1859

Centuries: 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

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Events

• January 2 - Erastus Beadle[?] publishes The Dime Book of Practical Etiquette[?].
• February 14 - Oregon is admitted as the 33rd U.S. state.
• April 25 - Ground is broken for the Suez Canal
• May 30 - Piedmontese defeat the Austrian army at Palestro[?]
• June 24 - Battle of Solferino[?] (Battle of the Three Sovereigns[?]) Sardinia and Napoleon III of France defeat Franz Josef I of Austria-Hungary in northern Italy
• July 4 - Franco-Piedmontese War[?]: The Battle of Magenta.
• July 11 - Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, faced with expensive war against Piedmont and revolution in Hungary, meets Napoleon III at Villfranca[?]. Since the death of Metternich in 1858, he negotiates personally. Hostilities ceases, partly due to Napoleon's fear of the Nationalism in Italy.
• August 27 - Edwin Drake drills the first oil well in the United States, near Titusville, Pennsylvania
• September 17 - Joshua A. Norton proclaims himself "Emperor of These United States"
• October 16 - John Brown raids Harper's Ferry in Virginia, the signal for a general slave rebellion.
• October 18 - Federal Troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee overpower Brown at the Federal arsenal[?]
• November 19 - Opera "Genevieve de Brabant[?]", composed by Jacques Offenbach, debuts at the Theatre de Bouffes Parisians in Paris.

• Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies is succeeded by his 13-year-old son Francesco I of the Two Sicilies[?]
• Charles Blondel[?] crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope[?]
• Karl_XV succeeds Oskar I as Swedish King
• Codex Sinaiticus found by Constantin von Tischendorf on his third visit to the monastery of Santa Katerina[?], on Mount Sinai
• Bernhard Riemann formulates the Riemann hypothesis, one of most important open problems of contemporary mathematics
• Solar flares first observed on the Sun by English astronomer Richard Carrington[?].
• Brisbane declared the capital of newly-made-separate colony [Queensland]], Australia

Arts, Sciences, Literature and Philosophy

• 1859 in literature:
  • Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species
  • Charles Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities[?] is published on July 11

Births

• January 11 - George Nathaniel Curzon (Lord Curzon), British statesman
• January 13 - Karl Bleibtreu[?], critic (+ 1928)
• January 27 - Wilhelm II of Germany, last German Emperor[?] and Prussian king (+ 1941)
• February 1 - Victor Herbert, composer
• February 3 - Hugo Junkers, industrialist and aircraft designer (+ 1935)
• February 18 - Sholom Aleichem[?], writer (+ 1916)
• March 2 - Sholom Aleichem[?], novelist (+ 1916)
• March 8 - Kenneth Grahame, author (+ 1932)
• March 26 - Alfred Edward Housman, English poet
• May 15 - Pierre Curie, physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics 1903 (+ 1906)
• May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, British writer of the Sherlock Holmes novels
• August 4 - Knut Hamsun, author (+ 1952)
• October 9 - Alfred Dreyfus, French military officer
• October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature
• December 15 - L. L. Zamenhof, Ruso-Polish initiator of Esperanto
• Francesc Macià, President of Catalan Generalitat

Deaths

• May 22 - Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies
• September 15 - Isambard Kingdom Brunel, British engineer.
• November 28 - Washington Irving, American author.
• December 2 - John Brown, American abolitionist, hanged for Treason