1892
John Gracie, an inventor from Bel Air, Maryland, claims to have invented a potentially revolutionary new type of propulsion for motor vehicles in the February issue of a respected specialist publication, the American Mechanics' Monthly. His vehicle, however, fails to deliver on it's promise[although this does not prevent Gracie from continuing to embark on other endeavors of fleeting fancy].
Also in America, a Pennsylvania garage owner named Albert Davidson builds a three wheeled vehicle powered by coal; surprisingly, the car actually drives halfway decently, but is still expensive to operate and is rather dirty, as well[much more so than even for the era].
Early election polls held in mid-April thru early May indicate that a surprisingly significant number of Americans are willing to give the new Progressive Party a chance in this year's upcoming elections.
The current Brazilian Emperor, Pedro III, falls ill of what seems like a benign disease during the month of June; unfortunately, it is eventually discovered to be something much worse.
In America, the first commercially successful motorcycle goes on sale in June of this year.
After years of neo-Imperialist misrule, Jose Andres de Iturbide is forced out of Mexico City by a U.S. sponsored counter-coup led by Anselmo Juarez, who had been exiled in 1881.
An Indiana man named Madison Rone, currently on the run from authorities following a drunken spat with his second wife, robs a family-owned bank in the small town of Pardeeville, East Texas, just outside of Dallas[Pardeeville is roughly around where Mesquite, TX was in our world.], on August 21st. No one is killed, but Rone hijacks a stagecoach on his way out; one of the passengers is a former Senator from Kentucky. The news soon makes headlines across the country and the U.S. Marshals begin one of the first modern manhunts in the history of the country's law enforcement.
The last surviving veteran of the War of 1812 dies in early September, in the state of Missouri.
William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist, dies peacefully in his sleep on September 30th in the small northwest Ill. town of Galena, at the home of one of his daughters. Three former U.S. presidents(Sherman, Rousseau, and Bristow, that is; Chase wished to attend but was ill in bed, and Randall was also too busy), the current President of Canada & that nation's ambassador to the U.S., and one of the sons of former British PM Benjamin Disraeli, amongst quite a few others, attend the October 19th processions, of what was originally intended to be a small funeral.
The 1892 U.S. Presidential Elections: At this point in time, both of the current major parties were the victim of some serious electoral fatigue, not to mention various other problems; several Republican Congressmen and Senators had been caught up in incompetency scandals and quite a few Democrats were under investigation for corruption. The GOP, seemingly randomly, nominated a little-known Tennessee Congressman named Henry Evans, who talked a good game, as it were, but didn't have much of an actual record to run on. And the Democrats nominated Orlando Culver, an Illinois Senator with a strong pro-business streak; unfortunately, as they would later discover, Culver also wasn't terribly honest, either.
The Progressive Party, meanwhile, nominated a fellow by the name of Charles T. Martin, a 53-year-old two-time state senator and longtime anti-corruption activist from the state of Kansas. Martin, the son of Welsh immigrants, wasn't just any Progressive, however; he was also an advocate of women's and labor rights as well. It was a tough race between the three, but Martin managed to pull ahead by banking on America's newfound prosperity in the wake of the Civil War, and a desire to continue the society building legacy of Presidents Bristow and Sherman. Despite only winning a total of 44.8% of the popular vote, Martin won just enough electoral votes to be able to take office; it was the state of Colorado that put him over the top.
Unfortunately, his stances on civil rights also angered many Southern conservatives, and soon, forces would be set in motion to try to unravel the progress made under Reconstruction.....[similar, unfortunately, to what happened in the real world.]
1893
The first working primitive submachine gun is invented by Jonathan Pelley in the American state of Missouri; it quickly becomes colloquially known as the “Pelley Gun”. It doesn't see a lot of commercial success, being purchased mainly by sportsmen and eccentric gun collectors, but it does spark interest in other things.
On February 14th, Pedro III, Emperor of Brazil, dies at 7:30 in the evening, leaving no clear heirs; his only son, who would have been Pedro IV, was killed in a hunting accident in Wales in the United Kingdom, five years earlier. His sister, Princess Isabel, is the one possible successor, but there is a heated debate over this; for four whole months, Brazil has no monarch at all.
The American city of Brickston, New Jersey, is terrorized during a heated gun battle between two rival Italian-American crime syndicates, in late February, in which half a dozen policemen and over twenty civilians die.
A majorly destructive tornado wiped out much of the towns of Fayette and Marvinville, Alabama, on February 28th, killing 48 people, with 58 other people also dying in other tornadoes during this two day outbreak.
On March 30th, a rare hurricane, with winds over 110 miles per hour, slammed directly into Auckland in New Zealand; over 400 people were killed.
