The inhabitants of the Mexican province of Texas declare their independence as a new republic

200 Texans, among them Davy Crockett, hold out for twelve days in San Antonio before being killed in the Alamo by a Mexican army

Sarah and Angelina Grimké join the abolitionist crusade, each publishing a powerful anti-slavery pamphlet in the same year

Sam Houston destroys a Mexican army near the San Jacinto river, completing the seizure of Texas from Mexico

In his essay, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson sets out the fundamentals of the philolosphy of Transcendentalism

In The American Scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson urges his student audience to heed their own intellectuals rather than those of Europe

Oberlin College in Ohio becomes the first in the USA to enrol women as degree students

US inventor Samuel Morse gives the first public demonstration, in Philadelphia, of his electric telegraph

Five American Indian tribes are forcibly escorted to a new Indian Territory west of the Mississippi in the process that becomes known as the Great Removal

John James Audubon completes publication of the 435 plates forming his 4-volume Birds of America

US naval officer Charles Wilkes leads a four-year exploration of the Antarctic and Pacific, proving on the way that Antarctica is a continent

In his Divinity School Address, delivered at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson criticizes formal religion and gives priority to personal spiritual experience

US author Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes Fanshawe, his first novel, at his own expense

Edgar Allan Poe publishes a characteristically gothic tale, The Fall of the House of Usher

Mutiny by slaves on a Spanish vessel leads two years later to a significant abolitionist victory in the Amistad case

Joseph Smith and the Mormons create the thriving town of Nauvoo in Illinois on the Mississippi

The first issue of the quarterly magazine The Dial is issued by the Transcendentalists meeting at Ralph Waldo Emerson's home

US lawyer Richard Henry Dana has immediate popular success with Two Years Before the Mast, his account of his time as a merchant seaman

Herman Melville goes to sea on the whaler Acushnet and spends moe than a year in the south Pacific

August Dupin solves the case in Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered to be the first example of a detective story

Brook Farm, the most famous of the Charles Fourier phalanxes, is established at Dedham near Boston

Horace Greeley founds and edits the New-York Tribune, which will survive for more than a century (till 1966

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems includes 'The Village Blacksmith' and 'The Wreck of the Hesperus'

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