1682

1681 1682 1683 1684 1685 1686 1687 1688 1689 1690

political events

Russia's Fedor III dies at Moscow April 27 at age 21, his half-brother Peter, 9, succeeds to the throne in preference to Fedor's mentally and physically defective 15-year-old brother Ivan, but Ivan's sister Sophia Alekseevna, 25, instigates the household troops (strelitzi) to invade the Kremlin and murder Peter's supporters. Ivan is proclaimed czar with Peter as his associate and begins a nominal 7-year reign in which Sophia will serve as regent and exercise the power.

A special Swedish commission appointed to inquire into corruption reports May 27 that the country's regent Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie and her senate are solely to blame for Sweden's decline and that they owe the crown 4 million Riksdaler. Now 59, Gabriel de la Gardie is permitted to retire to his estate, where he will die in relative poverty less than 3 years hence; Karl (Charles) XI, now 25, ascended the throne 10 years ago and works to build the nation's iron and shipbuilding industries, bringing in Walloon families from the Netherlands to work in the foundries.

Austrian and Polish forces begin a 17-year war to liberate Hungary from the Ottoman Turks (see 1684; Battle of Zenta, 1697).

Randall MacDonnell, 2nd earl of Antrim, dies at Ballymagarry, Ireland, February 3 at age 72; Prince Rupert at London November 29 at age 62, having introduced the art of mezzotint printing to England.

exploration, colonization

Louisiana Territory is so named by Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, who reaches the mouth of the Mississippi April 9 with a party of 50 men after descending from the Illinois River. La Salle has built Fort Prudhomme at the mouth of the Hatchie River in what later will be called Tennessee, and he claims the entire Mississippi Valley for Louis XIV (see 1669; 1763).

Louis XIV recalls New France's governor-general Louis de Buade, comte de Pallua et de Frontenac, whose 10-year administration has been marked by misgovernment that has allowed the Iroquois and the English Hudson's Bay Company to jeopardize France's fur trade while Frontenac concerned himself with the personal profits to be derived from that trade (but see 1689).

A Frame of Government drawn up by William Penn for the Pennsylvania colony contains an explicit clause permitting amendments, an innovation that makes it a self-adjusting constitution.

William Penn lands at New Castle on the Delaware River late in the year after a voyage from Deal in the ship Welcome. A third of his 100 Friends have succumbed to smallpox on the voyage which has lasted nearly 2 months.

Philadelphia—a city "of brotherly love"—is founded by William Penn. Mennonites begin leaving the German states to settle at Philadelphia and on fertile lands that will extend from Easton through Allentown, Reading, and Lebanon to the Cumberland Valley (see 1537; Germantown, 1683).

Norfolk, Virginia, is founded on the Elizabeth River under terms of a June 1680 Act for Co-habitation and the Encouragement of Trade and Manufacture adopted by the legislature at Jamestown with a provision to establish a town in each of the colony's 23 counties. Shipwright Nicholas Wise, Jr., has inherited the site of a Native American village and agrees to sell the 50-acre parcel for casks containing 10,000 pounds of tobacco. The town will grow to exceed New York as an East Coast seaport.

commerce

The Hudson's Bay Company puts up a fur-trading post at the mouth of the Hayes River on Hudson's Bay (see 1670). Initially called Fort Nelson, it will be destroyed by rival French fur interests in 1684, immediately rebuilt and renamed, and change hands several times before 1713, when the Treaty of Utrecht makes it British. It will continue operations until 1957 (see 1713).

The Bremen bourse opens (see Antwerp, 1531; Hamburg, 1558); trade on the exchange will continue for more than 315 years (see London, 1698; Hanover, 1787).

science

Methodus Plantarum Nova by English naturalist John Ray, now 55, demonstrates for the first time the nature of buds and divides flowering plants into dicotyledons and monocotyledons (see Linnaeus, 1737).

The Anatomy of Plants by botanist Nehemiah Grew, now 40, is a four-volume work that makes the first observations of sex in plants. Physician Sir Thomas Millington has suggested to Grew that the pollen-bearing stamen is a flower's male sex organ and the pistil its female sex organ (see Camerarius, 1694).

medicine

The Black Death kills nearly half the 10,000 inhabitants of Halle and wipes out much of Magdeburg.

literature

Nonfiction: "Thoughts on the Comet of 1680" by French philosopher Pierre Bayle, 35, uses rationalism to oppose superstitions about comets.

Physician-author Sir Thomas Browne dies at Norwich October 19 (his 77th birthday).

