century. En route to the west coast of North America, Cook landed on the Hawaiian Islands, which he called the Sandwich Islands. In March 1778 the expedition reached Vancouver Island's Nootka Sound, where the Nootka people introduced Cook to the sea otter pelt trade. Cook continued north and explored Prince William Sound and Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands. He traveled to latitude 70°44' north without finding a Northwest Passage. Cook then returned to the Sandwich Islands in January 1779 to spend the winter. He was killed on Kealakekua Bay during a struggle with natives over a stolen boat. Cook's expedition failed to find a Northwest Passage, but his discovery of abundant sea otter pelts on the northwest coast led to a thriving fur trade with China that enriched the Hudson's Bay Company.
In 1789 Antoine Lavoisier publishes his treatise on chemistry, laying the foundation for the modern theory of chemical elements.
Frederick the Great remains one of the most famous German rulers of all time for his military successes and his domestic reforms that made Prussia one of the leading European nations. Frederick II (the Great) was king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, and he stands as one of the greatest of the Enlightened Despots. He was an absolute ruler, but he lived under the principle that he was the "first servant of the state." He consequently did not rule by his own personal whims, but always under the guidance of what was most beneficial for Prussia, and he expected his people to possess the same devotion.
In the year 1787, Lieutenant William Bligh, a young British Naval Officer was commissioned to undertake a voyage in a small ship, HMS Bounty. The goal of the voyage was to obtain a large number of breadfruit plantings to be taken to the Caribbean where they would be transplanted to provide food for the slaves in those colonies. The voyage was difficult, and ill-feelings were rampant, although probably no more than on other long sea voyages of the period. After a long stay in Tahiti, the Bounty began its voyage to the Caribbean and then back to England. On the morning of April 28th, 1789, led by Masters Mate Fletcher Christian, twelve crewmembers staged the now famous mutiny, capturing the ship, and setting Lt. Bligh and his supporters adrift in the ship's launch.
The French Revolution was a cataclysmic political and social upheaval, extending from 1789 to 1799. The revolution resulted, among other things, in the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy in France and in the establishment of the First Republic. It was generated by a vast complex of causes, the most important of which were the inability of the ruling classes of nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie to come to grips with the problems of state, the indecisive nature of the monarch, extortionate taxation of the peasantry, impoverishment of the workers, the intellectual ferment of the Age of Enlightenment, and the example of the American Revolution.
The Cotton Gin is a machine used to separate the fibers of cotton from the seeds. The American inventor Eli Whitney is generally credited with inventing the cotton gin in 1793. Before the invention of the cotton gin, seeds had to be removed from cotton fibers by hand; this labor-intensive and time-consuming process made growing and harvesting cotton uneconomical. The cotton gin allowed the seeds to be removed mechanically and rapidly from the cotton fibers, making cotton production economical and leading to dramatic growth in the United States cotton industry.
The Rosetta Stone is a black basalt slab bearing an inscription that was the key to the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus to the foundation of modern Egyptology. Found by French troops in 1799 near the town of Rosetta in Lower Egypt, it is now in the British Museum, London. The stone was inscribed in 196 BC with a decree praising the Egyptian king Ptolemy V. Because the inscription appears in three scripts, hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek, scholars were able to decipher the hieroglyphic and demotic versions by comparing them with the Greek version. The deciphering was chiefly the work of the British physicist Thomas Young and the French Egyptologist Jean François Champollion.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition was the first United States overland exploration of the American West and Pacific Northwest, beginning in May 1804 and ending in September 1806. The expedition was commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson and led by army officers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The exploration covered a total of about 13,000 km (about 8000 mi), from a camp outside St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back. Like other scholars in his time, Jefferson believed in the existence of a Northwest Passage, or some kind of water connection between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The principal goal of the expedition was to locate such a route and survey its potential as a waterway for American westward expansion. Although Lewis and Clark did not find this route, the expedition succeeded in making peaceful contact with Native Americans and uncovering a wealth of knowledge about the peoples, geography, plants, and animals of the western United States.
The first attempt to utilize a steam engine on the railroad was made by a Cornishman name Trevithick, who ran a locomotive attached to several wagons in South Wales.
