Little Glimpses of the 19th Century
The Great Events in the History of the Last One Hundred Years, Assembled
so as to Present a Nutshell Record of Each Decade.
Compiled and edited for The Scrap Book.
In many respects the nineteenth century was the most remarkable in the history of the world. In no corresponding period did science vouchsafe to men so many revelations, or did wars result in such sweeping political changes. It was the age of steam, electricity, and steel; of Napoleon, Wellington, Nelson, Grant, Lee, and Moltke; of Bismarck, Gladstone, and Lincoln; of Garibaldi and Bolivar; of Stephenson, Fulton, Morse, and Edison; of Darwin, Huxley, and Emerson; of Wagner and Verdi; of Byron and Scott, of Tennyson and Victor Hugo, of Dickens and Balzac, of Hawthorne and Poe.
In the nineteenth century were all the glories of the Victorian Era, and in it slavery was abolished in the United States and serfdom in Russia. It saw the liberation of South America, the unification of Italy, and the creation of the kingdoms of Greece, Servia, and Rumania. It saw the United States grow from a small nation to a rich and powerful one; it witnessed the development of Great Britain's scattered colonies into the most extensive empire the world has yet known; and in its latter years it beheld the rise of Germany to commanding military power and great industrial prosperity. The progress made in the field of invention was astounding. The coming of the railroad and the steamship revolutionized the history of civilization. The art, literature, and drama of the world were greatly enriched, and music entered upon what may truly be said to be its golden age.
But, confronted by this great mass of events, how many persons are there who are able to tell the story of the years in which those events occurred? Several histories of the nineteenth century have been written, but none of them has yet succeeded in giving the clear, concise view that the one now published in The Scrap Book purposes to give. This will be complete in ten instalments, each instalment covering a period of ten years. We begin with the year 1800, the last of the eighteenth century, in order to give the reader a clearer understanding of the situation of affairs at the opening of the nineteenth.
1800
Napoleon, then the dominating figure of the world, continued the work of reorganizing the government, centralizing power in his own hands; subdued the last of the French loyalists, and took the Tuileries as his residence. Only Paul, the imbecile Czar of Russia, returned a favorable answer to the request for friendly relations sent by Napoleon to the powers the previous December.
In Egypt, General Kléber, commander of the French forces, agreed with the English admiral, Sir Sydney Smith, to evacuate the country; treaty rejected by the English Parliament; Kléber drove the grand vizier into Syria; restored French rule in Egypt; assassinated by an Arab; succeeded by General Menou.