istoryworld
Events relating to north america
US social reformer Catherine Beecher publishes an influential book to empower women, Treatise on Domestic Economy
Edwin Pearce Christy launches the Virginia Minstrels, later to become America's most popular minstrel show under the name Christy's Minstrels
US showman P.T. Barnum draws huge crowds to the New York premises where his attractions include 'General Tom Thumb', a 4-year-old midget
US secretary of state Daniel Webster and British negotiator Lord Ashburton resolve US-Canadian boundary disputes
Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Pit and the Pendulum, a cliff-hanging tale of terror at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition
The Great Migration across the north American continent to the Pacific establishes the Oregon Trail
William Hickling Prescott brings the Conquistadors dramatically to life in his 3-volume History of the Conquest of Mexico
James Polk pledges in his presidential campaign to include the self-proclaimed republic of Texas in the USA
The Mormon leader, Joseph Smith, and his brother are killed by an armed mob in Nauvoo
Samuel Morse and his assistant Alfred Vail complete the first telegraph line, between New York and Baltimore
Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven and Other Poems
New Yorker Alexander Cartwright devises the set of rules that become the basis of the modern game of baseball
Henry David Thoreau moves into a hut that he has built for himself in the woods at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts
The expansionist slogan 'Manifest Destiny' is coined by journalist John L. O'Sullivan to emphasize the right of the USA to extend west to the Pacific
Escaped slave Frederick Douglass publishes the first of three volumes of autobiograrphy
US author Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an early and thoughtful feminist study of women's place in society
Francis Parkman travels west into dangerous territory in Wyoming, an adventure he later describes in The Oregon Trail
The Irish, fleeing from the potato famine at home, become the main group of immigrants to the USA
The Oregon Treaty establishes the border between Canada and the USA along the 49th parallel to the Pacific
President Polk sends a US army into Texas, provoking the Mexican-American War
Brigham Young leads the migration of Mormons west up the Missouri from Illinois
The US Congress establishes the Smithsonian Institution with a bequest to the nation by Englishman James Smithson
A dentist in Boston, William Morton, uses ether as an anaesthetic while surgeon John Collins Warren removes a tumour in a patient's neck
Brigham Young selects the site of Salt Lake City as the place for Mormon settlement
Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his first collection of poems, many of which have appeared first in The Dial
