Turning Points in History

Lydia strikes the earliest known coins in electrum, inventing coined money.

On the Ionian coast next to Lydia, Greek cities such as Ephesus dedicate the great marble Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders, financed in part by Lydian wealth and new coinage.

The Persian king Cyrus defeats Croesus of Lydia, bringing the Greek cities of Asia Minor — Cyzicus among them — under Achaemenid overlordship while leaving their commerce and coinage largely intact.

Rome overthrows its monarchy and establishes the Republic.

Greek cities of Asia Minor rise against Persian rule, igniting the chain of events that leads to the Greco-Persian Wars and the battles of Marathon and Salamis.

Athens repels the first Persian invasion, a turning point for the Greek world.

As Alexander secured his throne, his former tutor Aristotle returned to Athens and founded the Lyceum, whose systematic study of nature, logic, and politics would shape Western and Islamic thought for two millennia.

Alexander's victory at Gaugamela shattered Darius III's last great army and opened the road to Babylon and Persepolis, while in the same year he founded Alexandria in Egypt — the future intellectual capital of the Medit…

Alexander dies at Babylon, leaving an empire that spread Greek culture across three continents.

The Qin state unifies China under its first emperor, Qin Shi Huang.

Caesar is killed in the Senate, hastening the end of the Roman Republic.

Octavian becomes Augustus, Rome's first emperor, ending the Republic.

Augustus, Rome's first emperor, dies in 14 AD and Tiberius succeeds him, beginning the reign under which this shekel was struck.

Caesar defeats Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus, securing his control of the Roman world and setting the stage for his eventual assassination in 44 BC.

Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon River with his 13th Legion, declaring "alea iacta est" (the die is cast) and beginning the civil war that will end the Roman Republic.

Alexander traveled east and launched a costly campaign against Ardashir I, whose new Persian dynasty had replaced Parthia and would remain Rome’s principal eastern rival for centuries.[4]

Rhine troops killed Alexander and Julia Mamaea and elevated Maximinus Thrax, ending the Severan dynasty and opening the conventional period of the Crisis of the Third Century.[3][4]

The last Western Roman emperor is deposed, marking the empire's collapse in the west.

537: Hagia Sophia in Constantinople is dedicated, still the greatest domed church in Christendom and the visual center of Justinian's capital.

541-542: The Plague of Justinian spreads from Egypt through the Mediterranean, killing millions and reshaping the empire's manpower and finances for a generation.

Muhammad's migration to Medina marks year one of the Islamic calendar.

Charlemagne is crowned Emperor of the Romans, reviving imperial rule in the West.

William of Normandy defeats the English at Hastings and takes the crown.

England's barons compel King John to accept limits on royal power.

Florence began issuing its high-quality gold florin as expanding Mediterranean and trans-Saharan trade brought new bullion and commercial opportunities into the city. [2][3]

Plague sweeps Europe, killing a third or more of its population.

The plague transformed Florence’s population, labor market, family life, and economic institutions, leaving a lasting mark on the society that used florins. [5]

Frederick III — elected king in Frankfurt twelve years earlier — was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in Rome, the final imperial coronation ever performed there.

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople ends the Byzantine Empire.

October 1454: At the Imperial Diet in Frankfurt, an unidentified “marvelous man”—possibly Gutenberg himself—displayed and offered for sale unbound gatherings from the new printed Bible. Enea Silvio Piccolomini, imperial…

In 1478 Ferdinand and Isabella established the Spanish Inquisition, an institution that would police religious conformity in Spain and its empire for over three centuries.

Columbus's first voyage opens sustained contact between Europe and the Americas.

Duke Albert founds the Albertina, one of Europe's first explicitly Lutheran universities, to train pastors and officials for his new Protestant duchy.

The Catholic Church convenes the Council of Trent, launching the Counter-Reformation in direct response to the Protestant movement this coin proclaims.

The peace concluded the long Habsburg-Valois conflict and left Philip II’s Spain dominant in Italy and western European diplomacy.

Philip II’s restrictions on Morisco language, dress, books, and customs helped precipitate the Alpujarras rebellion that began at Christmas 1568.

1685: Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes, ending religious toleration for French Huguenots and sending tens of thousands of Protestant refugees to England.

Newton's Principia sets out the laws of motion and universal gravitation.

One year after this coin was struck, William of Orange lands in England and James II flees to France, ending his reign and establishing parliamentary monarchy under William III and Mary II.

