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Volume six, Moscow

The sixth and final volume of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace was issued in Moscow in December 1869, completing the first separate full edition of the work.

A Moscow newspaper advertisement dated 12 December announced that the newly printed sixth volume had just gone on sale, and offered the complete six-volume set alongside it. The evidence consulted does not establish a single formal publication day.

Not one book, and not all at once

The edition had appeared volume by volume: the first three were available by late 1867 despite title pages dated 1868, volume IV came in March 1868, volume V in March 1869, and volume VI in December.

That is why bibliographies date the edition either 1867–1869 or 1868–1869. The Moscow printer Ris produced it, and the volumes were supplied in paper wrappers, leaving purchasers to have them bound.

Six volumes, not four

The familiar four-volume organisation belongs to later publishing history; Tolstoy reorganised the text for the 1873 edition. What was completed in December 1869 was a work in six volumes.

The first four volumes had already sold well enough to require another edition, and critical argument continued around the now-complete text.

Its reach abroad came much later: the first French translation appeared in 1879, and the first complete English translation in 1886.

Five signatures in Cleveland

On 10 January 1870, John D. Rockefeller, Henry M. Flagler, Samuel Andrews, Stephen V. Harkness and William Rockefeller executed articles in Cleveland creating an Ohio corporation named the Standard Oil Company.

The articles reduced the enterprise to a spare formula: manufacturing petroleum and dealing in petroleum and its products, with its manufacturing establishment in Cleveland. The existing Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler partnership was dissolved and reconstituted as a joint-stock corporation.

A million dollars in ten thousand shares

Authorised capital was $1,000,000, divided into 10,000 shares at $100 par. Rockefeller held 2,667, Harkness 1,334, and Flagler, Andrews and William Rockefeller 1,333 each; Oliver B. Jennings held 1,000, and 1,000 went to the former partnership.

Jennings held stock but did not sign the articles, so the five legal incorporators and the initial body of shareholders were not the same group.

Not yet the trust

The corporation began with two Cleveland refineries. The sprawling interstate Standard Oil Trust was a separate legal organisation, created in 1882.

The founding articles say nothing about a nationwide monopoly, railroad rebates or the South Improvement Company; all of that belongs to later history.

Nor can the industry-wide decline in kerosene prices before 1870 be credited to a company incorporated at the very end of that period.

A breach beside Porta Pia

Italian artillery opened fire before dawn on 20 September 1870 at several points in Rome's defences, with the principal attack directed at the Aurelian Walls between Porta Pia and Porta Salaria.

The guns opened a breach near Porta Pia, and mixed units of infantry and Bersaglieri went through it. The gate itself was not smashed down, and the feather-hatted Bersaglieri did not enter alone — line regiments were with them.

A white flag at ten

Pius IX had ordered only enough resistance to demonstrate that the occupation happened by force, and the papal defenders showed a white flag at about ten in the morning.

The papal commander Hermann Kanzler and the Italian commander Raffaele Cadorna concluded capitulation terms that afternoon at Villa Albani, reported as signed at about half past five.

Vittorio Vidotto's later reconstruction counts 48 Italian dead and 141 wounded against 19 papal dead and 68 wounded; totals differ between accounts because some record only deaths on the day itself.

Rome, minus the Leonine City

Italian troops occupied the city but initially excluded the Leonine City around the Vatican under the capitulation arrangements. At sunset the area around St. Peter's lay outside the occupation terms.

Legal annexation had not happened either. It followed the plebiscite of 2 October and the royal decree of 9 October, and the government remained in Florence.

The listed date is not the date

The listing puts Rome's becoming capital on 6 October 1870. Italian troops had captured the city on 20 September, and a royal decree of 9 October incorporated Rome and the Roman provinces into the kingdom — but no act made it the capital that autumn.

Victor Emmanuel II sanctioned and promulgated Law No. 33, enacted by the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, on 3 February 1871, for transferring the capital from Florence to Rome. The 6 October date may derive from records connected with certifying plebiscite proceedings.

One sentence, and a budget

Article 1 declared Rome the capital of the Kingdom. Article 2 required the seat of government to be established there no later than June 1871.

The law also authorised funding and special expropriation procedures for housing the government in Rome, with a transfer appropriation of 17,000,000 lire.

Declaring and moving are different operations

The statute was published on 4 February and entered into force on 19 February 1871. The definitive physical transfer of the capital is dated 1 July.

Florence remained the functioning seat of government until then, and the ministries did not relocate on any single day.

The first parliamentary session held in Rome opened on 27 November 1871.

Five plenipotentiaries at Frankfurt

Five plenipotentiaries signed the definitive peace treaty at Frankfurt am Main on 10 May 1871 for the French Republic and the German Empire: Bismarck and Harry von Arnim for Germany, and Jules Favre, Augustin Pouyer-Quertier and Marc-Eugène de Goulard for France.

The document converted the preliminary peace terms agreed at Versailles on 26 February into a definitive settlement, and revised the proposed border around Belfort and Thionville.

