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Today is September12, 2026 Saturday.

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The World in 1874 the year an insult became the name of an art

St Louis walked a circus elephant across its new bridge before letting the public on, because people believed an elephant would refuse to step onto anything unsafe.

Life back then

In April a group of painters in Paris gave up on the official Salon and rented a photographer's studio on the Boulevard des Capucines. Thirty of them hung their work, Monet, Degas, Renoir and Berthe Morisot among them. A critic looked at Monet's hazy harbour scene, Impression, Sunrise, and used the title as a joke at their expense. The name Impressionism stuck. Paint now came in metal tubes, so a painter could carry it out to a river bank and finish the picture there instead of in a studio.

The year in 8 events

• 🔥Feb 4 British troops reach Kumasi and burn the Ashanti capital, in what is now Ghana.
• 🎨Apr 15 Thirty painters open their own show in Paris. A critic mocks it and gives Impressionism its name.
• 🎻May 22 Verdi conducts his Requiem in Milan, a year after the death of the writer Manzoni.
• 🌉Jul 4 The Eads Bridge opens at St Louis, the first big steel bridge over the Mississippi.
• ✉️Oct 9 Twenty two countries sign a postal treaty at Bern. One stamp will now carry a letter abroad.
• 🏝️Oct 10 Fiji's chiefs sign the islands over to Britain.
• 🐘Nov 7 Thomas Nast draws the Republican party as an elephant in Harper's Weekly. The symbol sticks.
• 🔗Nov 24 Joseph Glidden patents barbed wire in Illinois. Farms can now be fenced where there is no timber.

Who Was in Charge?

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