A distressed former Civil War veteran named Gabriel Tapley shoots and kills Tennessee Lt. Governor Joseph Monaghan on April 7th, in Murfreesboro. Monaghan, the son of Irish immigrants, hadn't just been popular with first and second-generation citizens in his state, but had made efforts to improve the lives of the African-American community as well.
Another devastating tornado in Alabama destroyed several small towns just south of the bustling metropolis of Manchester, killing 36 people, on the evening of April 16th.
An anti-Polish ethnic riot breaks out in Clarksville, Tennessee, on May 18th, after an immigrant named Vladislav Karolek is accused of having robbed a nearby jewelry store. The man is found not guilty during his June 2nd trial, but, dissatisfied with the ruling, a lynch mob attacks his home just two days later; he, his wife, and their two children survive, but Vladislav's brother, Michael, does not. The news of this event makes national headlines for a week and horrifies many in the growing Polish-American community in particular.
p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } The political situation in Brazil finally blows up on June 16th when Princess Isabel is accepted to the Brazilian throne. Many of the remaining planters do not take kindly to this, as they had hoped to install a particularly conservative Hapsburger on the throne, who had become sympathetic to their cause. Herman I, as this Austrian prince has named himself, decides to help lead the growing pro-slavery revolt in the country, and the Brazilian Civil War begins in earnest.[Interestingly, amongst his most ardent supporters are many of the small number of Confederate exiles who'd arrived in the half-decade immediately after the American Civil War ended].
After years of growing anti-Italian prejudice in this area, a number of the residents of Beaufort and several other towns in the south end of lowland South Carolina break out into a riot on June 24th after an immigrant by the name of Luigi Brescia is publicly accused of raping and attempting to murder Anne Benson, the daughter of a well-respected planter(and former slaveholder) named Jeremiah Luckett, in a nearby rural area. On the 28th, an impartial judge finds that there is no solid evidence that can convict Brescia of the crime, but that only drives the gathered crowd into a fury. Brescia is brutally lynched by the rioters, and the judge has to be escorted out of the county by the local sheriff and a sympathetic deputy.
(As it turns out, the real offender was actually revealed to be a former lover of Mrs, Benson's, a man named Elijah Waters, himself the son of a planter, who had been rejected by her. Waters, however, was never charged, as the judge in the Brescia case had since been forcibly removed from office. He later was killed in 1908 during a dispute over a ranch in Arizona. Anne Benson committed suicide in Florida in 1918.)
On June 27th, a 35 year old Czech American newspaper writer named Anton Hradek, originally from Galveston, East Texas, is murdered, and his offices ransacked, by angry protesters in Vicksburg, Mississippi, after he published a scathing editorial condemning the murder of Michael Karolek in Tennessee the previous month; he was also noted as a supporter of Reconstruction, which many suspect contributed to his assassination.
A highly unusual mid-winter tropical storm sliced it's way through northern Cooksland, Australia, on the 15th & 16th of July, killing over 80 people, mainly thanks to flooding; the town of Weipa in particular was almost totally destroyed. Winds approaching hurricane force also exacerbated the damage, trashing many homesteads, and even downing a few telegraph lines.
The August 7th shooting death of a Russian nobleman in Paris by anarchist Jean-Pierre Castell raises much concern in both France and Russia; law enforcement in the latter country urges Tsar Alexander III to crack down on “dangerously subversive” elements.
On August 27th, two street gangs, one Catholic Irish and the other Ulster Protestant Irish, battle it out on the streets of the bustling city of Roscommon[Wollongong in the real world], New South Wales. Concerns will soon be raised as to whether or not settling Ulster Protestant and Southern Catholic Irish together was all that good of an idea. A debate begins in Canberra regarding possible solutions to the problem.
After years of simmering tensions between them, the Chinese Empire and the Taiping Republic find themselves on the brink of war at the end of the summer of 1893, after a number of border incidents. On Sept. 16th, the tensions finally boil over when a Qing Chinese diplomat is assassinated in Fujian; later that day, thousands of Qing troops surge across the border, and the Taiping War begins.
The American town of Atlantic City, New Jersey, is devastated by a hurricane on Sept. 24th; over a hundred people die there and elsewhere in the state, as winds of over 95 miles an hour and torrential rains lash the South Jersey coast. Two days later, the storm landfalls again in eastern Connecticut, causing more destruction. One of the grandsons of former President Daniel Webster, Jerome Scammell, a newspaper owner from Warwick, Rhode Island, is amongst those who perished in the storm.
On October 16th, former American President Lovell Rousseau passes away in the home of one his daughters in St. Genevieve, Missouri.