The War of 1812 was a conflict between the United States and Great Britain from 1812 to 1815. Fought over the maritime rights of neutrals, it ended inconclusively. Over the course of the French revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars between France and Great Britain (1793-1815), both belligerents violated the maritime rights of neutral powers. The United States, endeavoring to market its own produce, was especially affected. To preserve Britain's naval strength, Royal Navy officers impressed thousands of seamen from U.S. vessels, including naturalized Americans of British origin, claiming that they were either deserters or British subjects. The United States defended its right to naturalize foreigners and challenged the British practice of impressment on the high seas. Relations between the two nations reached a breaking point in 1807 when the British frigate Leopard fired on the USS Chesapeake in American territorial waters and removed, and later executed, four crewmen.
Baseball is often called the national pastime of the United States, because of its strong tradition and great popularity. It is played throughout the world by people of all ages. Baseball is one of the oldest and most popular spectator sports. The game as it is known today developed during the early 1800s among children and amateur players.
The Irish Potato Famine was a disastrous food shortage in Ireland between 1845 and 1847 caused by the failure of the potato crop. Large numbers of people emigrated, especially to America; it has been estimated that through emigration and deaths resulting from famine, the population of Ireland decreased by more than 2 million people.
The Gold Rush of 1849 was the massive movement of people to California following the discovery of gold there in 1848. In January James W. Marshall, a carpenter building a sawmill in partnership with John A. Sutter in California's Sacramento Valley, discovered gold. Sutter made his workers promise to keep the discovery a secret. However, the news leaked out. Within a few months, a shrewd merchant, hoping to increase his business, set off the gold rush in earnest. Samuel Brannan, one of the early Mormon settlers in San Francisco, owned a store near Sutter's fort. In early May, he returned to San Francisco from a visit to the diggings and spread the word of gold. Within a few days, boats filled with townspeople were heading up the Sacramento River to look for gold. Brannan, of course, had stocked his store with mining supplies and was doing a thriving business. San Francisco soon was a ghost town, as almost everyone was off to the gold sites.
Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry (1794-1858) was an American naval officer, who commanded the expedition that established United States relations with Japan. Born on April 10, 1794, in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. He was promoted to commodore in 1842. In 1853 Perry was sent on the mission to Japan, a country that had been closed to outsiders since the 17th century. On July 8, he led a squadron of four ships into Tokyo Bay and presented representatives of the emperor with the text of a proposed commercial and friendship treaty. To give the reluctant Japanese court time to consider the offer, he then sailed for China. With an even more powerful fleet, he returned to Tokyo in February 1854. The treaty, signed on March 31, 1854, provided that humane treatment be extended to sailors shipwrecked in Japanese territory, that U.S. ships be permitted to buy coal in Japan, and that the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate be opened to U.S. commerce. Perry's mission ended Japan's isolation, a prerequisite for its subsequent development into a modern nation. Perry died in New York City on March 4, 1858.
The American Civil War is sometimes called the War Between the States, the War of Rebellion, or the War for Southern Independence. It began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and lasted until May 26, 1865, when the last Confederate army surrendered. The war took more than 600,000 lives, destroyed property valued at $5 billion, brought freedom to 4 million black slaves, and opened wounds that have not yet completely healed more than 125 years later.
Édouard Manet (1832-1883) was a French painter, whose work inspired the impressionist style, but who refused to so label his own work. His far-reaching influence on French painting and the general development of modern art was due to his portrayal of everyday subject matter; his use of broad, simple color areas; and a vivid, summary brush technique. Manet began to paint genre (everyday) subjects, such as old beggars, street urchins, café characters, and Spanish bullfight scenes. He adopted a direct, bold brush technique in his treatment of realistic subject matter. In 1863 his famous Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was shown at the Salon des Refusés, a new exhibition place opened by Napoleon III following the protests of artists rejected at the official Salon.
The Union and Pacific Railroads were joined in 1869, making a through railroad route from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
In 1869 American geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell, who had lost his lower right arm in the American Civil War (1861-1865), guided the first American expedition down the length of the Green and Colorado rivers through the Grand Canyon. Powell earned acclaim for the journey, and the federal government hired him to conduct a geological survey of the Colorado Plateau country. Between 1870 and 1879, Powell explored and surveyed the area, the last unknown section of terrain in the United States.
