1793Charlotte Corday stabs Marat in his bath
Jean-Paul Marat, a doctor turned journalist, was one of the fiercest voices of the French Revolution. His newspaper, L’Ami du peuple, called again and again for traitors to be hunted down and killed, and he was a leader of the radical Montagnards, who in early June 1793 drove their rivals, the Girondins, out of the National Convention. A painful skin disease forced him to spend long hours in a medicinal bath, where he read and wrote.
Charlotte Corday, a 24-year-old from Normandy who sympathised with the Girondins, came to Paris convinced that killing Marat would stop the bloodshed. On the evening of 13 July 1793 she talked her way into his rooms by promising names of plotters in Caen, and as he wrote them down she stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife. She was guillotined four days later. The Jacobins turned Marat into a martyr, and Jacques-Louis David’s painting of him dead in his bath became one of the most famous images of the Revolution.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Jean-Paul Marat ↗
1830Alexander Duff opens his school in Calcutta
Alexander Duff was the first missionary the Church of Scotland sent overseas. He sailed for India in 1829 and was shipwrecked on the way, losing almost all his books, before he reached Calcutta in 1830. He believed that the best way to reach educated Bengalis was not street preaching but a school that taught Western learning, science and literature in English, alongside the Bible, and the reformer Ram Mohan Roy helped him find premises and pupils.
On 13 July 1830 Duff opened the General Assembly’s Institution in a rented house on upper Chitpur Road, in the Jorasanko district of the city. It proved hugely popular and helped shape the English-language education that Britain later adopted across India. The school grew into Scottish Church College, one of the oldest colleges in Asia still running, whose students have included the religious teacher Swami Vivekananda and the nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Scottish Church College: College history ↗
1863The draft riots break out in New York City
In 1863, short of men for the Civil War, the United States brought in its first national draft. Men were chosen by lottery, but anyone called up could escape service by paying $300, more than half a year’s wages for a labourer. In New York, many poor workers, especially Irish immigrants, were angry at a war they now saw being fought to free enslaved people who might compete with them for jobs. The first names were drawn in the city on Saturday 11 July.
On the morning of Monday 13 July 1863 a crowd attacked the draft office on Third Avenue and set it on fire. For four days mobs looted shops, fought the police and burned buildings, and they turned with terrible cruelty on the city’s Black residents: men were beaten and lynched, and the Colored Orphan Asylum was burned, though its children escaped. Troops were rushed from the battlefield at Gettysburg to restore order. More than a hundred people died, in the worst civil disorder in the country’s history.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: New-York Historical Society: What happened during the New York City Draft Riots? ↗
1870Bismarck edits the Ems telegram and pushes France towards war
In the summer of 1870 Spain offered its vacant throne to Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a relative of King William I of Prussia. France was alarmed at the thought of Hohenzollerns on two of its borders, and on 12 July the candidacy was withdrawn. Paris wanted more. On 13 July the French ambassador, Count Vincent Benedetti, approached the king on his morning walk at the spa town of Ems and asked for a promise that the candidacy would never be renewed.
The king politely refused, and his staff sent a telegram describing the meeting to the Prussian chief minister, Otto von Bismarck, in Berlin. Bismarck, who believed a war with France would unite the German states behind Prussia, shortened the message before releasing it to the press that evening, so that it read as if the king had snubbed the ambassador. The French were outraged, and on 19 July France declared war on Prussia. The war ended in French defeat and the creation of the German Empire in January 1871.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Ems telegram ↗
