1850s

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

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.
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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.

Crimean War

Wars

Internal conflicts
  • The Alexandrian Revolt, by Alexandrian locals led by Sherekoh governor of Alexandria against Abbas I of Egypt.
  • The Indian Mutiny, 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 (1857–61) in Mexico
  • Taiping Rebellion (1851–64) in Southeastern China.
  • Nian Rebellion (1853–68) in Northern China.
  • Miao Rebellion (1854–73) in Guizhou Province, China.
  • Red Turban Rebellion (1854–1856) in Guangdong Province, China.
  • Punti-Hakka Clan Wars (1855–67) 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

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 transpacific 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
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