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 Oregon Treaty establishes the border between Canada and the USA along the 49th parallel to the Pacific

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

William Hickling Prescott follows his great work on Mexico with a 2-volume History of the Conquest of Peru

Gold is found on the property of John Sutter, at Coloma on the Sacramento river in California, and news of it launches the first gold rush

Two New York girls, Maggie and Katie Fox, claim to be in touch with the spirit of a murdered man, thus launching the modern cult of spiritualism

The Wilmot Proviso is defeated in the US Senate, heightening north-south tensions on the issue of slavery