From October 8 to 10, 1871, the Great Chicago Fire killed at least 250 people, left 90,000 homeless, and destroyed about 10 sq km (about 4 sq mi) of central Chicago (nearly one-third of the total area). According to legend, the fire started when a cow kicked over a lantern in a backyard shed after an extreme dry spell had left the city particularly susceptible to fire. The city was quickly rebuilt and continued its rapid growth. The fire's chief consequence was to reorient the retail business district away from the Chicago River toward a new axis along State Street. The fire led to a more general adoption of requirements for fire-retarding and fireproof construction, building codes, municipal and state laws regulating the construction of buildings and prescribing minimum requirements for fire protection, sanitation, and safety.
Claude Oscar Monet (1840-1926) was a French impressionist painter, who brought the study of the transient effects of natural light to its most refined expression. In 1874 Monet and his colleagues organized an exhibition of their new style. They called themselves independents, but the press soon derisively labeled them impressionists because their work seemed sketchy and unfinished (like a first impression) and because one of Monet's paintings had borne the title Impression: Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan, Paris). Monet's compositions from this time are extremely loosely structured, and the color was applied in strong, distinct strokes as if no reworking of the pigment had been attempted. This technique was calculated to suggest that the artist had indeed captured a spontaneous impression of nature. During the 1870s and 1880s Monet gradually refined this technique, and he made many trips to scenic areas of France, especially the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, to study the most brilliant effects of light and color possible.
Scottish missionary David Livingstone was well known for his explorations of Africa when he disappeared in 1866 while exploring central Africa and searching for the source of the Nile River. Livingstone was not actually lost; he simply was not in contact with the Western world. Beginning on the East African coast, Livingstone traveled north along the Rovuma River and continued north toward the upper regions of Zaire (Congo), where he discovered Lakes Mweru and Bangweulu. He fell ill and took refuge at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, in present-day Tanzania. In 1869 the New York Herald hired Anglo-American journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley to find Livingstone. Stanley located the explorer at Ujiji in November 1871, and when he met him is said to have made his famous remark: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Stanley nursed Livingstone back to health, and the two men explored the surrounding region. Livingstone later continued his unsuccessful search for the source of the Nile until his death in 1873.
Yellowstone National Park is a national park established in 1872. Located in northwestern Wyoming and extending into Montana and Idaho, the park is known for its spectacular geysers, hot springs, canyons, and fossil forests. Yellowstone was the world's first national park. Native American groups lived in the area of Yellowstone for thousands of years. The name Yellowstone is thought to come from a translation of the Native American Minnetaree word mi tsi a-da-zi, for the yellow cliffs along the Yellowstone River.
The Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly known as Custer's Last Stand, was an American military engagement fought on June 25, 1876, in what is now Montana, between a regiment of the Seventh United States Cavalry led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and a force of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors. The discovery of gold in the nearby Black Hills in 1874 had led to an influx of white prospectors into Native American territory and to attacks on the prospectors by the Sioux, under Chiefs Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall.
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847. The American inventor, whose development of a practical electric light bulb, electric generating system, sound-recording device, and motion picture projector had profound effects on the shaping of modern society. His later work consisted mainly of improving and perfecting previous inventions. Altogether, Edison patented more than 1000 inventions. He was a technologist rather than a scientist, adding little to original scientific knowledge. In 1883, however, he did observe the flow of electrons from a heated filament-the so-called Edison effect-whose profound implications for modern electronics were not understood until several years later. Edison died in West Orange on October 18, 1931
Billy the Kid (1859-1881), outlaw of the American Southwest, born in New York City. Billy the Kid used many names throughout his life, including William H. Bonney, Henry McCarty, and Kid Antrim. In 1873, after his father's death, his mother remarried and the family moved to Silver City, New Mexico. Billy the Kid spent much of his youth in the rough saloons of the frontier. At the age of 12 he reportedly committed his first murder; he claimed to have shot and killed 21 men in his lifetime. He became notorious for crimes of robbery, murder, and cattle stealing. In 1880, Sheriff Pat Garrett of Lincoln County, where Billy the Kid had become involved in the cattle wars, captured him. Sentenced to hang, Billy the Kid killed two deputies and escaped from jail on April 28, 1881. Shortly after his escape, Billy the Kid was trapped and fatally shot by Sheriff Garrett in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
Jesse Woodson James (1847-1882) was an American outlaw, whose exploits, both real and legendary, in bank and train robberies won him worldwide notoriety. James was born in Clay County, Missouri. At the age of 15, during the American Civil War (1861-1865), James joined a band of pro-Confederate raiders led by the rebel William Clarke Quantrill. After the war, he organized his own gang of robbers which included his older brother Frank, and Cole, James, and Robert Younger. One of their most famous bank robbery attempts occurred in 1876 at the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota. When the bank clerk refused to open the safe, the gang brutally murdered him and then tried to escape. In the shoot-out that followed, all the gang members except Jesse and Frank were killed or captured.
Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890) was a Dutch postimpressionist painter, whose work represents the archetype of expressionism, the idea of emotional spontaneity in painting .In 1888 van Gogh left Paris for southern France, where, under the burning sun of Provence, he painted scenes of the fields, cypress trees, peasants, and rustic life characteristic of the region. During this period, living at Arles, he began to use the swirling brush strokes and intense yellows, greens, and blues associated with such typical works as Bedroom at Arles (1888, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh), and Starry Night (1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York City).
The Eiffel Tower, rising in the twilight sky above Paris, was built for the World's Fair in 1889. French engineer Gustave Alexandre Eiffel designed it as a cross-braced latticed girder with minimum wind resistance. Constructed from over 6300 metric tons (7000 tons) of highest quality wrought iron, it is a masterpiece of wrought-iron technology.
In 1885, Louis Pasteur created the first successful vaccine against rabies for a young boy who had been bitten 14 times by a rabid dog.
The causative agent of cholera is the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which was discovered in 1883 by the German physician and bacteriologist Robert Koch. Virtually the only means by which a person can be infected is from food or water contaminated by bacteria from the stools of cholera patients. Prevention of the disease is therefore a matter of sanitation. Cholera epidemics swept through Europe and the United States in the 19th century but did not recur in those areas after improvement of the water supply.
The Spanish-American War was a brief war that the United States waged against Spain in 1898. Actual hostilities in the war lasted less than four months, from April 25 to August 12, 1898. Most of the fighting occurred in or near the Spanish colonial possessions of Cuba and the Philippines, nearly halfway around the world from each other. In both theaters the decisive military event was the complete destruction of a Spanish naval squadron by a vastly superior U.S. fleet. These victories left the Spanish land forces isolated from their homeland and, after brief resistance, brought about their surrender to U.S. military forces. The defeat marked the end of Spain's colonial empire and the rise of the United States as a global military power.
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was a French painter, often called the father of modern art, who strove to develop an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression, and abstract pictorial order. Among the artists of his time, Cézanne perhaps has had the most profound effect on the art of the 20th century. He was the greatest single influence on both the French artist Henri Matisse, who admired his use of color, and the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who developed Cézanne's planar compositional structure into the cubist style. During the greater part of his own lifetime, however, Cézanne was largely ignored, and he worked in isolation. He mistrusted critics, had few friends, and, until 1895, exhibited only occasionally. He was alienated even from his family, who found his behavior peculiar and failed to appreciate his revolutionary art.
In early December 1891, Luther Gulick, chairman of the physical education department at the School for Christian Workers (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts, instructed Canadian-American physical education teacher James Naismith to invent a new game to entertain the school's athletes during the winter season. With an ordinary soccer ball, Naismith assembled his class of 18 young men, appointed captains of two nine-player teams, and introduced them to the game of Basket Ball (then two words). Naismith, who had outlined 13 original rules, dispatched the school janitor to find two boxes to serve as goals, fastened to the balcony railing at opposite sides of the gymnasium. The school janitor, however, only found two half-bushel peach baskets, and the game was played with these.
X rays were discovered accidentally in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen while he was studying cathode rays in a high-voltage, gaseous-discharge tube. Despite the fact that the tube was encased in a black cardboard box, Roentgen noticed that a barium-platinocyanide screen, inadvertently lying nearby, emitted fluorescent light whenever the tube was in operation.
