At Pavón the provincial troops of Buenos Aires defeat the Argentinian national army, emphatically demonstrating the power of their city

Longfellow's narrative poem Paul Revere's Ride dramatizes a turning point at the start of the American Revolution

George Eliot is offered £10,000 to write a novel about Savonarola as a 12-part serial in the new Cornhill Magazine

Prince Albert dies of typhoid, plunging Victoria into forty years of widowhood and deep mourning

Cotton's Wharf burns

A suspension bridge is completed at Lambeth

Hungarian physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis publishes his discovery that deaths from puerperal fever can be dramatically reduced by a strict hand-washing routine

Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas

The future Cassel Hospital estate, now with a single mansion, is leased for nine years to HRH Robert Philippe, Duc de Chartres, exiled from France along with his grandfather, King Louis Philippe

Julia Ward Howe publishes The Battle Hymn of the Republic, inspired by a visit to Union troops in the American Civil War

Under the title Romola, George Eliot's story of Savonarola in Florence begins publication (completed in August 1863)

A joint French, Spanish and British force lands in Mexico and captures Veracruz, ostensibly to collect the interest on European debts

The Monitor and the Merrimack fight all morning off the Virginia coast, in history's first clash between ironclad ships

A two-day engagement at Shiloh is the first Civil War battle to bring massive casualties, with more than 23,000 dead, wounded or missing

Louis Pasteur uses heat to destroy the micro-organisms in liquid food, in the process that becomes known as pasteurization

In a surprise raid, Union forces sail up the Mississippi estuary to capture New Orleans

Victor Hugo publishes his novel Les Misérables, an immensely complex story about the adventures of ex-convict Jean Valjean

Richard Burton, visiting Dahomey, provides reports of the kingdom's celebrated Amazons preparing for war

Speke and Grant find the Ripon Falls, over which the headwater of the Nile flows from Lake Tanganyika

George B. McClellan brings a Union army within a few miles of Richmond, but withdraws after the Seven Days Battle against Robert E. Lee

Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll tells 10-year-old Alice Liddell, on a boat trip, a story about her own adventures in Wonderland

Swiss humanitarian Henri Dunant publishes A Memory of Solferino, proposing an international agency to cope with the battlefield casualties he has witnessed

John McDouall Stuart reaches the north coast of Australia at Van Diemen's Gulf seven months after setting off from Adelaide

The Homestead Act grants 160 acres in the west of the USA to any family farming them for five years

Otto von Bismarck declares Blut und Eisen (blood and iron) to be the only policy by which Prussia can become strong