1850s

From left, clockwise: Henry Clay introduces the Compromise of 1850 the U.S. Senate; Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Russian forces fight against British, French and Ottoman forces in Sevastopol during the Crimean War; SS Arctic, an American steamship, sinks in the Atlantic Ocean after a collision with a French steamship, SS Vesta in 1854; The Panama Railroad opens in 1855 connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans with a railroad in Central America; Anglo-French and Qing Empire forces engage each other in a four-year long campaign known as the Second Opium War starting in 1856; Dred Scott v. Sandford denies American citizenship as mandated under the U.S. Constitution to African Americans; Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species in 1859, presenting the idea of natural selection.

The 1850s (pronounced "eighteen-fifties") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 1850, and ended on December 31, 1859.

It was a very turbulent decade, as wars such as the Crimean War, shifted and shook European politics, as well as the expansion of colonization towards the Far East, which also sparked conflicts like the Second Opium War. In the meantime, the United States saw its peak on mass migration to the American West, that particularly made the nation experience an economic boom, as well as a rapidly increasing population.

The last living person from this decade was Ada Roe, who died in 1970.

Crimean War

Wars

Internal conflicts

  • The revolt in Alexandria by Alexandrian locals led by Sherekoh, governor of Alexandria against Abbas I of Egypt.
  • The Indian Rebellion of 1857, a revolt against British colonial rule in India.
  • Bleeding Kansas (1854–59): battles erupt in Kansas Territory between proslavery and "Free-State" settlers, directly precipitating the American Civil War.
  • Reform War (1857–1861) in Mexico
  • Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) in southeastern China.
  • Nian Rebellion (1853–1868) in northern China.
  • Miao Rebellion (1854–1873) in Guizhou province, China.
  • Red Turban Rebellion (1854–1856) in Guangdong province, China.
  • Punti–Hakka Clan Wars (1855–1867) in Guangdong province, China.
  • Panthay Rebellion (1856–73) in Yunnan province, China.

Prominent political events

Assassinations and attempts

Prominent assassinations, targeted killings, and assassination attempts include:

  • Assassination of Abbas I of Egypt by 4 of his slaves (1854)
  • Eight were killed and 142 wounded in Paris in a failed assassination attempt on Napoleon III, Emperor of the French (1858).

Science and technology

Michael Faraday delivering a Christmas Lecture at the Royal Institution in London, c. 1855
  • 1851 – the Great Exhibition is held at the Crystal Palace, London, considered to be the first world's fair.
  • 1851 – the first public exhibition of a Foucault pendulum, at the Meridian of the Paris Observatory, demonstrating the Earth's rotation.
  • 1851 – German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz invents the Keratometer, a diagnostic instrument for measuring the curvature of the anterior surface of the cornea and assessing the extent and axis of astigmatism
  • 1856 – discovery of Neanderthal fossils in Neanderthal, Germany.
  • 1856 – Eunice Newton Foote is the first scientist to make the connection between the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and climate change
  • 1858 – Donati's Comet, the first comet to be photographed, is discovered by Giovanni Battista Donati
  • 1858 – first publication of Gray's Anatomy.
  • 24 November 1859 – Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species, putting forward the theory of evolution by natural selection
  • 1859 – Florence Nightingale publishes Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not
  • 1859 – Marian Albertovich Kowalski publishes the first usable method to deduce the rotation of the Milky Way
  • 1859 – Pollen is identified as the cause of allergic rhinitis by Charles Harrison Blackley.
  • 1859 – French mathematician Nicolas Auguste Tissot first proposes Tissot's indicatrix in cartography.
  • 1859 – Étienne Lenoir produces the first single-cylinder two-stroke Lenoir cycle gas engine with an electric ignition system.
  • Epidemiology begins when John Snow traces the source of an outbreak of cholera in London to a contaminated water pump.
  • Solar flares discovered by Richard Christopher Carrington.

Economics

  • Distinction between coats and jackets begins to blur
  • Production of steel revolutionized by invention of the Bessemer process
  • Benjamin Silliman fractionates petroleum by distillation for the first time
  • First transatlantic telegraph cable laid
  • First safety elevator installed by Elisha Otis
  • Railroads begin to supplant canals in the United States as a primary means of transporting goods.
  • First commercially successful sewing machine made by Isaac Singer

Environment

Society

  • The word girlfriend first appears in writing in 1855.
  • The word boyfriend first appears in writing in 1856.

Literature

Citations

References

  • Kaufman, Will (2006). The Civil War in American Culture. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0748619351.
  • Painter, Nell Irvin (2000). "Honest Abe and Uncle Tom". Canadian Review of American Studies. 30 (3): 245–272. doi:10.3138/CRAS-s030-03-01. S2CID 155725588.
  • DeLombard, Jeannine (Fall 2012). "Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America". The Historian. 74 (3).


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