US Secretary of State John Clayton and British ambassador Henry Bulwer come to an agreement about the building of a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific

Escaped slave Harriet Tubman makes the first of many dangerous journeys back into Maryland to bring other slaves into freedom

Jenny Lind, the 'Swedish Nightingale', has a great success touring the USA in a show presented by P.T. Barnum

Allan Pinkerton retires from the Chicago police force and forms the Pinkerton National Detective Agency

An American clergyman, L.L. Langstroth, discovers the 'bee space', which becomes a standard feature of the modern beehive

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

The New York Times is founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond as a conservative daily with an emphasis on accuracy

US author Nathaniel Hawthorne bases his novel The House of the Seven Gables on a curse invoked against his own family

Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick; or, The Whale, a novel based on his own 18-month experience on a whaler in 1841-2

A journalist in the Terre Haute Express gives a piece of advice, 'Go west, young man', that chimes perfectly with the US pioneer spirit

The citizens of the US are scandalized to discover that the Mormons practise polygamy

In the four years since the discovery of gold, the population of California has leapt from 14,000 to 250,000

Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes a massively successful antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, that sells 300,000 copies in its first year

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

In an Argentinian civil war, Urquiza defeats the dictator Rosas and is subsequently elected president (in 1854)

Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce wins the US presidential election, defeating his Whig opponent Winfield Scott

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

US inventor Elisha Otis dramatically demonstrates his new safety elevator, cutting the rope suspending his platform in New York's Crystal Palace

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

US minister to Mexico James Gadsden secures a treaty by which the USA purchases from Mexico much of southern Arizona

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

Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole sets up her own 'British Hotel' in the Crimea to provide food and nursing for soldiers in need

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

The first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is published anonymously, at his own expense, and contains just 12 poems