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor, generally considered the greatest artist of the 20th century. He was unique as an inventor of forms, as an innovator of styles and techniques, as a master of various media, and as one of the most prolific artists in history. He created more than 20,000 works. In the summer of 1906, during Picasso's stay in Gósol, Spain, his work entered a new phase, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian, and African art. His celebrated portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905-1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) reveals a masklike treatment of her face. The key work of this early period, however, is Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), so radical in style-its picture surface resembling fractured glass-that it was not even understood by contemporary avant-garde painters and critics. Destroyed were spatial depth and the ideal form of the female nude, which Picasso restructured into harsh, angular planes.
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (1869-1954) was a French artist, leader of the fauve group (see Fauvism), regarded as one of the great formative figures in 20th-century art, a master of the use of color and form to convey emotional expression. Matisse's true artistic liberation, in terms of the use of color to render forms and organize spatial planes, came about first through the influence of the French painters Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne and the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, whose work he studied closely beginning about 1899. By 1905 he had produced some of the boldest color images ever created, including a striking picture of his wife, Green Stripe (Madame Matisse) (1905, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen).
An American expedition led by Robert E. Peary was the first that is generally credited with reaching the North Pole, arriving there on April 6, 1909. Peary was accompanied by his assistant, Matthew A. Henson, and four Inuit. There is some evidence that they may have missed the pole by a few kilometers.
On April 18, 1906, an earthquake shook San Francisco and caused a fire that raged for three days, destroying almost all of the city's downtown and much of the residential area.
The Titanic Disaster was one of the worst maritime disasters in history. The British luxury liner Titanic (46,000 gross tons) of the White Star Line, on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, struck an iceberg about 153 km (about 95 mi) south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland just before midnight on April 14, 1912. Of the more than 2220 persons aboard, about 1513 died, including the American millionaires John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidor Straus. The disaster caused the implementation of more strenous safety protocols for shipping lines.
Romanov, dynasty that ruled Russia for three centuries, from 1613 until the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Romanovs were descendants of a Moscow aristocrat whose daughter, Anastasia Romanov, married the Russian czar Ivan IV Vasilyevich (Ivan the Terrible). The children of Anastasia's brother Nikita adopted the name Romanov in honor of their grandfather being the father of a czarina.
World War I was a military conflict, from 1914 to 1918, that began as a local European war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia on July 28, 1914; was transformed into a general European struggle by declaration of war against Russia on August 1, 1914; and eventually became a global war involving 32 nations. The immediate cause of the war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia was the assassination on June 28, 1914, at Sarajevo in Bosnia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; now in Bosnia and Herzegovina), of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir-presumptive to the Austrian and Hungarian thrones, by Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist. The fundamental causes of the conflict, however, were rooted deeply in the European history of the previous century, particularly in the political and economic policies that prevailed on the Continent after 1871, the year that marked the emergence of Germany as a great world power.
Tutankhamen (1343-1325 BC), Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, the son-in-law of Akhenaton, whom he succeeded. He became pharaoh at about the age of 9 and ruled until his death at about the age of 18. Peace was brought to Egypt during his reign as the worship of Amon, abandoned under Akhenaton, was restored and Thebes, the city sacred to Amon, was again made Egypt's capital. Although he was not an important king, Tutankhamen is well known today because his tomb, containing fabulous treasures, was found virtually intact by the British archaeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922.
The research of Alexander Fleming in 1928 led to the discovery of penicillin, an important antibiotic derived from the mold Penicillum notatum. It is effective against a wide range of disease-causing bacteria. Penicillin acts by killing bacteria directly or by inhibiting their growth.
The Great Depression in the United States, worst and longest economic collapse in the history of the modern industrial world, lasting from the end of 1929 until the early 1940s. Beginning in the United States, the depression spread to most of the world's industrial countries, which in the 20th century had become economically dependent on one another. The Great Depression saw rapid declines in the production and sale of goods and a sudden, severe rise in unemployment. Businesses and banks closed their doors, people lost their jobs, homes, and savings, and many depended on charity to survive. In 1933, at the worst point in the depression, more than 15 million Americans-one-quarter of the nation's workforce-were unemployed.
