1839 to 1840

Literature

"The Village Blacksmith." HW Longfellow. 1839. Poetry. Describes a New England smithy.

The Charterhouse of Parma. Stendahl. French. 1839. Historical Novel. Post-Napoleonic era. Remarkable analysis of romanticism. From Waterloo to Carthusian monastery.

"Each and All." Ralph Waldo Emerson. American. 1839. Poetry. Seashore walk. Expression of faith in the oneness of the universe. All parts interdependent.

"The Fall of the House of Usher." Edgar Allan Poe. American. 1839. Story. Sister, supposedly dead, reappears in bloody shroud. Brother, sister fall dead together. House splits.

The Green Mountain Boys. Daniel Pierce Thompson. American. 1839. Novel. Vivid picture of Revolutionary times in Vermont. Central character is Ethan Allen.

Society

1840. Queen Victoria marries her first cousin Albert.

1840. William Henry Harrison wins election to the U.S. presidency.

1840. The World's Anti-Slavery Convention opens at London, but Boston abolitionist William Garrison refuses to attend, protesting the exclusion of women. The U.S. antislavery movement has split into two factions in the past year largely because of Garrison's advocacy of women's rights, including their right to participate in the antislavery movement.

1840. Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin makes no reference to the idea that struck him two years ago when he read the 1798 Malthus Essay on Population. Darwin realized that living creatures in nature must compete with each other for sustenance and that nature kills off those which cannot compete, but he will not commit the notion to paper, even in pencil, for another two years.

1840. A new worldwide cholera epidemic begins. It will kill millions in the next 22 years.

1840. Afternoon tea is introduced by Anna, the duchess of Bedford. The tea interval will become a lasting British tradition.

Literature

Two Years Before the Mast. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. American. 1840. Narrative. Brutality of a ship's captain and the sailors' lack of redress. Aroused public opinion and led to legal action; influenced Melville and Conrad.

Sordello. Robert Browning. British. 1840. Poetry. Southern Europe in the 13th century; poet's dilemma: action or song. Tennyson: Poem is obscure. Only understood first and last lines and they are not true.

The Old Curiosity Shop. Charles Dickens. British. 1840. Novel. The adventures of Little Nell who accompanies her grandfather, an obsessive gambler, after he has lost the Curiosity Shop because of gambling.

A Hero of Our Time. Mikhail Lermontov. Russian. 1840. Novel. Young aristocrat in the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, in the 1830s. Serve the state or remain inactive? Aimless willfulness is threat to all he touches. Character of the superfluous man. Psychological analysis.

1837 to 1839

Society

1837. Buildings and paved streets occupy only one-sixth of Manhattan; the rest remains planted in farms and gardens.

1837. London's Buckingham Palace will be the royal residence of the new queen, Victoria, and her successors.

Literature

Twice-Told Tales. Nathaniel Hawthorne. American. 1837. Stories. "Howe's Masquerade"; "The Grey Champion"; "the Great Carbuncle"; "The Minister's Black Veil."

The French Revolution. Thomas Carlyle. British. 1837. History. Central motif is the nemesis that follows upon oppression of the poor.

Oliver Twist. Charles Dickens. British. 1837/39. Novel. Depicts the world of poverty, crime and workhouse of the 19th century London. Illustrates that poverty breeds crime.

Society

1838. The "underground railway" organized by u.S. abolitionists transports Southern slaves to freedom in Canada, but slaving interests at Philadelphia work on the fears of Irish immigrants and other working people who worry that freed slaves may take their jobs.

1838. The Trail of Tears takes more than 14,000 members of the Cherokee Nation from tribal lands in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, 800 miles westward to Indian territory west of the Red River. Escorted with their horses and oxen by troops under the command of Gen. Winfield Scott, the Cherokee journey by wagon and keelboat for anywhere from 93 to 139 days. An estimated 4,000--mostly infants, children and old people--die enroute of a variety of diseases.

