Diplomatic coups were scarce that season. Thomas Jefferson had temporarily left his duties at the Court of Versailles to join John Adams, America’s first minister to the Court of St. James’s. Adams had summoned him to help in concluding several treaties, but soon after Jefferson’s arrival in London on March 11, the negotiations ground to a halt. Tripoli’s ambassador informed the Americans that sixty thousand guineas would be required to prevent Tripoli and Tunis from seizing American vessels and enslaving sailors, a sum the struggling states could hardly afford. The possibility of reaching a trade agreement with Britain seemed equally remote, and the commercial treaty under way with Portugal was being delayed. Overworked, underpaid, and dispirited, Jefferson and Adams decided it was time for a holiday and set out for a fortnight’s tour of English countryseats.

The diplomats’ responses to what they saw contrasted nearly as greatly as their appearances. Jefferson, the reedy aristocrat, strode about the estates with Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening in hand, making careful marginal notes. He concerned himself with aesthetics and mechanical matters, such as the operation of a sluice and the design of an Archimedes screw, which raised water. The Chiswick gardens were too artificial, he wrote, lacking the naturalness that should characterize even the most formal garden. Hampton Court seemed “old-fashioned,” the buildings at Moor Park proved delightful, and the trees at Esher Place displayed “a most lovely mixture of concave and convex.” Jefferson scrutinized everything, bearing Monticello in mind: “My enquiries were directed chiefly to such practical things,” he later wrote, “as might enable me to estimate the expence of making and maintaining a garden in that style.”

Short, plump Adams, on the other hand, was occupied with thoughts of the relevance of history and the making of great minds. In Worcester, where Cromwell defeated Charles II in the English Civil War, Adams was outraged to discover that the locals were ignorant of their town’s heritage. He exhorted them to “tell your neighbors and your Children that this is holy Ground.…All England should come in Pilgrimage to this Hill, once a Year.” At Shakespeare’s birthplace Adams mused upon what might have turned the mind of one born in a cottage “as small and mean as you can conceive” to “Letters and the Drama.” He also enjoyed a simple appreciation of the estates he saw, calling them “superb,” “great and elegant,” and “beautifull.” But as a New England farmer, he could hardly restrain himself from moralizing. “It will be long, I hope,” he wrote, “before Ridings, Parks, Pleasure Grounds, Gardens and ornamented Farms grow so much in Fashion in America.”

Their tour concluded, the men returned to London and their cares as foreign ministers. Although they signed a treaty with Portugal, that country ultimately repudiated it. Jefferson soon departed for Paris, where he pondered what he had observed of U.S.-British relations: “I think the king, ministers, and nation are more bitterly hostile to us at present that at any period of the late war.” Adams remained in London to dodge the barbs of the press, which printed gossipy stuff, most of it true, about the impecuniousness of the American minister, whose wife was obliged to go to market herself.

•March 1: At the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston, Revolutionary War veterans found the Ohio Company of Associates to purchase and settle land “north westerly of the River Ohio.”

Late in the afternoon on Saturday, March 25, on the top floors of the Asch Building near Washington Square in New York City, six hundred garment workers rose from their machines and cutting tables and prepared to go home. Most were immigrants—Italians or Russian Jews —and the majority were girls and women between the ages of thirteen and thirty. It was the end of their six-day workweek, and they were eager to leave. As they wound their way past bins heaped with lint and rags, crowded rows of sewing machines, and tables covered with bolts of cloth, someone may have stopped for a last furtive cigarette and tossed a match carelessly aside. How it started was never determined, but suddenly, on the eighth floor, a fire leaped up, and despite efforts to extinguish it, it spread quickly.

The young women rushed for the two exits. The first led to a passageway that was twenty inches wide, so narrow that only one person could walk through at a time. It had been devised by the owners to prevent employees from slipping by without having their handbags inspected for stolen material. This exit was immediately choked with terrified people, as were the two small elevators and the narrow, winding staircase beyond it. The second exit, a wider doorway on the other side of which lay another staircase, was also besieged. But the company’s owners distrusted their employees and wanted to be sure that they left the eighth floor, and the similarly designed ninth and tenth floors, through the twenty-inch passageways. And so, as the fire spread from the eighth to the tenth floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, the workers fled from the impassable hallways to the other exits and found them locked on every floor.

Fewer than twenty clambered to safety down the building’s precipitous wroughtiron fire escape, after which it softened from the fire’s heat and collapsed, pitching those still on it into the courtyard below. Most workers on the tenth floor survived by climbing to the roof, where New York University students from the next building held two ladders for them to step across. Many others did manage to flee down the available staircase, and on the eighth floor the locked door was eventually smashed open. But those trapped by the smoke and fire—nearly a quarter of the employees—were driven to a frenzy. Some twenty threw themselves into the elevator shafts and were crushed. Sixty others, the flames lapping at their clothes, ran to the windows. The first policeman to reach the building later described what he saw: “Dozens of girls were hanging from the ledges. Others, their dresses on fire, were leaping from the windows.” Once the firefighters arrived, they stood below with nets outstretched, but many of the jumpers were little more than children, and, as children do, they held hands for courage. “Life nets?” asked the battalion chief. “What good were life nets? The little ones went through life nets, pavement, and all. I thought they would come down one at a time. I didn’t know they would come down with arms entwined—three and even four together.”

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire lasted thirty minutes, and within that time 146 people died and 70 were seriously injured. The company’s owners were tried on charges of first- and second-degree manslaughter and were found not guilty. A year before, their employees had struck for better sanitary and safety conditions. But the living weren’t as persuasive as the dead, and after the disaster, the New York state legislature was moved to appoint a Factory Investigation Commission. Before long, thirty new ordinances were added to New York’s fire code.

•February 6: The Old Age Home for Pioneers opens in Prescott, Arizona.

•March 3 : The first U.S. Army Dental Corps commissions are authorized.