The first American branch of the Young Men's Christian Association is established in Boston

France demands that Turkey should end Russia's exclusive control of the Christian Holy Places in the Ottoman empire

Scottish physicist William Thomson formulates the second law of thermodynamics, concerning the transfer of heat within a closed system

US entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt conveys passengers across the American continent through Nicaragua by steamship and horse and carriage

Russia insists that her exclusive rights over the Holy Places are enshrined in the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji

G.H. Lewes leaves his serially unfaithful wife and begins an affair with Marian Evans

Antoinette Brown becomes the first female to be ordained a minister in the USA, in the First Congregational Church in South Butler, NY

An anti-slavery movement, formed in the USA to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act, adopts a resonant name, calling itself the Republican party

The controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act passes into law, enabling citizens of these territories to decide whether or not to allow slavery

Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes flout British convential morality by travelling openly to Germany together

Thoreau publishes an account of his two years of self-sufficient transcendentalism in his hut at Walden Pond

British and French troops land at Sebastopol, to besiege the port, and win a limited victory over the Russians at the river Alma

An inconclusive engagement at Inkerman means that the allies in the Crimea have to dig in for the winter besieging Sebastopol

Pope Pius IX issues a papal bull declaring that the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary is to be an article of faith for Catholics

On their return to England, Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes pretend to be married (Lewes is unable to get a divorce)

Marian Evans (George Eliot) and G.H. Lewes move into lodgings at 8 Parkshot in Richmond, with Mrs Croft as their landlady

The Panama Railroad company completes a line between the Atlantic and the Pacific, providing America's first transcontinental link

The Christian Socialism of F.D. Maurice and others is mocked by its opponents as 'muscular Christianity'

Longfellow publishes his American Indian epic, The Song of Hiawatha, in an irresistibly catchy metre

After a siege of nearly a year the Russians abandon Sebastopol, but the Turkish alliance is too exhausted to pursue the conflict

Abolitionist John Brown presides over the lynching of five pro-slavery men at Pottawatomie in Kansas

In the cramped sitting room that she shares as a study with Lewes, Marian Evans begins writing her first novel, Adam Bede

David Livingstone urges upon a Cambridge audience the high ideal of taking 'commerce and Christianity' into Africa

The Boers of the southern Transvaal declare independence as the South African Republic

John O'Mahony, an Irish emigrant to the USA, founds the Fenian Brotherhood as a secret organization supporting the Irish republican cause