Not all of Alsace, not all of Lorraine

France ceded most of Alsace and part of Lorraine, not the entirety of both historical regions. Belfort and an enlarged surrounding area stayed French in exchange for the frontier adjustment favouring Germany west of Thionville.

More than 1.5 million French inhabitants were annexed with the ceded territory. Those who wished to remain French generally had to declare that choice and move their domicile by 1 October 1872, although they could keep real estate in the annexed land.

Money, prisoners, archives, railways

The indemnity was 5,000,000,000 francs. The final 3,000,000,000 were due by 2 March 1874 and carried 5% annual interest, and 325,000,000 was credited against the total for transferred Eastern Railway rights.

The treaty also regulated the staged withdrawal of German occupation forces, the repatriation of prisoners — 20,000 were directed to Lyon and then immediately to Algeria — commercial relations, transferred archives and war graves.

Signature did not settle it: ratifications were required within ten days, and the instruments were exchanged at Frankfurt on 20 May 1871.

Two books, one year, no coordination

William Stanley Jevons published The Theory of Political Economy through Macmillan in London in 1871. Carl Menger separately published Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre through Wilhelm Braumüller in Vienna the same year.

They were independent same-year publications rather than a coordinated manifesto. The catalogues consulted do not establish a shared day or month, so "simultaneous release" overstates what is known.

Two very different books

Jevons treated utility mathematically and made the "degree of utility" central to exchange value; his first-edition preface announced a challenge to established political economy.

Menger organised his around goods, value, exchange and price, explaining value through the importance of wants dependent on the units of a good available. He avoided Jevons's mathematical programme, and did not use the term "marginal utility" — Friedrich von Wieser later supplied Grenznutzen.

"Initiated" is a retrospective verdict

Calling 1871 the initiation of modern neoclassical economics is an interpretation applied afterwards. Historians commonly date a broader marginalist turn to 1871–1874 and include Léon Walras, and some dispute treating Jevons, Menger and Walras as exponents of one homogeneous revolution.

Marginal and subjective-value arguments also had precursors, among them Hermann Heinrich Gossen and the German subjective-value tradition.

Nor did a movement appear on publication: Jevons later described his book's early reception as discouraging, and Menger's was likewise limited.

The signature, and what the act said

President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act establishing Yellowstone National Park on 1 March 1872.

It withdrew the described tract in the Montana and Wyoming territories from settlement, occupancy and sale, dedicating it as a public park or "pleasuring-ground" for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. Anyone who tried to settle inside the boundary became, in the statute's words, a trespasser subject to removal.

A park with no park service

The tract passed to the exclusive control of the secretary of the interior, who was directed to retain its timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities and wonders in their natural condition.

The act authorised limited leases for visitor accommodations, each capped at ten years, and required protection of fish and game from commercial destruction.

What it did not supply was an operating staff or a congressional appropriation; Nathaniel Langford's superintendency was unpaid.

Not empty, and "first" needs a definition

The land was not untouched wilderness. Indigenous peoples had lived, hunted, gathered plants, quarried obsidian and used the thermal waters there for millennia.

The Park Service calls Yellowstone the world's first national park, but the claim rests on an institutional definition: Hot Springs had been a federal reservation since 1832, and Yosemite was granted to California as a state-administered park in 1864.

"Colter's Hell," the nickname in the listing, properly belonged to a thermal area on the Shoshone River near present-day Cody — not to Yellowstone's geyser basins.

Out of Portsmouth before noon

Shortly before noon on 21 December 1872, HMS Challenger steamed out of Portsmouth Harbour to begin its global scientific voyage. Only a small crowd watched it go.

Captain George S. Nares commanded the ship, while Professor Charles Wyville Thomson directed the civilian scientific staff — six people including Thomson himself and the artist-secretary John James Wild, aboard with roughly 250 sailors.

Before the English coast disappeared that evening, the ship met heavy seas and headwinds that continued for several days.

A warship rebuilt for science

A six-month refit at Sheerness had converted the corvette, fitting laboratories, scientific cabins, sounding and dredging equipment and specimen storage. Fifteen of its seventeen guns came out, leaving two.

Thomson was still Professor Thomson when the ship sailed; he was knighted only after the voyage ended in 1876.

What the date marks

Some chronologies mention an earlier departure from Sheerness on 7 December. That was a transfer and preparation leg; 21 December was the departure from Portsmouth for the global expedition.

Descriptions of a four-year expedition are conventional rounding. Challenger returned to Spithead on 24 May 1876, after roughly three years and five months.

The soundings, species descriptions and volumes of reports that made the voyage famous all belong to later stages of it.

9:22 in the morning at Oakland Long Wharf

On the morning of 4 June 1876 the Jarrett & Palmer Special Fast Trans-Continental — also called the Lightning Express — reached Oakland Long Wharf on the east side of San Francisco Bay.

The New York Clipper Almanac recorded a 9:22 a.m. arrival after a 1 June departure, and calculated the rail journey from Jersey City to Oakland Wharf as 83 hours, 39 minutes and 16 seconds.