A devastating hurricane, with winds exceeding 160 miles per hour, slammed into the northern half of the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico on November 8th, killing 8,000 people, and badly devastating the capital city of San Juan. When the news reached Spain, which had already been in dire financial straits for over a decade primarily thanks to conservative[that is, pro-Carlist] misrule, two weeks later, many people began to demand an answer to the increasingly unavoidable “Puerto Rico Question”.
King Christian IX of Denmark dies in his sleep on December 27th. The following evening, his son, who takes the name of Frederick VII, is crowned in his stead.
After years of neglect by Britain, there is a growing movement for independence in Ireland, and with much support from people, both prominent and ordinary, in France, Canada, and the United States in particular. Bulgarians, too, are seeking their independence from an increasingly repressive Ottoman government.
1894
A rare wintertime tornado devastates a large swath of the town of Gainesville, Georgia, on January 27th. 35 people die in two counties, 30 in Gainesville alone.
The Conservative Spanish Prime Minister, Marcelo Palmero, resigns from his post on February 22nd; the seat remains vacant until April 2nd, when Liberal Praxedes Sagasta, himself a veteran statesman, takes his place.
On April 26th, a rare cyclone[rare, that is, for this area of the world] with winds exceeding 120 miles per hour landfalls not far from Shippington[near OTL Ravensthorpe], Western Australia, devastating the small coastal village of Coolacollup in particular; over a hundred people die. Help takes just under three weeks to arrive, and when it does, it's not enough; it takes until mid-June for the required assistance to finally appear on the scene. Many Western Australians are flustered by what seems to be a terrible case of incompetence, and this serves to only further underscore the growing social and geopolitical disparity in Australian society.
British anarchist John Liddell plants, and explodes, a pipe bomb at the local Conservative Party offices in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, during the early morning hours of June 7th. Perhaps as intended, no one is physically harmed, but the building is trashed. Liddell is caught, and for his crimes, is deported to Australia after his trial[yes, the practice of sending undesirables Down Under was not entirely stopped by this time ITTL, and had, in fact, been revived in recent years, mainly thanks to growing worries over anarchist and other strains of radical terrorism.].
An incident occurs in Amsterdam on July 22nd, when members of a radical Communist group get in a heated argument with a right-wing nationalist group over items and money that were allegedly stolen from the former. A shoot-out erupts, and by the end of it, the majority of the Marxists are dead, and the nationalists flee the neighborhood. Some of them are eventually caught, but are later acquitted under some rather dubious circumstances.
In retaliation for the July 22nd Amsterdam attack, a small explosive device explodes at the main headquarters of the nationalist organization that had been responsible for such, in Leiden, on Sept. 4th; the founder, Hendryk Groenewegen, and several others, are killed in the blast. The Communist who planted the bomb, a 23 year old factory worker from nearby Almere, Steffan van der Griff, admitted to having been inspired by the Rotherham incident in June. As a result, Van der Griff is sentenced to 20 years in prison, though he later escapes, and manages to hide out in Western Australia for a few years, during which time he fathers two children.
On Sept. 26th, a major ethnic riot broke out in the town of Zanesville, Ohio, after a young woman named Amelia Tiddings came forward claiming that a Serbian immigrant by the name of Michael Dukevich had raped her the Sunday prior after she refused his advances. Twenty people, mainly Eastern European immigrants, including Dukevich, would die before the truth was discovered; as it happened, both her father and her lover had demanded that she lie to the police as to not embarrass either of their families(Notably, both men died violent deaths about two weeks after this revelation. Many will speculate that this was revenge for causing the riot).
The Russian Crown Prince, Victor, the eldest son of Alexander III, is killed after a bomb is thrown into the carriage he was riding in, in the center of St. Petersburg, on the afternoon of Sept. 27th. Danish Prince Eric zu Oldenburg, a nephew of Frederick VII, also dies. The attack throws Russian high society into a frenzy, and Tsar Alexander, upon learning of his son's death, has a massive stroke. A pair Communist radicals by the names of Georgi Bronshtain and Matvei Zinovieff, are soon arrested and accused of masterminding the crime. Both profess their innocence, but it does them no good, and are convicted, despite a lack of any evidence, and are sentenced to be executed in January.
Another anarchist strikes Great Britain; on the 10th and 13th of November, a mysterious man plants packages at the homes of two prominent anti-labor industrialists, both of which explode, killing one of the victims, and badly maiming another. He is eventually identified as Anthony Onslow, but evades capture, dying in America at an advanced age(only confessing to the crimes on his deathbed in 1948)
Catherine Gladstone, the wife of former Prime Minister William Gladstone, dies on December 26th, shortly after visiting a Canadian relative. She is buried in the Westminster Abbey, and upon Mr. Gladstone's death in May of the following year, he will be next to her.