The Empire State Building in New York City is a skyscraper located on 5th Avenue between 33rd and 34th streets, which, when it was completed in 1931, was the tallest building in the world. Designed by the American architectural firm of Shreve, Harmon and Lamb in a streamlined art deco style, the Empire State Building consists of 102 stories of office space.
Bonnie and Clyde - Bonnie Parker (1910-1934) and Clyde Barrow (1909-1934) - were American criminals during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Clyde began committing petty thefts in Houston at the age of 15. Bonnie worked as a waitress; she also was an amateur poet who became known for her fondness of cigars. Bonnie and Clyde met in January 1930 and were first linked in crime in a December 1932 automobile theft. For two years Bonnie and Clyde worked their way across the southwestern United States, holding up gas stations, restaurants and banks. They killed 12 people, mostly law enforcement officials. Because of his ruthlessness, Clyde earned the title "public enemy number one of the Southwest." Frank Hamer, a former Texas Ranger, trailed Bonnie and Clyde across nine states before he was able to stage a deadly ambush outside Arcadia, Louisiana, in May 1934. Hamer and five other lawmen shot and killed Bonnie and Clyde as they drove through the ambush.
The famous German-built Hindenburg had a length of 245 m (804 ft) and a gas capacity of 190,006,030 liters (6,710,000 cu ft). After making ten transatlantic crossings in regular commercial service in 1936, it was destroyed by fire in 1937 when it was landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, with 97 passengers and crew; 35 people on board and 1 ground crew member were killed.
World War II was a global military conflict that, in terms of lives lost and material destruction, was the most devastating war in human history. It began in 1939 as a European conflict between Germany and an Anglo-French coalition but eventually widened to include most of the nations of the world. It ended in 1945, leaving a new world order dominated by the United States and the USSR. The most important determinants of its outcome were industrial capacity and personnel. In the last stages of the war, two radically new weapons were introduced: the long-range rocket and the atomic bomb. In the main, however, the war was fought with the same or improved weapons of the types used in World War I. The greatest advances were in aircraft and tanks.
While Nashville began to emerge in the 1940's as both the creative and business centers of country, wartime kept the music in something of a holding pattern. All this changed, however, when Hank Williams burst on the scene with a wild, free-wheeling style straight out of the small-town American watering holes that were known as "honky tonks". By decade's end, Hank was the new King of Country and, with the help of artists like Ernest Tubb and Lefty Frizzell, honky tonk became the new country music of choice.
The Big Bang Theory is the currently accepted explanation of the beginning of the universe. The big bang theory proposes that the universe was once extremely compact, dense, and hot. Some original event, a cosmic explosion called the big bang, occurred about 10 billion to 20 billion years ago, and the universe has since been expanding and cooling. The theory is based on the mathematical equations, known as the field equations, of the general theory of relativity set forth in 1915 by Albert Einstein. In 1922 Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann provided a set of solutions to the field equations. American astronomer Edwin Hubble provided some of the greatest supporting evidence for the theory with his 1929 discovery that the light of distant galaxies was universally shifted toward the red end of the spectrum or the Red Shift phenomenon. This proved that the galaxies were moving away from each other. In the 1940s Russian-American physicist George Gamow worked out a theory that fit with Friedmann's solutions in which the universe expanded from a hot, dense state.
Jonas Edward Salk (1914-1995) was an American physician and epidemiologist, who developed the first vaccine against poliomyelitis. Salk's work in the 1940s on an anti-influenza vaccine led him and his colleagues to develop an inactivated vaccine against polio in 1952. After successful wide-scale testing in 1954, the vaccine was distributed nationally and greatly reduced the disease.
The Korean War was a military struggle fought on the Korean Peninsula from June 1950 to July 1953. Begun as a war between South Korea (Republic of Korea) and North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) after the North's invasion of the South, the conflict swiftly developed into a limited international war involving the United States and 19 other nations. From a general viewpoint, the Korean War was one of the by-products of the cold war, the global political and diplomatic struggle between the Communist and non-Communist systems following World War II. The motives behind North Korea's decision to attack South Korea, however, had as much to do with internal Korean politics north and south of the 38th parallel (the boundary between the two republics) as with the cold war. Contrary to the prevailing view at the time, North Korea apparently attacked South Korea without the knowledge of either the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China.
