1859

18th century - 19th century - 20th century

Decades: 1790s - 1800s - 1810s - 1820s - 1830s - 1840s - 1850s - 1860s - 1870s - 1880s - 1890s - 1900s

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 Joseph 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

• 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