Canada Day: A look at the wider world as our country was being born

Canada Day has become a big deal over the years, marked with celebrations and flag-waving that might have been considered too showy, too un-Canadian back when it was called just Dominion Day.

But we're justifiably proud of our country, what it's achieved in almost a century and a half since Upper and Lower Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined together in Confederation on July 1, 1867, so why not a little birthday hoopla?

Citizens of the new country celebrated then, too, and an editorial in that day's Globe newspaper wished the new venture success on what was then dubbed Confederation Day.

"And, assuredly, if the people of the United Provinces are true to themselves and exercise a persistent and careful control over all public proceedings, there is not a shadow of doubt as to success," said the Toronto paper, whose founder George Brown, was one of the driving forces behind Confederation.

But outside Canada, the birth of a new nation was hardly front-page news. The New York Times played it on Page 2, amid news of a gold strike in Quebec, the capture of some army deserters and the arrival in Washington, D.C., of Canadian witnesses in the trial John Surratt, an alleged conspirator in assassination of Abraham Lincoln (he was acquitted). Surratt had lived in Canada for a time while evading arrest.

Canada's peaceful arrival on the world stage contrasted sharply with the ferment almost everywhere else. The world in the last half of the 19th century saw the growth of nationalist movements in Europe, a continued race among the European powers for colonies in Africa and Asia, and rapid westward expansion by the United States as it emerged from the Civil War.

It was also an era of scientific advancement, technological change and innovation.

Great Britain

The passage of the British North America Act by Parliament in the mother country confirmed Canada's status as an autonomous dominion within the empire. But it was just one one file on the British government's desk that year.

In Ireland, British authorities had put down an insurrection by Irish nationalists, labelled Fenians. February risings in County Kerry, as well as in Dublin, Limerick and Cork, were quickly put down because of poor planning, insufficient firepower and the fact the Irish republican movement was thoroughly compromised by informers.

Fenian raiders, who made forays into Canada from the U.S. after the Civil War, had also provided an impetus for uniting the disparate Canadian provinces.

Britain also played host that year to a conference in London that defused a potentially dangerous confrontation between Prussia and France over control of tiny but strategically important Luxembourg. The Treaty of London kept Luxembourg neutral under nominal Dutch control. Of course, it didn't stop France and Prussia from going to war three years later, with Prussia's victory heralding the arrival of a united Germany under Prussian leadership.

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Germany

While Canada was taking its first steps towards a country from sea to sea, another federation was rising amid guns smoke and blood. The North German Confederation rose out of Prussia's surprise victory over the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1866, which shattered the existing loose confederation of German states.

The 22-member North German Confederation, led by Prussia, came into being in 1867. The independent states of southern Germany, such as Bavaria, remained aloof from the new union until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, when the newly united states became the German Empire with Prussia's king, Wilhelm I, as its kaiser and Otto Von Bismarck its chancellor.

Italy

The unification of the individual Italian states and principalities, many under foreign domination, by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his supporters was not yet complete in 1867. French troops still garrisoned Rome to protect the Papal States, which had their own army, the Papal Zouaves (interestingly, alleged Lincoln conspirator John Surratt briefly belonged to the Zouaves after fleeing the U.S. following Lincoln's assassination, first to Canada, then Europe).

Garibaldi made an unsuccessful bid to capture Rome in the fall of 1867, with his rag-tag army defeated at the Battle of Mentana, near the city by Papal troops buttressed by the French. It was not until 1870, when French troops were called home from Rome to face the Prussian invasion, that the Italian army was able to capture the city and declare it the capital of a unified Italy.

Russia

Russia remained a semi-feudal state in the latter half of the 19th century under an autocratic czar who nodded at western-style modernization but not at the cost of power. Russia abolished serfdom in 1861 but peasants remained tied to the land owned by their feudal lords.

However, industrialization was giving birth to a new working class and socialist ideas rooted in Western Europe were reaching Russia's downtrodden via young intellectuals taking the message to the countryside.

But Russia's ruling aristocracy saw the revolutionary reformers, known as Narodniki (populists), as a threat. Arrests and imprisonment drove them underground and generated increasingly violent acts of terror, culminating in the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II.

Perhaps the most significant event in Russian history in 1867 was the sale of its Alaska territory to the United States. The Russian Empire tried to colonize the northwestern corner of North America in the 1700s but lacked the resources to maintain a permanent presence. It first offered the territory to the U.S. in 1859 but an agreement wasn't reached until after the U.S. Civil War.

Japan

The year 1867 was pivotal in Japanese history, the demarkation between the self-isolated island kingdom ruled by the Tokugawa clan, whose shoguns had governed behind the figurehead emperor for almost three centuries, and the modern nation bent on reform and industrialization to better stave off the colonizing western powers.

U.S. warships had forced Japan to open itself to external contacts in the 1850s but the shogunate struggled to maintain control. Civil war erupted in 1867 and the last Tokugawa shogun, Yoshinobu, resigned on Oct. 14, 1867, rather than see the country torn apart.

The accession of the reform minded Emperor Meiji (1867-1912) to the throne triggered an unparalleled period of modernization of Japan's infrastructure, economy and, significantly, its military. It defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and 10 years later its army and navy humbled the Russian empire, allowing it to seize Korea.

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United States

We've already mentioned the U.S. purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million, expanding America's domain to the North Pacific, though the acquisition would not pay off until the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898.

The United States was still rebuilding after the Civil War (1861-65) but its expansion was accelerating as settlers trekked west and the U.S. Army fought to suppress Indian tribes that had not already submitted to treaties that forced them from their traditional territories onto reservations.

Reconstruction, the policy of integrating the rebellious former Confederate states back into the Union, was continuing but none too smoothly. Southerners balked at the new rights given to freed black slaves and what they saw as economic exploitation, triggering a backlash that helped spawn the Ku Klux Klan in 1866. Its membership would reach four million by the 1920s and the South would remain segregated and economically disadvantaged for almost a century.

In the U.S. northeast, Irish-American Civil War veterans banded together in a plan to bring about Irish independence from Britain by capturing Canada and holding it hostage. The Fenian Raids between 1866 and 1871 achieved little, except to add incentive to the movement to unify Canada to reduce its vulnerability to attack.

Key inventions, discoveries and events in 1867

The year 1867 saw the invention of the first practical typewriter by a trio of American inventors, Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule. They sold their machine to a businessman who in turn cut a deal with gun- and sewing-machine maker E. Remington and Sons to produce it.

The day after Canada's Confederation, the first elevated railway in the United States began service in New York City. It had only one track and two stations but it opened the door to construction of more lines, which eventually lead to the development of the New York City subway system.

An 1867 article in the British medical journal The Lancet by doctor and teacher Joseph Lister on his research into the use of antiseptic during surgery to prevent infection triggered a great leap forward in the medical treatment.

German economist Karl Marx published the first volume Das Kapital, his theory of on the workings of capitalism that concludes it is doomed to destroy itself.

Charles Dickens made his second tour of America (the first was in 1842), arriving to rock-star fanfare and standing-room crowds for public readings of his work.

Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel received a U.S. patent for dynamite, which made the volatile liquid explosive nitroglycerin much easier to handle.

The Suez Canal, under construction since 1859, opened in November 1867, connecting the Mediterranean and Red seas through Egypt and allowing shipping to avoid a long trip around the southern tip of Africa on the way to India and Asia.

(Photo courtesy of the Canadian Press)