In the mid-50's there were rumblings in Memphis that were to change the course of not only country music but of popular music in general. When producer Sam Phillips recorded the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash for his Sun record label, he fused a country-roots sensibility to a rhythm and blues backbeat that brought country music a wider, younger audience in the process. Most importantly, " rockabilly ", as it would come to be called, gave the world perhaps the only singer capable of filling the hole left by Hank Williams, Elvis Presley. Rock 'n Roll was born.
Sir Edmund Percival Hillary was born in Aukcland, New Zealand in 1919. The mountain climber and Antarctic explorer, with Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa from Nepal, was the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest (8848 m/29,028 ft) which is the world's highest peak. Hillary reached the summit on May 29, 1953, and was knighted for the achievement later that year.
In the '60s rock 'n roll had created a void in the "easy-listening" market and Nashville producers were quick to fill it with Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves and Tammy Wynette, among others. Soon, artists from both coasts were flocking to Nashville looking for a hit, transforming the town from the somewhat provincial home of country to Music City USA.
The Vietnam War was a military struggle fought in Vietnam from 1959 to 1975, involving the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (NLF) in conflict with United States forces and the South Vietnamese army. From 1946 until 1954, the Vietnamese had struggled for their independence from France during the First Indochina War. At the end of this war, the country was temporarily divided into North and South Vietnam. North Vietnam came under the control of the Vietnamese Communists who had opposed France and who aimed for a unified Vietnam under Communist rule. The South was controlled by Vietnamese who had collaborated with the French. The United States became involved in Vietnam because it believed that if all of the country fell under a Communist government, Communism would spread throughout Southeast Asia and beyond. This belief was known as the "domino theory." The U.S. government, therefore, supported the South Vietnamese government. This government's repressive policies led to rebellion in the South, and the NLF was formed as an opposition group with close ties to North Vietnam. In 1965 the United States sent in troops to prevent the South Vietnamese government from collapsing. Ultimately, however, the United States failed to achieve its goal, and in 1975 Vietnam was reunified under Communist control; in 1976 it officially became the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. During the conflict, approximately 3 to 4 million Vietnamese on both sides were killed, in addition to another 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians who were drawn into the war. More than 58,000 Americans lost their lives.
The Woodstock Festival was a rock festival that took place near Woodstock, New York, on August 15, 16, and 17, 1969, and that became a symbol of the 1960s American counterculture and a milestone in the history of rock music. Prominent among those attending were members of the counterculture, who were often referred to as hippies and who characteristically rejected materialism and authority, protested against the Vietnam War, supported the civil rights movement, dressed unconventionally, and experimented with sex and illicit drugs.
Apollo 11 was the first lunar-landing mission. Launched on July 16, 1969, the crew of Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins flew the spacecraft Columbia (CSM) and Eagle (LM). On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin landed the Eagle at the relatively flat and unobstructed Tranquillity site on the moon, while Collins remained in the CSM. The LM spent 21 hours 36 minutes on the lunar surface, and the crew spent 2 hours 31 minutes outside the LM in a local area excursion on foot to a distance of approximately 50 m (160 ft) from Tranquillity Base. Armstrong and Aldrin evaluated the capability of working on the lunar surface, established a small scientific station, and collected 22 kg (49 lb) of lunar rocks and soil. Using the descent stage of the LM as a launching platform, the ascent stage of the LM took off from the moon's surface to rendezvous and dock with the CSM. The spacecraft departed lunar orbit over two days after arrival. This eight-day mission landed and was recovered safely in the Pacific Ocean. As a precautionary measure, the astronauts were quarantined for 14 days.
In 1967 the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) launched a worldwide vaccination campaign against smallpox. At the time, about 10 to 15 million cases of the disease occurred each year, with more than 2 million deaths. In 1979, after two years without a reported case of smallpox, the WHO marked the disappearance of smallpox from the earth.
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was an American abstract painter, famous for the purity and lucidity of her still-life compositions. O'Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League of New York. O'Keeffe moved to New Mexico in 1949 and is best known for her large paintings of desert flowers and scenery, in which single blossoms or objects such as a cow's skull are presented in close-up views. Although O'Keeffe handles her subject matter representationally, the starkly linear quality, the thin, clear coloring, and the boldly patterned compositions produce abstract designs.
Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1997