1867A flag comes down on Castle Hill
On the afternoon of 18 October 1867, on the rock above Sitka the Russians called Castle Hill, Brigadier General Lovell Rousseau and Captain Alexei Peshchurov met at the foot of the flagstaff outside the governor’s house. Russian and American troops lined the parapet. The Russian flag came down, the American flag went up, and Russian America became a territory of the United States.
The money - 7.2 million dollars, about two cents an acre - had been agreed in March, in a treaty signed at four in the morning by the secretary of state William Seward and the Russian minister Eduard de Stoeckl. Russia wanted to sell a colony it could not defend; American newspapers called the purchase Seward’s Folly. Nobody at the ceremony consulted the Tlingit, Haida and Aleut peoples whose land it was. Alaska Day is still kept on 18 October.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: National Park Service: American Flag Raising Site, Sitka ↗
1685Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes
The Edict of Nantes, granted by Henry IV in 1598, had given French Protestants the right to worship and a measure of civil protection. On 18 October 1685 Louis XIV signed the Edict of Fontainebleau, which took it all away: Protestant worship banned, churches pulled down, pastors expelled, children to be baptised as Catholics.
It also forbade Protestants to leave the country - an unusual provision even by the standards of seventeenth-century Europe, since it compelled conversion without offering exile as a way out. For twenty years the crown had been narrowing the edict piece by piece and billeting dragoons on Protestant households to frighten them into converting. Several hundred thousand Huguenots left anyway, for England, the Dutch Republic, Prussia, Switzerland and the American colonies, taking their trades with them. Some accounts date the edict 22 October, when it was registered.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Musée protestant: the Edict of Fontainebleau or the Revocation (1685) ↗
1851A long novel about a whale
Herman Melville’s sixth book appeared first in London, published by Richard Bentley on 18 October 1851 in three handsome volumes under the title The Whale. The American edition, called Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, followed on 14 November. Melville had sent Bentley a set of the American proof sheets, which were then edited for British taste and British spelling.
The London version also lost the epilogue, in which Ishmael explains how he survived - so British reviewers complained, reasonably, that the story was told by a narrator who had drowned. The book sold poorly in Melville’s lifetime and he died in 1891 largely forgotten. Its reputation as one of the great American novels was built in the 1920s, thirty years after his death.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Herman Melville Electronic Library: Moby-Dick, American and British first editions ↗
1898Four hundred years of Spanish rule end in Puerto Rico
The last Spanish troops sailed from Puerto Rico on 18 October 1898, and the United States flag was raised over the public buildings of San Juan. American forces under General Nelson Miles had landed in July, during the Spanish-American War; an armistice followed in August, and the formal handover took two months to complete. The Treaty of Paris in December confirmed the transfer.
It ended slightly more than four centuries of Spanish rule, begun when Columbus reached the island in 1493. Puerto Rico had won a charter of autonomy from Madrid only the previous year, and it was set aside. The island’s people were made United States citizens in 1917; its political status has been argued over ever since.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Library of Congress: the changing of the guard - Puerto Rico in 1898 ↗
1991Azerbaijan writes its independence into law
On 18 October 1991 the Supreme Soviet in Baku adopted the Constitutional Act on the State Independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan. A declaration had been made in August, in the confusion after the failed coup in Moscow, but the act of 18 October is the document that set out the legal and economic foundations of the new state, and it is the date Azerbaijan keeps.
The act deliberately presented itself as a restoration rather than a new beginning: the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of 1918-20, one of the first parliamentary republics in the Muslim world and among the first states anywhere to give women the vote, had been absorbed by the Red Army in 1920. Independence came with the war in Nagorno-Karabakh already under way.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Council of Europe: constitutional legislation of Azerbaijan ↗
