Centuries: Year in Review 19th Century (18th century - 19th century - 20th century)
Decades: 1800s 1810s 1820s 1830s 1840s - 1850s - 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s
Years: 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 - 1859 - 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864
Events
- February 14 - Oregon becomes the 33th state of the United States
- June 24 - Battle of Solferino (Battle of the Three Sovereigns) Sardinia and Napoleon III of France defeat Franz Josef I of Austria in northern Italy
- July 11 - A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is published
- September 17 - Joshua A. Norton proclaimes himself "Emperor of These United States"
- Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species
- Karl_XV succeeds Oskar I as Swedish King
- The Sinaiticus codex was found by Dr. Tischendorf on his third visit to the convent of St. Catherine, on Mount Sinai
- Bernhard Riemann formulates the Riemann hypothesis, one of most important open problems of contemporary mathematics
Births
- March 26 - Alfred Edward Housman, English poet
- May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, British writer of the Sherlock Holmes novels
- October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature
Deaths
- September 15 - Isambard Kingdom Brunel, British engineer.
- November 28 - Washington Irving, American author.
- December 2 - John Brown, American abolitionist