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Battle of the Little Big Horn between Crazy Horse’s Sioux and General George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry, who dies in action.

The majority of Italian emigration (98.3%) avoids Africa. It therefore follows the labor market more than geopolitics. Beginning in 1927, with the Great Depression in the United States and the forced colonization of Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, the situation would change.

The Left in government with Agostino Depretis (who was an opponent of Cavour’s mission to Crimea)

King Leopold II of Belgium forms a non-governmental humanitarian corporation with the aim of exploring Central Africa. In 1885, the European powers agree to cede control of 2.3 million square kilometers of Africa: the Congo Free State is born. The true goal, of course, is

Thomas Alva Edison announces to journalists his discovery of the “aetheric force”: he has actually discovered high-frequency electromagnetic waves, as James Clerk Maxwell will confirm theoretically and later Hertz, Lodge and Marconi in experimental practice.

Thomas Alva Edison begins a series of experiments on the acoustic telegraph for Western Union. In less than a week, he improves Gray’s acoustic transmitter with a delicate balance of electromagnets, resonators, and elastic pendulums, each connected to its own battery.

Thomas Alva Edison’s electric pen is born: a battery-powered stylus with a needle that quickly moves up and down thanks to an electromagnetic motor. This motor makes it pierce a sheet of template paper in a continuous line, allowing the operator to write or draw.

Spain. Second Bourbon Restoration: yet another coup d’état in the unstable Spanish Republic brings Isabella II’s son to the throne, under precise constitutional guarantees. The Bourbon sovereigns will thus be: Alfonso XII, Alfonso XIII.

Thomas Alva Edison demonstrates the quadruplex telegraph, which uses the phenomenon of induction, which he now fully masters. The demonstration is a success, and two days later, the New York Times announces it to the world. Edison gets his first taste of fame.

A few hours after Graham Bell, Elisha Gray also filed a patent application very similar to Bell’s; the invention was later recognized as Bell’s.

Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone (patent no. 174465) with earphone and microphone (Meucci did not renew it).

Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii, deaf due to a childhood complication of scarlet fever, was barred from Moscow schools. He was also denied elementary school because he was deaf. He was educated by his parents and then taught himself. He became the father of cosmonautics. After his

Friedrich Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy, in which he outlines the opposition of two aspects of the Greek soul: the wild and irrational passions personified by Dionysus, and the disciplined and harmonious beauty represented by Apollo.

Cornelius Vanderbilt and his competitor Tom Scott charge a single railroad tariff to each refiner, thus taking away the preferential tariff from John D. Rockefeller, who, to escape, will invent a new technology and build pipelines in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The HMS Challenger, under the command of John Young Buchanan, discovered that the ocean floor was covered with countless manganese nodules of all sizes. It was later discovered that in certain areas (especially in the Pacific Ocean) there were as many as 11 kg per

The HMS Challenger expedition, funded by the British government, the Royal Society, and the British Museum, sets out on a 3.5-year voyage around the world; after 70,000 nautical miles, it collects 4,700 new species of marine organisms; it will take 19 years to catalogue them

Charles Darwin publishes The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Isaac Newton’s private papers, inherited by his niece, Catherine Barton, then passed to the Earl of Portsmouth, who married his daughter, and then examined in 1777 by Bishop Samuel Horsley, who “viewed the contents with horror and slammed the lid,” were eventually donated to Cambridge

American Simon Ingersoll invents the jackhammer

Antonio Meucci issues the first patent for the telephone

The first chewing gum balls were sold in New Jersey. The patent dates back to two years earlier, and was filed by dentist Sir William.

Three Newark schoolgirls sheltered from the rain in the doorway of Edison’s factory on Ward Street, New Jersey. Invited inside by an employee who knew them, they encountered Thomas Alva Edison, busy working on the teletype for stock market quotes. Mary Stilwell, one of the

Antonio Meucci demonstrated the functioning of a device called the teletrophone, the operating principle of the telephone. He patented it but did not renew it, which was instead exploited by Bell. In 2002, the U.S. Congress recognized Meucci’s paternity of the invention.

Lazio. Plebiscite for annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. Voters numbered 135,188, with 133,681 voting in favor. In Rome, 40,875 voted in favor and only 46 voted against. The newspaper “Unita’ Cattolica” joked that the Pope found only 46 friends in Rome…

Breach of Porta Pia. On September 17, after the failure of diplomatic attempts and the withdrawal of the French garrison protecting the city, General Cadorna arrived at the gates of Rome with five divisions. He had entered papal territory without encountering resistance five days earlier.

