Hawaii's Queen Liliʻuokalani had been overthrown and replaced by a provisional government composed of members of the Committee of Safety on January 17, 1893.

The United States Minister to the Kingdom of Hawaii (John L. Stevens) had conspired with U.S. citizens to overthrow the monarchy.

After the overthrow, Lawyer Sanford B. Dole, a citizen of Hawaii, becomes President of the Republic when the Provisional Government of Hawaii ends on July 4, 1894.

Controversy will ensue in the following years as the Queen tries to regain her throne.

The administration of President Grover Cleveland commissions the Blount Report, which concludes that the removal of Liliʻuokalani had been illegal.

The U.S. government had first demanded that Queen Liliʻuokalani be reinstated, but the Provisional Government had refused.

Congress had conducted an independent investigation, and on February 26, 1894, submitted the Morgan Report, which found all parties, including Minister Stevens—with the exception of the Queen—"not guilty" and not responsible for the coup.

Partisans on both sides of the debate question the accuracy and impartiality of both the Blount and Morgan reports over the events of 1893.

Robert Louis Stevenson, in A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), details the activities of the great powers battling for influence in Samoa—the United States, Germany and Britain —and the political machinations of the various Samoan factions within their indigenous political system.

Even as they descend into ever greater interclan warfare, what most alarms Stevenson is the Samoans' economic innocence.

In 1894 just months before his death, he addresses the island chiefs:
       There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it before it is too late. It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country... if you do not occupy and use your country, others will. It will not continue to be yours or your children’s, if you occupy it for nothing. You and your children will in that case be cast out into outer darkness".

He had "seen these judgments of God," in Hawaii where abandoned native churches stood like tombstones "over a grave, in the midst of the white men’s sugar fields".

Biologist Alexandre Yersin discovers the pathogen which causes the bubonic plague in 1894

Born in 1863 in Aubonne, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland, to a family originally from France, Yersin had studied medicine at Lausanne, Switzerland from 1883 to 1884, and then at Marburg, Germany and Paris (1884–1886).

In 1886, he had entered Louis Pasteur's research laboratory at the École Normale Supérieure, by invitation of Emile Roux, and had participated in the development of the anti-rabies serum.

In 1888 he received his doctorate with a dissertation titled Étude sur le Développement du Tubercule Expérimental and spent two months with Robert Koch in Germany.

He joined the recently created Pasteur Institute in 1889 as Roux's collaborator and discovered with him the diphtheric toxin (produced by the Corynebacterium diphtheriae bacillus).

To practice medicine in France, Yersin had applied for and obtained French nationality in 1888.

Soon afterwards (1890), he left for French Indochina in Southeast Asia as a physician for the Messageries Maritimes company, on the Saigon-Manila line and then on the Saigon-Haiphong line. He participated in one of the Auguste Pavie missions.

In 1894 Yersin was sent by request of the French government and the Pasteur Institute to Hong Kong, to investigate the Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic.

Here, in a small hut (according to Plague by Wendy Orent) since he was denied access to English hospitals at his arrival, he makes his greatest discovery: that of the pathogen which causes the disease.

Dr. Kitasato Shibasaburō, also in Hong Kong, had identified a bacterium several days earlier.

There is controversy whether this was the same pneumococci or a mix of the two.

Because Kitasato's initial reports were vague and somewhat contradictory, some give Yersin sole credit for the discovery.

However, a thorough analysis of the morphology of the organism discovered by Kitasato has determined that "we are confident that Kitasato had examined the plague bacillus in Hong Kong in late June and early July 1894", only days after Yersin announced his own discovery on June 20.

The plague bacillus develops better at lower temperatures, so Yersin's less well-equipped lab turned out to be an advantage in the race with Kitasato, who used an incubator.

Therefore, although at first named “Kitasato-Yersin bacillus” by the scientific community, the microbe will later assume only the latter's name because of the one identified by Kitasato, a type of streptococcus, cannot be found in the lymphatic glands.

Yersin is also able to demonstrate for the first time that the same bacillus is present in the rodent as well as in the human disease, thus underlining the possible means of transmission.

