Brunel dies just before the maiden voyage of his gigantic final project, the luxury liner The Great Eastern

'Amos Barton' and two other stories are published together, as Scenes of Clerical Life, under the pseudonym George Eliot

An Irish branch of the US Fenians is established as the Irish Republican Brotherhood

Hector Berlioz completes his 4-hour opera The Trojans (not performed as a complete work until 1890)

Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes move from Parkshot in Richmond to Holly Lodge in Wandsworth

Marian Evans reluctantly allows her publisher to admit the truth of rumours that George Eliot is Marian Evans, also known as Mrs Lewes

A French and Piedmontese army liberates Milan from Austrian rule

French and Piedmontese forces defeat the Austrians decisively at Solferino, in a battle involving appalling casualties

Edward FitzGerald publishes The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, romantic translations of the work of the Persian poet

Mail is carried by horse relay from Missouri to California, travelling 2000 miles in ten days in the service known as the Pony Express

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

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

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

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

The third Hampton Court Bridge is built, replacing one on the same line that was pulled down in 1864, made of wrought-iron lattice girders in five spans on cast-iron columns

The southern states pass new Black Codes, designed to limit the freedom granted to African-Americans by the victorious north

The Plains Indians are threatened by settlers pressing west, building railways and slaughtering buffalo

A Civil Rights Act is passed by the US Congress, guaranteeing the legal rights of African-Americans

The Prussians achieve the first blitzkrieg in their Seven Weeks' War defeat of the Austrians

The terms of the treaty of Prague, ending the Seven Weeks War, make plain the transfer of German leadership from Austria to Prussia

George Custer leads federal troops in the massacre of more than 100 American Indians, on an official reservation beside the Washita river

Johannes Brahms' German Requiem, setting passages from Luther's translation of the Bible, has its first complete performance in Leipzig

British prime minister William Gladstone introduces a bill to disestablish the Anglican church in Ireland

The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads meet at Promontory Summit in Utah, completing the first transcontinental line

The territory of the Hudson's Bay Company is transferred to the new state of Canada