Timed instead from the passengers' ferry departure out of New York City, the same almanac gave 83 hours, 59 minutes and 16 seconds.

A theatre stunt on rails

The special had been organised by the Booth's Theatre managers Jarrett & Palmer as a publicity exercise, and to carry Lawrence Barrett's company west for a San Francisco production of Shakespeare's Henry V.

It was a one-off charter rather than a new scheduled service, and not one locomotive and trainset running coast to coast — participating railroads exchanged locomotives, crews and some cars. A 1926 railway history puts the route at more than 3,313 miles against a fastest regular schedule of seven days.

And then a ferry

After reaching the Oakland railhead, the travellers still had to cross San Francisco Bay by ferry to enter San Francisco. "Arrived in San Francisco" is metropolitan shorthand.

The timings are not perfectly settled either. A Carleton Watkins photograph in Berkeley's collection is catalogued as taken at Oakland Wharf at 9:25 and carries the variant claim 83:32:07, apparently reflecting different clocks, endpoints or later captions.

The first transcontinental railroad had been completed seven years earlier; what this run demonstrated was speed over a network that already existed.

An overnight joint session

In an overnight joint session in Washington, Congress completed the electoral count shortly after four in the morning on 2 March 1877 and declared the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes elected president, with 185 electoral votes to the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden's 184.

Wisconsin's ten electoral votes were the last counted. The presiding officer, Thomas W. Ferry, announced the result and dissolved the joint meeting, and the prolonged legislative day that had begun on 1 February adjourned at 4:12 a.m.

What the declaration implemented

The count carried out the Electoral Commission's earlier decisions, which had awarded Hayes all twenty disputed electoral votes from four states, generally by 8–7. The commission had fifteen members: five senators, five representatives and five Supreme Court justices.

House Democrats had kept up procedural delays until Speaker Samuel J. Randall ruled the remaining obstruction out of order. The majority threshold in that count was 185, not 200.

Not the date of a compromise

2 March is the date of the congressional declaration, not a documented date on which any formal Compromise of 1877 was signed. The Wormley's Hotel negotiations happened before it, and no signed compact fixes the bargain to that morning.

Whether Democratic acquiescence came from a coherent quid pro quo is contested; historians including Allan Peskin have challenged C. Vann Woodward's reconstruction of a unified five-part bargain.

Hayes was confirmed so late that he took a precautionary private oath on 3 March, because 4 March — the constitutional start of the term — fell on a Sunday. The public inauguration followed on 5 March.

Two orders, two states, one April

On 3 April 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the federal detachment occupying the South Carolina State House in Columbia returned to its previous camp. The order was carried out at noon on 10 April.

On 20 April he directed that the infantry detachment beside Louisiana's disputed statehouse, the Mechanics' Institute in New Orleans, be moved to regular barracks nearby. That movement took place at noon on 24 April.

What actually changed

In South Carolina the Republican claimant Daniel Chamberlain abandoned his claim immediately after the withdrawal, leaving the Democrat Wade Hampton III in control. A parallel transfer favoured Francis T. Nicholls over the Republican Stephen B. Packard in Louisiana.

The soldiers were withdrawn from statehouses, not from states. Federal troops remained in South Carolina as a potential guarantee of civil and political rights, and the Army did not leave the South.

"Forced by the Compromise" is an interpretation

Describing the withdrawals as a condition forced by the Compromise of 1877 adopts C. Vann Woodward's disputed reading. Hayes already favoured a conciliatory Southern policy, and scholars disagree over whether the troop decisions and Democratic acquiescence formed a genuine exchange.

Florida's Republican state government had already yielded to the Democrat George F. Drew in January, before Hayes took office.

1877 is the conventional textbook endpoint of Reconstruction, but the periodisation is interpretive: some modern scholarship and National Park Service work use a longer Reconstruction extending well beyond it.

The 92nd sitting

During its 92nd sitting, on 31 May 1883, the German Reichstag held the final roll-call vote on the bill concerning workers' health insurance and adopted it by 216 votes to 99.

The measure imposed compulsory sickness insurance on specified wage earners in mines, factories, ironworks, railways, inland steamship operations, shipyards, construction, crafts and other established trades. It expressly excluded officials employed at a fixed salary by imperial, state or municipal administrations.

Half a wage, for thirteen weeks

The minimum benefits were medical treatment and medicines from the onset of illness and, for incapacity, half the customary local daily wage beginning after the third day, for no more than thirteen weeks.

This was contributory social insurance rather than tax-funded medical care: workers ordinarily paid two-thirds of the contributions and employers one-third. The German Federal Ministry of Health puts the population initially subject to compulsory coverage at about 10 percent.

Passage is not enactment

31 May was the parliamentary vote, not the start of benefits. The enacted law was dated 15 June and carried the signatures of Kaiser Wilhelm I and Bismarck.

Preparatory provisions began on 1 December 1883 and the remainder on 1 December 1884.

Calling it a law Bismarck personally pushed through also passes over the Reichstag, its committee negotiations, and the changes made to the government's bill along the way.