Ferdinand Von Helmholtz shows that different forms of Gauge Field can give rise to the same electromagnetic field

United States. President Ulysses Grant signs a congressional resolution authorizing the Secretary of War to establish the National Weather Service. Grant assigns it to the War Department both because he believes that only military discipline is capable of gathering the necessary data and making predictions,

The average working week is 65 hours in Western Europe and 60 hours in the United States. This will drop to 45 and 40 hours, respectively, by 1950.

During the Union Pacific excavations, the almost complete skeleton of the first Brontosaurus (thunder lizard) was found, which caused great wonder and made the front pages of all the newspapers.

The Suez Canal is inaugurated.

Huxley coined the term agnosticism or unknowability, in opposition to Gnosticism which claims to know everything.

Japan annexed the island of Hokkaido, originally inhabited by the Ainu people, significantly different from the Japanese, but largely already controlled.

American George Herbert Taylor invented the vibrator. It was a medical bed with a sphere at its center that was made to vibrate the patient’s pelvic area by a mechanism powered by a steam engine in the next room. At the time, however, Dr. Joseph

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is approved. The amendment was passed with the aim of guaranteeing the rights of slaves. Today, it is the foundation of due process and the equal protection clause in the laws of each state. The amendment was

Henrietta Leavitt was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts. She discovered the law of Cepheid variables: their absolute magnitude is proportional to the period of their variability. This provided a method for estimating the distances of galaxies, which allowed her to discover, for example, that the small

United States. President Andrew Johnson is impeached and acquitted by a single vote.

Japan. Conspirators capture the gates of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, ending the shogunate and restoring power to the emperor. The Meiji Restoration has begun. The shogun accepts defeat, but many others do not, sparking a civil war. But realism quickly prevails. Westerners cannot all

With Garibaldi’s inconclusive expedition to Rome, the democratic Risorgimento failed, while the year before the royal Risorgimento had failed at Custoza.

Lazio. Many Garibaldi followers end up in papal prisons, others manage to cross the border where Italian troops disarm and arrest them. Garibaldi is captured and taken to La Spezia, then sent back to Caprera. General Govone witnesses him protesting, declaring himself an American citizen

Giuseppe Garibaldi, confined on the island of Caprera, a sixty-year-old man suffering from arthritis and with an ankle injured by the Bersaglieri in Aspromonte, manages to escape one evening on a small boat, in which he remains lying down to elude surveillance, paddling as he

Joseph Lister began using carbolic acid as an antiseptic agent in all his surgical procedures, not just as a post-operative dressing. He had previously used this method on a child with an open leg fracture—a highly feared case at the time. He carefully cleaned the

Charles Feltman opens the first hot dog shop in the United States, located in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, and sells 3,684 in a year. He is credited with coining the word “hot dog.”

Veneto. Plebiscite for annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. Voters numbered 647,495, with 647,426 voting yes.

The Italo-Austrian Peace Treaty is signed, by which the Austrian Empire recognizes the Kingdom of Italy. The country thus completes its territorial unification, excluding only Rome (which will be conquered on September 20, 1870) and Trento.

Italy acquires the Veneto. Rome, annexed in 1870, is still missing; Trento with Trentino; and Trieste with Venezia Giulia, annexed between 1915 and 1919 (World War I or Fourth War of Independence). The new Italian state is reluctant to start a new war, while Italian

Bezzecca. Garibaldi and his men achieve victory over the Austrians, but it is a useless victory: the war draws to a close thanks to the Prussian victory, and Garibaldi must halt the advance on Trento by order of the king, to which he responds with

Bernhard Riemann died of tuberculosis in Selasca near Verbania, on Lake Maggiore. He was buried in the local cemetery in Biganzolo. His work introduced the concept of extra dimensions to simplify the laws of physics, wormholes (Riemann’s cut), and the concept of gravity as a

After the Seven Weeks’ War, Austria was defeated and ceded Venice to Napoleon III, who passed it on to the Kingdom of Italy.

United States. Engineer James Buchanan Eads wins the contract to build the bridge over the Mississippi River in St. Louis. He builds it with large iron castings and tubular steel arches, with spans of 170 meters. A few years earlier, Eads had also recognized the

Otto von Bismarck, head of the Prussian government, in preparing for a conflict against Austria, a direct competitor for hegemony in the German-speaking world, and having secured the neutrality of Russia and France, sought an ally interested in a war against Austria. This ally could

James Clark Maxwell, with the four laws of electromagnetism, which describe the field in a complete and closed way, lays the foundations of electronic technology.

Wilmington and its bastion, Fort Fisher, the last major Confederate port, also fell to Federal hands.

General Sherman’s armies take Columbia, the capital of South Carolina.

Confederate emissaries travel to Fort Monroe (United States) to negotiate surrender. But Lincoln has set clear conditions: 1) Rejoining the Union; 2) Abolition of slavery. The first is unacceptable to the Southerners.

