E-text prepared by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Richard J. Shiffer,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

NOTABLE EVENTS

OF THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the
Progress of the World,

IN A SERIES OF SHORT STUDIES.

Compiled and Edited

By John Clark Ridpath.

PUBLISHED BY

THE CHRISTIAN HERALD,

Louis Klopsch, Proprietor,

BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK.

1896

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PREFACE.

This little volume constitutes one number of the Christian HeraldLibrary series for 1896-97. The title indicates the scope and purposeof the work. Of heavy reading the reader of to-day no doubt has asufficiency. Of light reading, that straw-and-chaff literature thatfills the air until the senses are confused with the whirlwind anddust of it, he has a sufficiency also. Of that intermediate kind ofreading which is neither so heavy with erudition as to weigh us downnor so light with the flying folly of prejudice as to make usdistracted with its dust, there is perhaps too little. The thoughtfuland improving passage for the unoccupied half hour of him who hurriesthrough these closing years of the century does not abound, but israther wanting in the intellectual provision of the age.

Let this volume serve to supply, in part at least, the want for briefreadings on important subjects. Herein a number of topics have beenchosen from the progress of the century and made the subjects of asmany brief studies that may be realized in a few minutes' reading andremembered for long. Certainly there is no attempt to make these shortstories exhaustive, but only to make [pg 4]them hintful of larger readingsand more thoughtful and patient inquiry.

The Editor is fully aware of the very large circulation and widereading to which this little volume will soon be subjected. For thisreason he has taken proper pains to make the work of such merit as mayjustly recommend it to the thoughtful as well as the transient andunthoughtful reader. It cannot, we think, prove to be a whollyprofitless task to offer these different studies, gathered from thehighways and byways of the great century, to the thousands of good andbusy people into whose hands the volume will fall. To all such theEditor hopes that it may carry a measure of profit as well as amessage of peace.

J.C.R.

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CONTENTS

[All articles not otherwise designated are by the Editor.]

CRISES IN CIVIL SOCIETY.

• Brumaire—The Overthrow Of The French Directory,9
• How the Son of Equality Became King of France,14
• The Coup d'Etat of 1851,19
• The Chartist Agitation in England,23
• The Abolition of Human Bondage,...