April 17, 2026 brought with it Concerning History’s ninth anniversary! As is our long-standing tradition, our contributors take this opportunity to reflect on some of the other major historical anniversaries of this year. One post can only discuss so many events, of course, so if we missed anything, please add to the conversation below!
Continuing on from our practice last year, there is one major anniversary that will not be discussed below. 2025 marked the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, and now 2026 brings commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In the interest of highlighting lesser-known events and in acknowledgement of our own separate coverage of these seminal moments in American history, you won’t find discussion of them here—but stay tuned for content devoted to them in their own right!
1526: Founding of the Mughal Empire
Bryan Caswell
April 21, 1526 saw a battle won and, finally, an empire forged. Zahir ud-Din Muhammad, descendant of Mongols had been attempting to follow in the conquering footsteps of his great-great-great grandfather Timur (known to Europeans as Tammerlane) in Central Asia for three decades. No sooner would he gain a neighboring province than he would lose it again or, worse, lose his capital, sometimes even losing all his territory entirely. After his third time being evicted from Timur’s capital of Samarkand, the man known to his men and history as Babur (from the Persian for “tiger” or “panther”) turned his sights east, through the Khyber Pass to the ailing Delhi Sultanate and India. At the First Battle of Panipat on that April day five hundred years ago, he would emerge victorious and at the head of what would become known as the Mughal Empire, joining his brother Islamic gunpowder empires (and supporters in his invasion) the Ottomans and Safavid Persians. A year later, Babur’s victory over the Rajput kingdom of Mewar consolidated his hold over northern India and ushered in centuries of Mughal rule in the subcontinent.
It is hard to overstate the importance of the Mughal Empire to Indian and world (not to mention my own study of) history. As has so often been the case with empires of conquest, particularly those of Mongol heritage, the Mughals underwent a “re-founding” under Babur’s grandson Akbar that transformed the state from an unstable conglomeration of personally-held territories into an early modern bureaucratic state that, under their successors, would come to dominate most of India. Babur, Akbar, and many of their descendants were models of early modern Persian kingship, patronizing the arts, writing poetry, and constructing such architectural marvels as Delhi’s Red Fort and the world famous Taj Mahal. Their reigns were also religiously tolerant, though this perhaps owed more to their precarious position as a religious minority than innate humanistic values—the last powerful Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb, would pursue a campaign of persecution against Hindu sects and reinstate the jizya poll tax on non-Muslims while at the height of Mughal supremacy in India, cementing the division of the subcontinent into a largely Muslim North and largely Hindu South. While Aurangzeb’s campaigns ultimately led to a crisis in Mughal control and the empire shrank into a shadow of its former power and influence during the eighteenth century, the “Great Mughal” in Delhi was still at least nominally deferred to as the sovereign of India until as late as 1857, when the last Mughal “emperor” Bahadur Shah accepted the invitation to lead the Indian Rebellion against the British East India Company and was exiled to die in Burma upon its ruthlessly suppression.
Recommended Reading: After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000, by John Darwin
1876: The Hayes-Tilden Election Heralds the End of Reconstruction
Francis Butler
Every two years, as Americans head to the polls for federal elections, US voters are often told that this election is the most consequential of their lifetime, that the stakes of losing are just too great. While often a source of rhetoric meant to inspire parties’ bases to vote, such a description for the Election of 1876 actually fits.
The major political debates in the Election of 1876 centered on Reconstruction and whether the Federal government would continue to enforce the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments as well as their accompanying civil rights laws in the occupied states of the former Confederacy. Admirable in their scope, these amendments ended slavery, banned the implementation of Black Codes, granted formerly enslaved Black workers contractual freedom in their labor and property rights, protected Black people’s marriages in law, guaranteed the equal protection of the law and the due process of the law to all people in the US, established birthright citizenship, created new bureaucracies such as the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Department of Justice, and banned the use of racial barriers in law to prevent men from voting. However, the letter of these laws and their implementation were disjointed. Despite the desires of Radical Republicans in Congress and general support from President Ulysses Grant (1869-1877), the federal government did not have the institutional capacity or the political will to enforce these policies. As a result, the Reconstruction South became a society pockmarked with areas of intense guerrilla violence from ex-Confederates against Black people next to certain counties or cities where Black people did experiment with and experience an embattled freedom.
The longevity of this freedom came down to the 1876 Election. Several Southern states had already been “redeemed,” that is, former Confederates had won control of their state governments and used violence and the threat of violence to keep Black men and white Unionists from voting or holding government offices. These states then started the process (by no means finalized in 1876) of disenfranchising Black male voters. The stakes, then, of the 1876 Election were thus the continuation of the Reconstruction project or its demise. Never ones for fair fights, the ex-Confederates across the South made it clear that if their preferred candidate for the Presidency, Samuel Tilden, did not win, they would rebel and pursue secession once again.
As the election played out, it became clear that Southern state governments ignored or even abetted widespread voter intimidation and fraud to disenfranchise Black voters, guaranteeing that the South’s electoral votes went to Tilden rather than Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes. Just as the 2000 Election came down to disputes over the vote count in Florida, the results of the 1876 Election hinged on South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. These were three states that had robust Republican parties that drew from an alliance of white Unionists, white and Black northerners who moved South to assist their states in Reconstruction, Black Union veterans, freedmen, and well-organized communities of middle-class Black people. Despite voter intimidation and actual violence, Hayes probably won these states’ Electoral votes, but the results were so close or so disputed that Congress had to set up a commission to resolve the election. Fearful that ex-Confederates would spark another insurrection, Republicans on this commission negotiated a deal in 1877 that granted Hayes the presidency in exchange for the promise that Hayes would withdraw any remaining US soldiers (a paltry force, to be fair) from the South. Doing this removed the main federal presence (alongside US Marshals) that had stalled the KKK’s reign of terror and aided Black men and white unionists as they defended their communities. While next year gives us an opportunity here at Concerning History to examine how, exactly, the Compromise of 1877 worked out, this year’s anniversary commemorates this election in 1876 where threats of terrorism, actual violence and determined citizens sought to determine the fate of an experiment with a more equal and fair democracy in the United States.