1838. Famine kills thousands in the north of Ireland as crops fail.

Literature

The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. Edgar A. Poe. American. 1838. Novel. English boy stows away on a whaler; mutiny,savagery, cannibalism, pursuit. In end, emergence of great white figure. Intrigued Melville.

"Ligeia." Edgar A. Poe. American. 1838. Story. Narrator's mysterious dark-haired wife dies after lingering illness. Marries Rowena. She dies. In opium state, he sees corpse of Rowena arise. She has been transformed into Ligeia.

Nicholas Nickleby. Charles Dickens. British. 1838. Novel. Attacks schools and school masters; led to reformation.

"The Divinity School Address." Ralph Waldo Emerson. American. 1838. Speech. Stressed the divinity of man and the humanity of Christ. Denied miracles. Did not quote scripture. Upheld intuition, rather than ritual, as a means of knowing God. Shocked conservative clergymen.

Society

1839. Charles Goodyear pioneers effective use of rubber.

1839. The first state-supported normal school (teacher's college) is founded at Lexington, MA, through the efforts of Board of Education Secretary Horace Mann.

1839. Baseball rules are devised by West Point cadet Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, NY. His dicta call for a diamond-shaped field and two teams of nine players each.

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."

1834 to 1836

Literature

The Last Days of Pompeii. Edward Bulwer-Lytton. British. 1834. Novel. Eruption of Vesuvius allows young Greek lovers to escape to happiness.

Society

1835. A new Seminole War against the whites in Florida Territory begins following the arrest and imprisonment of Osceola.

1835. Democracy in America by French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville notes that "all classes meet continually and no haughtiness at all results from the differences in social position." However, he also warns that the tyranny of the majority is a hazard to democracy.

1835. New York loses 674 buildings Dec. 16 in a $15 million fire that rages out of control.

Literature

The Yemassee. Wm. Gilmore Simms. American. 1835. Novel. Conflict between South Carolina Yemassee Indians and British in 1715. Son betrays tribe and is killed by his mother. Helplessness of Indians as they lose their lands to advancing white civilization.

Taras Bulba. Nikolay Golgol. Russian. 1835. Novel. Seventeenth-century wars between Poles and Cossacks in the Ukraine Russian son falls in love with a Pole and deserts; killed by father. Other son and the father are killed by the Poles.

Don Alvaro o la fuerta del sino. Angel Saavedra Rivas. Spanish. 1835. Play. Alvaro accidentally kills father of girl he loves and her two brothers. Before he dies, one brother kills the girl. Alvaro commits suicide.

"Berenice." Edgar Allan Poe. American. 1835. Story. Love for epileptic cousin. Has her teeth drawn when she is presumed dead. She comes to life.

Danton's Death. Georg Buchner. German. 1835. Play. Starkly realistic. Tired, apathetic in beginning; idealistic commitment when he defies Robespierre.

"Young Goodman Brown." Nathaniel Hawthorne. American. 1835. Story. Young Puritan discovers that all his respected townsmen, even his wife, are in league with Satan.

Kalevala. Elias Lonnrott (compiler). Finnish. 1835/49. Epic Tradition. Finnish national epic. Origin of the world. Adventures of three sons of Kaleva.

Society

1836. The Alamo at San Antonio falls March 6 to a 4,000-man army commanded by Gen. Santa Anna after an 11-day siege. James Bowie and Davy Crockett are among those killed.

1836. "Remember the Alamo" is the battle cry of U.S. Army Col. Sidney Sherman as he helps former Tennessee governor Sam Houston defeat Santa Anna at the b=Battle of San Jacinto.

1836. A new Republic of Texas claims all land between the Rio Grand and Neuces Rivers. Sam Houston is sworn in as president.