Britain, France, and Spain concluded the Treaty of Seville on 9 November 1729, formally ending the Anglo-Spanish War of 1727–1729 and restoring a fragile diplomatic framework around imperial trade and territorial rivalr…

In September 1760, Montréal surrendered to British forces, ending the French regime in Canada and placing New France under British rule.[4]

The thirteen colonies declare independence from Britain, founding the United States.

In September 1783, Britain and the United States (with France and Spain) signed the Treaty of Paris, recognizing American independence and awarding Florida and Menorca to Spain, the power that struck this coin.

Revolution in France topples the monarchy and reshapes modern politics.

Following the banking crash of 1825, Parliament passed the Country Bankers Act of 1826, permitting joint-stock banks with more than six partners to form outside a 65-mile radius of London — the first major structural re…

President Andrew Jackson's July 1832 veto of the Second Bank of the United States recharter bill dismantled the nation's central banking structure and set off decades of monetary instability driven by competing state-ba…

President Andrew Jackson ordered that federal deposits be removed from the Bank of the United States, a controversial action that ultimately led to the bank's destruction.

In April 1834 the House of Representatives voted against rechartering the Bank of the United States and confirmed that federal deposits should remain in state banks — a decisive moment in the destruction of America's ce…

Britain waged war against Qing-dynasty China to force legalization of the opium trade, seizing Hong Kong Island in 1841 and culminating in the Treaty of Nanking, which fundamentally reshaped the balance of power in Asia.

Harrison died of pneumonia on April 4, 1841 — just 31 days into his term — becoming the first U.S. president to die in office and elevating Vice President John Tyler, setting a constitutional precedent for presidential…

In May 1843, roughly 1,000 settlers left Elm Grove, Missouri, in the first mass organized wagon train bound for Oregon, opening the era of large-scale continental migration that would reshape North America over the foll…

U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry's fleet entered Edo Bay in July 1853, forcing Japan to end two centuries of isolation and reshaping Pacific trade that American gold would soon finance.

1859 - Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species in London, establishing evolution by natural selection.

The House of Representatives voted on February 24, 1868 to impeach Andrew Johnson for defying the Tenure of Office Act, and he survived removal by a single Senate vote in May—the first presidential impeachment trial in…

The Suez Canal opens in November 1869, linking the Mediterranean and Red Seas and reshaping global shipping between Europe and Asia.

George Armstrong Custer's expedition confirmed gold in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, provoking a rush onto Lakota treaty land and setting off the chain of events leading to the Great Sioux War of 1876.

On January 1, 1879, the U.S. Treasury resumed redeeming paper greenbacks for gold on demand, ending seventeen years of fiat Civil War currency and anchoring the dollar to gold [9].

The U.S. government continued forced silver purchases under the Bland-Allison Act, deeply polarizing national economic policy.

The shocking assassination of President Garfield underscored the intense political instability of the post-Reconstruction era.

The Brooklyn Bridge opens to traffic on May 24, 1883, linking Manhattan and Brooklyn and announcing America's age of steel, engineering, and the modern industrial city.

In November 1884, Democrat Grover Cleveland narrowly defeated James G. Blaine after one of the most scandal-ridden campaigns in American history, becoming the first Democratic president since 1856.

On February 21, 1885, the Washington Monument was formally dedicated in Washington, D.C., completing the obelisk begun in 1848, just as the Philadelphia Mint was striking this cent a hundred miles to the north.

The U.S. Army's killing of Lakota at Wounded Knee in December 1890 marks the violent end of armed Indigenous resistance on the Plains, as the census declares the frontier line dissolved.

James Naismith invents basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts, devising an indoor game to keep athletes occupied through the New England winter.

July 1897  news of Klondike gold reaches Seattle and San Francisco, launching the Klondike Gold Rush that floods the San Francisco Mint with new gold and ends the deflation of the mid-1890s.

Chinese nationalists besieged the foreign legation quarter of Peking for fifty-five days, prompting an international relief force of roughly 20,000 troops, including American Marines and sailors, to fight their way into…

In December 1901 Guglielmo Marconi received the first wireless radio signal across the Atlantic, inaugurating the era of global instant communication.

President Theodore Roosevelt brokered an end to the great anthracite coal strike of 1902, the first time a U.S. president intervened in a labor dispute as a neutral arbiter rather than with troops against workers.

