The French Intervention to Korea in 1866 was a punitive expedition undertaken by the Second French Empire against Joseon Korea in retaliation for the execution of seven French Catholic missionaries. Throughout Joseon history, Korea had maintained a policy of strict isolationism from the outside world, with exceptions only for interaction with the Qing dynasty and occasional trading with Japan through Tsushima. Despite these efforts at isolation, foreign contact persisted, and Catholic missionaries had shown interest in Korea as early as the 16th century following their arrival in China and Japan.
The encounter took place over Ganghwa Island and lasted nearly six weeks. The specific details of commanders, force compositions, and key moments of the engagement are not provided in the available article text.
The French expedition resulted in an eventual French retreat and a check on French influence in the region. The encounter confirmed Korea in its isolationism for another decade, until Japan forced the country to open up to trade in 1876 through the Treaty of Ganghwa. In contemporary South Korea, the event is known as the Byeongin yangyo, or "Western disturbance of the byeongin year."
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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