1836. Vice-President Martin Van Buren is elected to the presidency with support from outgoing President Jackson.

1833 to 1834

Society

1833. Parliament orders abolition of slavery in the British colonies.

1833. A factory act voted by Parliament forbids employment of children under age 9 and enacts several other reforms.

1833. English mathematician Charles Babbage proposes an "analytical engine," a large-scale digital calculator.

1833. The Oxford Movement to restore High Church traditions of the 17th century in the Church of England. John Henry Newman publishes Tracts for the Times. So much opposition is aroused that Newman will leave the Church of England and become a Roman Catholic.

1833. Oberlin (Ohio) College opens and admits qualified blacks and women, becoming the first coeducational U.S. college.

Literature

"The Queen of Spades." Aleksandr Pushkin. Russian. 1833. Story. Calm, matter-of-fact telling of the mental breakdown of a gambler.

Eugenie Grandet. Honore de Balzac. French. 1833. Novel. Father, embodiment of greed and domestic tyranny, condemns his daughter to futile, joyless existence.

Sartor Resartus. Thomas Carlyle. British. 1833. Satire. Idealist finally realizes that the here and actual are the true ideal. "Tailor Retailored."

The County Doctor. Honore de Balzac. French. 1833. Novel. Kindly spirit and indefatigable efforts on behalf of people of his village. Universally beloved.

The Bronze Horseman. Aleksandr Pushkin. Russian. 1833. Poetry. Ordinary individual vs. the power of the state. Curses statue of Peter the Great. Blames him for his fiancee's death.

Tracts for the Times. JH Newman. British. 1833/41 Nonfiction. Designed to arrest the advance of liberalism in religious thought.

"In Memoriam." Alfred Lord Tennyson. British. 1833/50. Poetry. In addition to an elegy for Hallam, themes include the decline of faith, rise of skepticism, and scientific materialism.

Society

1834. A new British Poor Law limits the pay of charitable doles to sick and aged paupers. It establishes workhouses where able-bodied paupers are put to work.

1834. Unskilled U.S. workers demonstrate against abolitionists in fear that they will be displaced by black freemen. Rioting continues for more than a week, and churches and houses are destroyed.

1834. The Spanish Inquisition instituted in the 13th century is finally abolished.

1834. Hansom cabs are introduced in London.

1834. The Braille system of raised point writing devised by French educator Louis Braille gains acceptance throughout the world.

1834. Fire destroys London's Houses of Parliament and part of the city.

Literature

Pere Goriot. Honore de Balzac. French. 1834. Novel. Father does everything for his two ungrateful daughters. They don't even attend his funeral.

1831 to 1833

Literature

The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Victor Hugo. French. 1831. Romance. Romance of medieval times. Esmeralda; Capt. Phoebus; Frollo; Quasimodo, the deformed bell ringer.

Crotchet Castle. Thomas Love Peacock. British. 1831. Novel. Satire on romantic themes. Humorously erudite discussions. Debate on the best period in history.

Society

1832. The "spoils system" in U.S. politics gets its name January 21 in a Senate speech by Sen. William Learned Marcy (NY) who says that he can't see "nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belongs the spoils." Politicians will continue for decades to name cronies to government jobs and dispense favors that will enrich their friends.

1832. The Democratic-Republican party that has elected every U.S. president since Thomas Jefferson renames itself the Democratic party. Its first national convention has established the two-thirds majority requirement for nomination.

1832. The U.S. Government has exclusive authority over tribal Indians and their lands within any state, rules the Supreme Court.

1832. The Creeks sign a treaty ceding their lands east of the Mississippi to the United States.

1832. The Seminoles in Florida cede their lands to the U.S. in a treaty signed by 15 chiefs who agree to move west of the Mississippi.

1832. Chief Black Hawk in the state of Illinois leads his people back from west of the Mississippi, retakes a village, and begins his 4-month Black Hawk War that ends only when the Illinois militia massacre the warriors at Bad Axe River in Wisconsin Territory.