While working in Bern, Albert Einstein published papers on light quanta, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass–energy equivalence that remade modern physics. [4][5]

Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan by 321 electoral votes to 162, extending the Republican administration associated with Theodore Roosevelt.[6]

A fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City kills 146 garment workers, most of them young immigrant women, galvanizing the American labor movement and landmark factory-safety reforms.

Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison died after running in front of King George V's horse at the 1913 Derby, becoming a martyr of the militant campaign for women's votes.

The outbreak of the First World War reshapes the political map of the world.

July-November 1916 - The Battle of the Somme on the Western Front kills and wounds more than one million men and reveals the industrial scale of World War I.

The October 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power collapsed Russian imperial authority across its periphery, opening the door to Finnish independence and the emergence of Poland and the Baltic states.

Iceland was recognized as a fully sovereign state in personal union with Denmark, making Christian X also King of Iceland and beginning the contraction of the old composite Danish monarchy.

Christian X's dismissal of the elected government triggered a constitutional crisis that confirmed the monarch could no longer act against parliament, cementing modern Danish parliamentary democracy.

KDKA in Pittsburgh aired the first play-by-play radio broadcast of a Major League baseball game, inaugurating the era of mass-media entertainment that would define the decade.

Lenin died on 21 January 1924 at Gorky, triggering a succession struggle among Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev that would define Soviet politics for the following decade, while this coin entered circulation and h…

Millions of UK workers downed tools in a flashpoint of post-WWI European labor unrest and economic strain.

On March 12, Mohandas Gandhi began the Dandi (Salt) March, a defining act of nonviolent resistance against British imperial rule in India. [5]

U.S. Army troops forcibly cleared a camp of roughly 43,000 Depression-era veterans and families demanding early payment of a promised service bonus, badly damaging Herbert Hoover's political standing.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, creating a federal old-age pension system and unemployment insurance.

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937 ignited a full-scale conflict between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan.

King Ghazi of Iraq used Baghdad Radio in 1938 to publicly demand the annexation of Kuwait, inflaming pan-Arab nationalist sentiment and straining Iraq's relations with Britain and its Gulf neighbours.

The Allied forces successfully launched the invasion of mainland Italy, a pivotal theater in the war against the Axis powers.

On 6 June 1944, Canadian troops stormed Juno Beach in Normandy as part of the Allied invasion that began the liberation of Western Europe.

On 8 May 1945, French colonial forces and settler militias killed thousands of Algerian Muslims following nationalist demonstrations, radicalizing a generation and setting the stage for the 1954 War of Independence.

The French National Assembly enacted a statute creating an Algerian Assembly and proclaiming equal citizenship, but its discriminatory electoral provisions left Algeria's Muslim majority politically subordinate, deepeni…

North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, rapidly taking Seoul. The United Nations called for assistance to South Korea, and the conflict expanded into a major Cold War confrontation involving Amer…

Active hostilities ended on July 27, 1953, leaving Korea divided after three years of war.[3]

Congress authorized the Interstate highway system, beginning a transformation of American travel, freight, suburbs, military logistics, and the physical geography of daily life.

Prime Minister Lester Pearson's drive to give Canada a flag of its own ignites months of bitter parliamentary and public debate, ending with the adoption of the Maple Leaf flag on 15 February 1965.

Dylan plugs in at the Newport Folk Festival, a flashpoint that reshaped popular music.

On 3 December 1967, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant, a landmark in medical history.

Humans walk on the Moon for the first time.

In April 1970 an oxygen tank explosion turned NASA's Apollo 13 lunar mission into a globally-watched fight for survival and a triumph of improvised engineering.

Nixon ends dollar–gold convertibility, severing modern money from metal.

Iran's monarchy falls and an Islamic republic is founded, redrawing Middle Eastern politics.

On 26 April 1986, reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located near Pripyat, Ukraine, exploded.

The Wall is opened, hastening the end of the Cold War division of Europe.

The USSR breaks apart into fifteen independent states, ending the Cold War.

The UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro produced the first global treaties on climate change and biodiversity — the moment of planetary environmental consciousness this coin's 'Preserve Planet Earth' legend was struck to…

Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing film yet released and ignited a worldwide dinosaur craze that sent paleontology surging into popular culture.

On January 1, 1995, the WTO began operating under the Marrakesh Agreement, creating a new institutional framework for multilateral trade. [3]

Coordinated attacks on the United States reshape global security and a generation of politics.

A banking collapse triggers the deepest worldwide downturn since the Great Depression.

The first decentralized digital currency is launched — coinage with no sovereign behind it.