This important discovery is communicated to the French Academy of Sciences in the same year, by his colleague Emile Duclaux, in a classic paper titled "La peste bubonique à Hong-Kong".

Donghak followers, exasperated by the weak Korean state’s helplessness in the face of China’s heavy-handed attempts to counter rising Japanese influence, revolt against the government in 1894.

Both China and Japan dispatch troops in August to suppress the rebellion.

Officials often ignore the Guangxu Emperor upon the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War, and instead sent their memorials to Cixi for her approval, even though is he nominally the sovereign ruler of the Qing Empire.

Eventually, two sets of Grand Council memoranda are created, one for the emperor and the other for the empress dowager, a practice that will continue until it is rendered unnecessary by the events in the autumn of 1898.

France, seeking allies against Germany after 1871, forms a military alliance with the Russian Empire in 1894, with large-scale loans to Russia, sales of arms, and warships, as well as diplomatic support.

Nicholas II begins his reign as Tsar of all the Russias on November 1, 1894.

Despite a visit to the United Kingdom in 1893, where he had observed the House of Commons in debate and seemingly impressed by the machinery of constitutional monarchy, Nicholas turns his back on any notion of giving away any power to elected representatives in Russia.

Shortly after he comes to the throne, a deputation of peasants and workers from various towns' local assemblies (zemstvos) comes to the Winter Palace proposing court reforms, such as the adoption of a constitutional monarchy, and reform that would improve the political and economic life of the peasantry, in the Tver Address.

Although the addresses they had sent in beforehand were couched in mild and loyal terms, Nicholas is angry and ignores advice from an Imperial Family Council by saying to them:

    ... it has come to my knowledge that during the last months there have been heard in some assemblies of the zemstvos the voices of those who have indulged in a senseless dream that the zemstvos be called upon to participate in the government of the country. I want everyone to know that I will devote all my strength to maintain, for the good of the whole nation, the principle of absolute autocracy, as firmly and as strongly as did my late lamented father.

Edvard Munch's massive output of graphic art—consisting of etchings, drypoints, lithographs, and woodcuts—begins in 1894.

The principal attraction to him of printmaking is that it enables him to communicate his message to a much larger number of people, but it also affords him exciting opportunities for experimentation.

His lack of formal training in any graphic medium is no doubt a factor in pushing him toward extremely innovative techniques.

Like many of his contemporaries, he is influenced by the Japanese tradition in his use of the woodcut, but he radically simplifies the process by, for example, printing from a single block of wood sawed into a number of small pieces.

Munch's use of the actual grain of the wood for expressive purposes proves an especially successful experiment (and it will greatly influence later artists.)

He also frequently combines different media or overlays one medium on top of another.

Munch's prints closely resemble his paintings in both style and subject matter.

Continuing his exploration of the theme of suffering caused by love, he completes one of his most pessimistic paintings, Ashes (1894; Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo) another of the works that form the Frieze.

...the Victor Emmanuel II Monument in Rome express municipal grandeur through the employment of antique architectural forms.

The Sultan, in a precursor to the Hamidian massacres, begins to target the Armenian people in 1894.

This persecution strengthens nationalistic sentiment among Armenians.

The first notable battle in the Armenian resistance takes place in Sasun.

Hunchak activists, such as Mihran Damadian, Hampartsoum Boyadjian, and Hrayr, encourage resistance against double taxation and Ottoman persecution.

The ARF arms the people of the region.

The Armenians confront the Ottoman army and Kurdish irregulars at Sasun, finally succumbing to superior numbers and to Turkish assurances of amnesty (which will never be granted).

In response to the resistance at Sasun, the governor of Mush responds by inciting the local Muslims against the Armenians.

Scottish historian Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross, will write that massacres of this kind were often achieved by gathering Muslims in a local mosque and claiming that the Armenians had the aim of "striking at Islam."

Sultan Abdul Hamid sends the Ottoman army into the area and also arms groups of Kurdish irregulars.

The violence spreads and affects most of the Armenian towns in the Ottoman Empire.