US feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organize a convention on women's rights in Seneca Falls, New York

Oh! Susannah is in the first published collection of popular songs by Stephen Collins Foster

A utopian community dedicated to the sharing of both property and sexual favours is established by John Humphrey Noyes near Oneida, New York

Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail, already serialized in 1847, is published in book form

An anti-British mob attacks the New York theatre where William Macready is appearing as Macbeth, leaving 22 dead and many injured

The gold rush to California gathers pace during 1849, causing the prospectors to become known as 'forty-niners'

The brothers James and John Harper launch in New York Harper's Monthly Magazine, still published today

As many as 50,000 US pioneers travel west this year on the Oregon Trail

The slave trade, but not slavery itself, is banned in Washington and the district of Columbia

The US Congress passes the Compromise of 1850, designed to defuse the growing crisis over slavery

The Fugitive Slave Act, concerned with the arrest of runaway slaves, is the most contentious part of the Compromise of 1850

Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes his novel The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester Prynne is forced to wear the letter A for Adultress

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