1832. A modern sewing machine devised by New York inventor Walter Hunt has a needle with an eye in its point that pushes thread through cloth to interlock with a second thread carried by a shuttle. Hunt does not obtain a patent, and when he suggests that his daughter Caroline go into business making corsets with his machine, she will protest that it would put needy seamstresses out of work.

1832. The cholera epidemic that spread through Russia reaches Scotland. Scottish physician Thomas Latta injects saline solution to save the life of a cholera patient and pioneers a new treatment.

1832. English physician Thomas Hodgkin gives the first description of a disease marked by a sarcoma of the lymph nodes. Hodgin's disease will have a fatality rate of about 75% within 5 years of onset.

1832. Domestic Manners of the Americans by English novelist Frances Milton Trollop who says of her subject, "I do not like them. I do not like their principles. I do not like their manners. I do not like their opinions."

Literature

Indiana. George Sand. British. 1832. Novel. Heroine, a creole named Indiana, abandons old husband for fascinating young lover.

The Legends of the Alhambra. Washington Irving. American. 1832. Stories. Admirer of Moorish civilization. Clash between the Spaniards and the Moors.

Society

1833. On War by the late Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz is a posthumous work on the science of warfare that will be a classic.

1830 to 1831

Literature

Little Tragedies. Aleksandr Pushkin. Russian. 1830. Poetic Drama. Four plays. "Essays of dramatic investigation": characters in four varied situations. Covetous knight : effects of avarice. Feast during the plague: evil effects on human behavior of imminent death. Mozart, Salieri: depicts Salieri's jealousy of Mozart's artistic genius, legendary poisoning. Stone guest: retelling of the Do Juan legend.

Wild Ass's Skin. Honore de Balzac. French. 1830. Novel. Magic skin grants wishes but it and the owner's life grow shorter with each wish.

The Red and the Black. Stendahl. French. 1830. Novel. Plot is romantic. Portrait of hero's inner state is realistic.

Tales of Belkin. Aleksandr Pushkin. Russian. 1830. Stories. Stationmaster is one of the first characters in Russian literature who is not a member of the nobility.

"Old Ironsides." Oliver Wendell Holmes. American. 1830. Poetry. Written when Holmes read of the Navy's plans to scrap the old frigate.

Society

1831. The French Foreign Legion created March 9 serves largely in North Africa, the Middle East and Indo-China. The Legion will attract renegades and fugitives from justice for more than 160 years.

1831. Irish Catholics resort to violence in an armed protest against enforcement of tithes to support the established Episcopal Church.

1831. The Supreme Court rules that an Indian tribe may not sue in federal courts since the tribes are not foreign nations.

1831. Nat turner's rebellion brings panic to the South as whites learn that the Virginia slave has murdered his master and all his master's family in their sleep the night of August 21.

1831. A new London Bridge opens across the Thames to replace the 10th-century structure now being demolished.

1831. English naturalist Charles Darwin embarks on a voyage to South America and the Galapagos Islands aboard the HMS Beagle.

1831. Telegraphy is pioneered by Joseph Henry who sees that an electromagnet can be used to send messages over great distances by wiring the magnet to a switch, turning it on and off to attract and release a piece of iron, and thus producing a pattern of clicks. He does not patent the device or put it to any practical use.

1831. The Barbizon school of French painters holds its first exhibition at Paris. Their rural scenes are based on direct observation of nature.

1831. The McCormick reaper that enables one man to do the work of five is demonstrated by Virginia farmer Cyrus Hall McCormick.

Literature

Eugene Onegin. Aleksandr Pushkin. Russian. 1831. Verse Drama. Byronic hero. Bored. In duel kills friend. Hollow, artificial. Ironic narrator. Not interested in woman when she is interested in him. When he is interested in her, she will have none of him.

"The City in the Sea." Edgar Allan Poe. American. 1831. Poetry. Grim landscape. Description of shrine. Melodic.