All Events

The Metropolitan Railway, the world's first to go underground, opens in London using steam trains between Paddington and Farringdon Street

48-year-old Julia Margaret Cameron is given a camera by her daughter, in the Isle of Wight, and decides to concentrate on portraits

The Marylebone Cricket Club, arbiter of cricket, finally rules that overarm bowling is legitimate

The French arrange for the coronation of the Austrian archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell presents to the Royal Society his discoveries in the field of electromagnetics, now known collectively as Maxwell's Equations

The Federal government confiscates the Arlington estate of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and turns it into a war cemetery

Imperial Chinese troops and Gordon's auxiliaries take Nanjing, the rebel capital, finally bringing to an end the Taiping rebellion

Pope Pius IX includes socialism, civil marriage and secular education among eighty modern errors listed in his Syllabus

Dostoevsky publishes Notes from Underground, the bitter memories of a retired civil servant that is often described as the first existentialist novel

President Lincoln is re-elected for a second term, thanks largely to recent Union successes on the Civil War battlefields

The Hungerford Railway Bridge, also known as the Charing Cross Railway Bridge, brings trains to Charing Cross Station

The last survivor of the Richmond tontine dies, at the age of 91, ending the payment of interest and making the Richmond Bridge free of tolls

Gregor Mendel reads a paper to the Natural History Society in Brno describing his discoveries in the field of genetics

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