Recommended Reading: Reconstruction, Eric Foner
1926: National debut of the SAT
Heather Clancy
This year, an iconic college readiness exam celebrates 100 years of giving high schoolers sweaty palms.
If you graduated from an American high school and applied to college, you probably took the SAT.* White-knuckling a #2 pencil or grasping a computer mouse, millions have run its multiple choice gauntlet. Despite the SAT’s household name status, though, its administrators have largely elided its origin story. And no wonder why—a foundation in interwar eugenic theory doesn’t exactly make for great PR.
Carl Campbell Brigham rose to prominence as a test developer during his Great War military service. Like many educated men of his generation, Brigham was a devout eugenicist. His published Army study on supposed racial disparities of intelligence brought him much acclaim among like-minded peers. After returning to civilian life, that acclaim helped earn him a seat in Princeton University’s Psychology department in 1920. Three years later, the College Entrance Examination Board called on Brigham for a challenging new assignment: to design a standardized, national college admissions exam that would assess student ability and college readiness.
In 1926, Brigham completed work on the endeavor, which was titled the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Following an initial 8050-student cohort, the SAT would be steadily adopted by thousands of colleges and universities over the following decades. While today the heyday of the college admissions test is behind us, the SAT nonetheless reached its registration peak in 2019, with 2.2 million high schoolers sitting for the exam.
Controversy has consistently plagued the SAT. Many consider its premise to be harmful—an inherently flawed attempt to assess multifaceted intelligence and potential through a point-in-time snapshot of select knowledge regurgitation. Standardized isn’t the same as equitable, its critics protest. College Board reporting openly demonstrates that sign-up itself can be a hurdle; the plurality of 2025 SAT takers were white, had college graduate parents, enjoyed a family income in the top quintile ($124.9K+), and attended a suburban high school. Periodic College Board attempts to recalibrate the SAT scoring algorithm to be more equitable have failed to enact lasting positive change. And while Brigham began as early as 1930 to dissect and rebut some of his own theory about the relationship between race and ethnicity and intelligence, the eugenic genie was by that time already well out of the bottle. Today’s College Board warning against drawing hasty conclusions from test scores about the aptitude of demographic groups feels toothless.
In today’s age of what some are calling soft eugenics, it feels more important than ever to call out pseudoscience when we see it. And reflecting on the sordid origins—and legacy—of the SAT is one opportunity to do just that.
*A note on names: Christened the “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” the name of this exam suite underwent a 1990 rebranding to “Scholastic Assessment Test” before being pared down in 1997 to its current form: the initialized “SAT.”
Recommended Reading:
1951: Treaty of San Francisco is Signed
Francis Butler
This September marks the 75th anniversary of the Treaty of San Francisco. While Japan had formally surrendered in 1945, hostilities and the legal disputes from the war — such as reparations, Japan’s diplomatic relations with the countries it invaded, and its economic relations with the Allies and neighbors — had to be negotiated before the Second World War could officially end. After the US military cobbled together a new constitution for Japan (the military officials and lawyers who wrote it literally scrounged through the ruins of Japan’s libraries in Tokyo to find copies of other nations’ constitutions as sources for ideas), the US occupied Japan until this treaty in 1951. Once enacted in 1952, the treaty restored diplomatic relations and set up economic trade deals between the US, Japan, and the 48 other signatories. In addition, the US and Japan, led by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, created a separate security agreement that still governs military cooperation between Japan and the US.
One clear implication of the Treaty of San Francisco was its rehabilitation of Japan into the international community as an American ally. Japan’s constitution forbids it from using war as a means to achieve its foreign policy and Japan’s military to this day is a self-defense force with very limited capacity to wage war outside its own territory. Japan relies on the presence of the US military, most notably through the massive US overseas base in Okinawa, to provide for its defense in the region. Moreover, despite the tense relations that exist between Japan and the Republic of Korea (South Korea), both of these nations cooperate on defense and trade as a result of the Treaty of San Francisco’s success in integrating Japan into the international system. The strength of this treaty is that it helped transform the brutal militarist regime of Imperial Japan into the multilateral, democratic ally that has cooperated with and supported an international order based on free trade, respect for the sovereignty of other nations, and mutual defense. The Treaty of San Francisco thus demarcated the contrast between the policies of the United States and the Soviets in the aftermath of the Second World War; where the US rebuilt and provided economic aid to Allies and former Axis powers (Japan, Italy, and West Germany) alike, the USSR exploited both its Axis enemies (Romania, Hungary, and East Germany) and the states that Nazi Germany conquered, like Poland and the Czech Republic.
As states around the world in the present question the validity and effectiveness of the international system the Treaty of San Francisco helped establish and aggressive states (like China, Putin’s Russia, and the US under Donald Trump’s presidency) actually act like rapacious imperial states from the 1800s, this treaty and the system it enacted presents a historical model for multilateral foreign relations aimed at rehabilitating former rivals and pursuing commerce over conquest. Indeed, the fact that even the USSR and Communist Poland observed these negotiations (though they didn’t sign them) indicates how the Treaty of San Francisco facilitated a rare moment of multilateralism between Cold War rivals even as the US, China, and the Soviet Union contemporaneously sparred over the fate of divided Korea.
Recommended Reading: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Herbert P. Bix