1893

Society

1893. Hawaiian annexationists overthrow Queen Liliukoalani with support from U.S. minister John Stevens. Armed marines from the U.S.S. Boston are landed to "protect" U.S. interests; the queen abdicates under duress after reigning less than 2 years.

1893. The Pullman Palace Car Co. reduces wages by one-fourth, obliging workers to labor for almost nothing while charging them full rents in company housing at Pullman, Ill., and charging inflated prices at company food stores.

1893. The American Railway Union is founded by socialist Eugene V. Debs.

1893. New Zealand adopts suffrage for women, the first country to do so.

1893. Anti-Semitism mounts in France as Jews are blamed for the collapse in 1889 of the Panama Canal Co., whose bankruptcy has cost many French investors their savings.

1893. Britain's Labour Party is founded by socialists who include Scotsman James Keir Hardie.

1893. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" by University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner observes that the frontier has been the source of the individualism, self-reliance, inventiveness and restless energy so characteristic of Americans, but that is now ending.

1893. Detroit machinist Henry Ford, 30, road tests his first motorcar in April.

1893. Chicago surgeon Daniel Hale Williams performs the world's first open-heart surgery, saving the life of a street fighter with a knife wound in an artery near the heart.

1893. A survey of Brooklyn, NY, schools reveals that 18 classes have 90 to 100 students each, while one classroom is jammed with 158.

1893. The Stanley Cup ice hockey trophy has its beginnings in a silver cup presented to the winner of an amateur Canadian hockey match. Frederick arthur, Lord Stanley of Preston, has purchased the cup. It will be replaced by a $14,000 silver bowl and it will be the North American professional hockey trophy beginning in 1910.

1893. The world's first Ferris wheel goes up at the Chicago fair.

1893. Lizzie Borden makes headlines in June when she goes on trial at Fall River, Mass. Spinster Lizzie Andrew Borden, 32, is charged with having killed her stepmother and then her father on the morning of August 4, last year; the sensational trial boosts newspaper circulation figures to new heights. The jury finally rules to acquit, but street urchins chant, "Lizzie Borden took an axe/ And gaver her mother forty whacks./ And when she saw what she had done/ She gave her father forty-one."

1893. Salt Lake City's Mormon Temple is completed on the site ordained for its construction by Brigham Young in 1847.

1893. America's buffalo herd falls to 1,090 as market hunters continue to exterminate the animals.

Literature

"The Hound of Heaven." Francis Thompson. British. 1893. Poetry. "Autobiography" of a fugitive from God's redemptive love.

The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Arthur Wing Pinero. British. 1893. Play. Woman with a past tries to warn her husband that his daughter is involved with a former lover. His daughter charges her with her past and she commits suicide.

Death and the Fool. Hugo Von Hofmannstahl. German. 1893. Play. Three dead people whom he had treated with indifference appear to a nobleman on his approaching death.

Magda. Hermann Sudermann. German. 1893. Play. Conflict between the mores of provincial bourgeoisie and the bohemian life of urban artists.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Stephen Crane. American. 1893. Novel. Darwinian jungle of New York streets; daughter of brutal father, drunken mother; seduced by Pete, disowned by mother. Prostitute. In despair, suicide. Episodic. Irony. In '96 version, less melodrama. First realistic American novel. Doomed by family, environmental forces, unable to escape.

Hannele. Gerhart Hauptmann. German. 1893. Play. Dying girl hallucinates, turning the wretched almshouse and its dreary inhabitants into a fairy-tale paradise. Dies.

Mrs. Warren's Profession. George Bernard Shaw. British. 1893. Play. Relationship between a madam and her duaghter whom she has supported in style.