Between April and December 1721, small pox swept through the city of Boston. Of the nearly 6000 who contracted the disease 844 died, 411 in October alone. That year, smallpox was the responsible for nearly three quarters of all deaths in the city.

Despite the promise of early expirements with inoculation, the 1721 epidemic was met with controversy evoking the passions of men like Reverend Cotton Mather and Boston physician William Douglass. Mather a proponate of innoculation, had learned about the procedure from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and from one of his slaves. So confident was he in the procedure, he (successfully) inoculated his own son, further reinforcing his advocacyof inoculation as the Boston epidemic grew.

Douglass, a physician from Edinburgh, and Boston’s only university–trained doctor, argued that Mather’s inoculations undermined legitimate medical authority and held that inoculation without regulated quarantine would only make the epidemic worse.

Most Boston physicians, as well as the general public, sided with Douglass believing that innoculation would spread the disease rather than prevent it. In fact, only one physician, Zabdiel Boylston, publicly supported Mather's position and to prove his point he innoculated his children and slaves. Yet, passions remained high, provoking one protestor to throw a lighted bomb into the window of Mather’s house. Fortunately the bomb's fuse was extinguished on impact and the bomb did not detonate.

European explorers became interested in the Mississippi River valley in 1673, when Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette entered the region for the first time. Other explorers followed including La Salle who claimed the area for France and they began plotting settlements including Fort de Chartres, Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and later Ste. Genevieve. Having suffered major defeats in the North American campaigns of the Seven Years’ War and fearing the loss of its empire to the English, France entered into secret negotiations for areas of the Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi. Under the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762, France ceded its territory to Spain and the French who remained became subjects of King Carlos III.  During the negotiations, a small band of explorers led by Pierre Lacléde and his stepson and aid Auguste Chouteau, who had earlier been given permission to trade with the Indians of the Missouri River Basin, had successfully made their way to the west bank south of the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. There in 1764, Lacléde and Chouteau founded the city of St. Louis.  For more information on Colonial St. Louis see, Cleary, Patricia The World, The Flesh, and the Devil: a History of Colonial St. Louis Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2012.

Colonial Expansion

• 1710 The Capture of Port Royal
• 1711 The Tuscarora War
• 1713 The Treaty of Utrecht
• 1714 King George I
• 1715 The Yamassee War
• 1715 Jacobite Rebellion
• 1720 Building Diversity
• 1721 Robert Walpole becomes Prime Minister
• 1721 Smallpox Epidemic in Boston
• 1724 Dahomey leads the Slave Trade

• 1724 Le Code Noir
• 1725 Brunswick, North Carolina founded
• 1727 Aliance against Russia
• 1729 Baltimore Founded
• 1729 Opium Banned
• 1733 Wilmington, North Carolina founded
• 1733 The Founding of Georgia
• 1733 The Molasses Act
• 1737 Linnaean Classification

Conflicts among colonial powers

• 1739 The War of Jenkin's Ear
• 1739 The Stono Uprising
• 1739 Crossing to Santa Fe
• 1740 Lunda Founded
• 1740 Frederick the Great
• 1743 King George's War
• 1745 Jacobite Rising
• 1746 Princeton Founded
• 1747 Afghanistan Founded
• 1747 Fighting Scurvy
• 1749 Sign Language
• 1749 Founding of Halifax
• 1750 Chinese Expansion
• 1754 The Seven Years' War

• 1756 French take Forts
• 1757 Battle of Plassey
• 1757 Prussian victory over Austria
• 1758 Prussian victory over Russia
• 1758 French defeat at Senegal
• 1758 British take Forts
• 1759 Spain joins the war
• 1759 The War in Europe
• 1759 Québec falls
• 1759 Cherokees killed
• 1760 The Great Boston Fire
• 1760 Montréal Falls
• 1762 Fontainbleau Treaty
• 1763 The Treaty of Paris

Legislation triggers unrest

• 1764 St. Louis Founded
• 1764 The Sugar Act
• 1765 The Spinning Jenny
• 1765 The Stamp Act
• 1766 The Declaratory Act
• 1766 The First Mysore War
• 1767 The Townshend Acts
• 1768 Troops arrive in Boston

• 1769 Political Turmoil in Boston
• 1769 Founding of Mission San Diego
• 1770 Tax Repeal
• 1770 Cook Discovers Botany Bay
• 1770 The Boston Massacre
• 1773 Boston Tea Party
• 1774 The Intolerable Acts

The American Revolution

• 1775 Lexington and Concord
• 1775 Americans March North
• 1775 The First Anglo-Maratha War
• 1776 Common Sense
• 1776 Evacuation of Boston
• 1776 Founding of San Francisco
• 1776 Declaration of Independence
• 1776 British Regroup in New York
• 1777 Fighting centered around New York
• 1777 The Articles of Confederation
• 1777 Winter at Valley Forge

• 1778 The War Moves South
• 1778 The Second Mysore War
• 1779 American Naval Victory
• 1779 Spain Retakes Florida
• 1780 Fighting in the South
• 1780 The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War
• 1781 Cornwallis Surrenders
• 1781 British attack Sumatra
• 1781 Revolt in Peru
• 1782 British victory in the West Indies
• 1782 British Gains in India

The United States

• 1783 Treaty of Paris
• 1784 Founding of New Brunswick
• 1787 First African Slave Repatriations
• 1787 The U.S. Constitution
• 1788 The First Fleet

• 1789 The U.S. Presidency
• 1789 The French Revolution
• 1791 The Constitutional Act
• 1793 The Terror

In a time of dramatic population increases elsewhere in the world, Africa's population failed to grow because so many unfortunate victims were taken away in the slave trade. War after war among the European colonial powers culminated in the Seven Years war where English Naval superiority overwhelmed the opposition and expelled France from colonies in Africa, North America, and India.

Yet the Eighteenth Century was also the time of The Enlightenment when the writings of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, and others inspired revolutionary ideals that help to defeat the English in the American Colonies and contributed to the end of the French monarchy. Clearly Elizabeth Murray lived in a time of momentous change, and indeed in the very midst of some of the most dramatic events.