istoryworld
All Events
The Palm House, today "the world's most important surviving Victorian glass and iron structure" is completed. Although originally told to hide it among trees, Kew's director William Hooker succeeds in placing it in a prominent position, thanks to support from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Honoré de Balzac completes publication of La Comédie Humaine, a 17-volume collected edition of his numerous novels and stories
US feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organize a convention on women's rights in Seneca Falls, New York
Louis Napoleon is elected the first president of France's new Second Republic
Oh! Susannah is in the first published collection of popular songs by Stephen Collins Foster
English art students Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
A utopian community dedicated to the sharing of both property and sexual favours is established by John Humphrey Noyes near Oneida, New York
The prime minister of the papal states, Pellegrino Rossi, is assassinated in Rome
The second Anglo-Sikh war begins when a British army invades the Punjab to suppress a local uprising
In a three-cornered US presidential election Whig candidate Zachary Taylor defeats Democrat Lewis Cass and the Free-Soil party's Martin van Buren
18-year-old Francis Joseph becomes emperor of Austria when his uncle, Ferdinand I, abdicates at the end of a year of unrest
Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë die within a period of eight months
A new Roman republic is proclaimed, with veteran agitator Giuseppe Mazzini in the leading role
Nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth announces the independence of Hungary and the deposition of the Habsburg dynasty
Prince Albert is the driving force behind the plans for a Great Exhibition in London
Local painter and photographer George Hilditch sets up his easel under Richmond's new railway bridge
Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels
A British victory at the Battle of Gujarat effectively ends the second Anglo-Sikh war, and is followed by annexation of the Punjab
Giuseppe Garibaldi arrives from exile in South America to defend the new Roman republic against a French army
Delegates of the German states offer the imperial crown of a united Germany to Frederick William IV, the king of Prussia, who rejects it
Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail, already serialized in 1847, is published in book form
An anti-British mob attacks the New York theatre where William Macready is appearing as Macbeth, leaving 22 dead and many injured
Scottish painter David Roberts completes publication of his 6-volume The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia
The gold rush to California gathers pace during 1849, causing the prospectors to become known as 'forty-niners'
In Vienna the younger Johann Strauss succeeds his father as the Waltz King