Robert Edward Lee is appointed by President Davis as General-in-Chief of the Confederacy

China. Taiping Rebellion (a para-Christian society of God-worshippers). The Qing army besieges and conquers Nanjing. The terrible civil war ends with the final defeat of the Taiping rebels in 1871.

Croatia, Yugoslavia. A young Nikola Tesla, armed with a backpack and several books, wanders the mountains and trails, at the suggestion of his father, who wants him to be stronger so he can enroll in the military academy. The experience does indeed make him stronger

Siege of Atlanta, Georgia. Hood’s first attempt to relieve the siege fails, leaving 3,000 Confederates on the field.

Atlanta, Georgia. Shermann’s advance on Atlanta is completed with the crossing of the Chattahoochee by the Army of the Cumberland, the Army of the Ohio, and the Army of Tennessee (unified). That evening, Confederate General Johnston is dismissed for failing to stop the advance. Command

In an attempt to break free, Lee sends the II Corps deep into Union territory. They reach within a few miles of Washington and threaten Baltimore. On July 10th, the capital seems lost, but Lincoln maintains his composure and remains in the city within sight

CL Sholes created the first QWERTY typewriter; it had a flat carriage and the hammers struck the paper from underneath; if they got stuck, you wouldn’t notice until the end of the document; to avoid this, the keys were moved, initially in alphabetical order –

The first Northern advance guards enter a evacuated Chattanooga.

Siege of Charleston, South Carolina. Morris Island is abandoned by the Confederacy. It withstood 58 days of bombardment and attacks.

4:00 PM. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. After a brief but intense artillery barrage, the Confederates assault the Union lines. For five miles as far as the eye can see, gray Confederate lines emerge from the woods. The fate of the battle, and perhaps the entire war, hangs

The Second Battle of Vicksburg, on the Mississippi, ends in a stalemate: the Confederates resist and hold the crucial stretch of the river.

In the face of the conflict, the American public debt soared from $64,844,000 in 1860 to a staggering $524,178,000 in 1862. This led to inflation, which, however, remained under control: only 7% per year, while wages grew only 4%. By contrast, the Confederacy suffered annual

Claude Monet knows Sisley, Renoir, Bazille, Courbet

Second Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). In a diversionary maneuver by Lee, the Confederate army advances toward Washington, D.C., and McClellan is forced to send a large contingent to stop it. The battle takes place in the same area as Bull Run, around the Stone

General McClellan’s 200,000 Union troops land south of Richmond to take the Confederate capital from behind. The Southerners currently have only 90,000 men to oppose them, but the slow pace of the operation and General Lee’s strategic and maneuvering skills allow the Confederates to avoid

General Grant accepts the surrender of the Confederate forces at Fort Donelson, besieged by land and the Mississippi River with the battleships Louisville, De Kalb, Pittsburg, Carondolet, Tyler, and Conestoga. The Confederate forces take 14,623 prisoners.

The English and French fleets reached Veracruz between January 6 and 8, 1862. The city of Campeche surrendered to the French fleet on February 27, and on March 5, a French army commanded by General Charles de Lorencez arrived. In April, the Spanish and English—having

Charles Darwin published The Fertilization of Orchids by Insects, in which he discovered coevolution. Observing the Star of Madagascar (Angraecum sesquipedale), an orchid with a spur up to 30 cm long, he predicted the existence of a previously unknown moth with an equally long proboscis

Lincoln declares the existence of an insurrection and calls for 75,000 volunteers. But the Northern “army” is disorganized. To give just one minor example: the Ohio militia, given the great popularity aroused in America by the Italian Risorgimento, adopts a red Garibaldi uniform, while a

Finally, Victor Emmanuel II signed the following law with Cavour, proclaiming the Kingdom of Italy: “Victor Emmanuel II, King of Sardinia, Cyprus, and Jerusalem, etc., etc., etc….The Senate and the Chamber of Deputies have approved; We have sanctioned and promulgate the following: Sole Article. King

Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele II meet in Teano

News that the Thousand had certainly landed in Sicily reached Turin, fifteen days late.

The Alpine Hunters, commanded by Garibaldi, crossed the Ticino River at Sesto Calende, where the river flows out of the lake. A well-executed maneuver allowed them to surprise and capture the entire (small) enemy garrison while they were asleep. The Alpine Hunters were a negligible

After the defeat of Custoza by the Piedmontese, the war with the Austrians ended.

Vicenza. Second Austrian assault on the city. At the end of the day, General Thurn and Taxis must give the order to retreat.

Morning. The Piedmontese decide to attack the fortified Quadrilateral, attacking its heart: Verona.