Monday, October 29, 2007

1836 to 1837

Society
1836. The Colt six-shooter revolver has an effective range of only 25 to 30 yards, but improved versions will play a major role in the opening of the West. Patented by Hartford, CT, inventor Samuel Colt.

1836. McGuffey's First and Second Readers are compiled for a local publisher by Cincinnati College president William Holmes McGuffey whose Readers will grow to number six in the next fifteen years and will be sold until 1927. They will be used to educate generations of Americans i the virtues of frugality, industry and sobriety.

1836. The Arc de Triomphe ordered by Napoleon in 1806 is completed at Paris.

1836. Some 75% of gainfully employed Americans are engaged in agriculture, down from 83% in 1820.

Literature
"Concord Hymn." Ralph Waldo Emerson. American. 1836. Poetry. "Shot heard round the world."

Pickwick Papers. Charles Dickens. British. 1836. Novel. Contains well known characters and caricatures; insults actually show respect. Letters and manuscripts about club's activities.

"Nature." Ralph Waldo Emerson. American. 1836. Essay. Nature as commodity, beauty, and discipline. Behind every natural fact, transcendentalist finds a spiritual truth.

Woyzeck. Georg Buchner. German. 1836. Play. Social, economic injustices that led to wife's faithlessness and husband's murder of her. Quick succession of short, meaningful scenes. Treats human agony in pure state.

The Inspector General. Nikolay Gogol. Russian. 1836. Play. Mistaken identity. Run-of-mill civil servant mistaken for Inspector. Goes along. Found out. Leaves town.

Society
1837. Britain's William IV dies and is succeeded by his niece of 18 who will reign as Queen Victoria.

1837. The Seminole leader Osceola is tricked into coming out of the Florida Everglades under a flag of truce and arrested. He will die early next year and most of his tribespeople will be exterminated in the next few years.

1837. A smallpox epidemic along the Missouri River kills 15,000 Indians.

1837. The World's first kindergarten opens at Blankenburg, Thuringia, under the direction of German educator Friedrich Frobel.

1837. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary opens at South Hadley, MA, the first U.S. college for women.

1837. Samuel F. B. Morse gives a public demonstration of his magnetic telegraph and is granted a U.S. patent. His assistant Alfred Lewis Vail devises a Morse Code using dots and dashes to represent letters in place of an earlier system that assigned numbers to letters.

1837. The Pitman shorthand system devised by Englishman Isaac Pitman is the first scientific shorthand system. It is based on phonetics and employs lines, curves, and hooks with contractions and "grammalogues" for frequently occurring words.

1837. Harvard graduate Henry David Thoreau delivers a commencement address that says a man should not work for six days and res on the seventh but rather should work one day and leave six free for the "sublime revelations of nature."

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