Fiction: The Life of an Amorous Man (Koshoku Ichidai Otoko) by Osaka-born merchant's son Saikaku Ihara (pen name for Togo Hirayama), 40, who has confined himself until now to poetry.

Poetry: The Medall, a Satyre against Sedition by John Dryden is an even more direct attack on the earl of Shaftesbury: "Successful crimes alone are justified," writes Dryden; MacFlecknoe by Dryden: "All human things are subject to decay."

art

Painter Jacob van Ruysdael dies at Amsterdam March 14 at age 53; Bartolomé Murillo at Seville April 3 at age 64; Claude Lorrain at Rome November 21 at age 82.

theater, film

Theater: Venice Preserved, or A Plot Discovered by English playwright Thomas Otway, 30, 2/9 at London's Dorset Garden Theatre.

architecture, real estate

Versailles becomes the seat of French government as Louis XIV moves his court into a palatial château built outside Paris at a cost of $325 million and some 227 lives. Waterworks constructed at Marly-le-Roi by the royal engineer Rannequin supply water from the Seine for the Versailles gardens, and another château for the royal family goes up at Marly-le-Roi (see 1627; Hall of Mirrors, 1684).

food and drink

Food served at the French royal palace in Versailles is generally cold because the kitchens are so far from the dining rooms; the king eats with his fingers, is more interested in the quantity of his food than in its quality, and pays little attention to the talents of his chefs.

The English nobility in this decade have begun storing ice for summer use. Charles II has had his own ice house built in St. James's Park.

Mennonites will introduce Pennsylvania "Dutch" (Deutsch) cooking and contribute dishes such as scrapple to the American cuisine.

1681 1682 1683 1684 1685 1686 1687 1688 1689 1690

Astronomy

Edmond Halley observes the "Great Comet" that will be named after him after he correctly predicts (in 1705) that the comet will return in 1758. See also 1664 Astronomy; 1705 Astronomy.

Nehemiah Grew's The Anatomy of Plants describes the different types of tissues making up stems and roots, and identifies the male and female parts of flowering plants. Grew shows that plant tissues are composed mostly of small chambers, or cells. See also 1675 Biology; 1694 Biology.

John Ray in Methodus plantarum nova ("new method for plants") introduces a classification scheme for plants, dividing them into monocots and dicots on the basis of the number of their seed leaves. Although Ray invents the words monocotyledon and dicotyledon, he will not use them in print until the second edition (1703). See also 1686 Biology.

Leibniz starts Acta eruditorum, the first learned journal on the continent of Europe. It is in Latin and continues to be published until 1776. See also 1665 Communication.

John Clayton [b. England, 1657, d. 1725] discovers coal gas, a gas similar to natural gas (methane) formed by distillation of coal. See also 1659 Energy; 1739 Energy.

Denis Papin describes the use of his "steam digester," first demonstrated in 1679. It is a pressure cooker that he uses to produce gelatin from animal bones. He also fits the device with a safety valve invented by himself. See also 1679 Food & agriculture.

Diaries, Journals, and Letters

• Mary White Rowlandson (c. 1635-c. 1678): The Sovereignty & the Goodness of God... Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. One of the most famous and popular examples of colonial American prose chronicles Rowlandson's spiritual and physical travails after her eleven-week captivity among Indians in 1676. It is the first best-selling book written by a woman and sets the standard for subsequent captivity narratives.

Nonfiction

• William Penn: The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsylvania. This is the constitution for the colony of Pennsylvania, written in preparation for the arrival of the settlers to the Quaker colony.

Poetry, Fiction, and Drama

• Cotton Mather (1663-1728): "Poem Dedicated to... Urian Oakes." Mather's first published work is a funeral elegy on the recently deceased clergyman and Harvard president, summarizing his virtues and the impact of his death on his family, friends, and the community. Mather, the son of Increase Mather, would produce a comparable poem, "Elegy on... Nathanael Collins," in 1685.
• Edward Taylor (1642-1729): Preparatory Meditations. It is believed that in this year Taylor begins his series of more than two hundred poems, written every two months until 1725, as private spiritual exercises prior to communion services. They represent the major poetic achievement of colonial America and some of the finest English-language poetry of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is also thought that around this time Taylor begins work on his other major poetic work, Gods Determinations Touching his Elect, a justification of God's ways to man from the Calvinist perspective. Taylor's Poetical Works would be discovered and first published in 1939.

Sermons and Religious Writing

• Urian Oakes: "The Soveraign Efficacy of Divine Providence...." Oakes's sermon attempts to reconcile religion and science according to orthodox Puritan principles. It is published posthumously with a lengthy preface by Increase Mather, extolling Oakes's merits as a divine and a scholar.

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