Song in America |
Politics & Culture
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Politics |
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Culture |
Expansion and Reform (1800 - 1859) |
| 1800 | 1800
- Population is 5.3 million, including 1 million blacks, 90% of whom are slaves
- Congress convenes in Washington, the new federal capital. President Adams moves into what will become known as the White House
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1801- William Little and William Smith publish their shape-note system The Easy Instructor, or A New Method of Teaching Sacred Harmony
- John Hill Hewitt born
| 1801
- Ballot count shows a tie between Jefferson and Burr; House of Representatives chooses Jefferson
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| 1802 | 1802
- Martha Washington dies
- Napoleon Bonaparte is made First Consul for life by the French
- Beethoven writes Symphony No. 2 as well as his "Heiligenstadt Testament"
- Victor Hugo born
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1803- Alexander Reinagle: "Masonic Ode"
- The lyrics to "Jefferson and Liberty" are written (anonymous) to the tune of "Anacreon in Heaven" (composed by John Stafford Smith) which would become the tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner"
| 1803
- Louisiana Purchase doubles the size of the United States
- Lewis and Clark begin their expedition in the Northwest Territory
- Ohio becomes 17th state, and the first in which slavery is illegal from the beginning
- The Irish Rebellion of 1803 fails in its attempt to secure independence from the United Kingdom
- Beetoven: Eroica Symphony, Kreutzer Sonata
- Hector Berlioz born
- Ralph Waldo Emerson born
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| 1804 | 1804
- Aaron Burr mortally wounds Alexander Hamilton in a duel
- Lewis and Clark expedition leaves St. Louis
- Thomas Jefferson is reelected president
- Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned Emperor of France
- Johann Friedrich von Schiller: William Tell
- Nathaniel Hawthorne born
- Eduard Mörike born
- George Sand born
- Immanuel Kant dies
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| 1805 | 1805
- Beethoven writes his only opera Fidelio
- Lorenzo da Ponte leaves Europe for New York
- William Wordsworth: The Prelude
- Painter Charles Wilson Peale founds the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
- Hans Christian Anderson born
- Johann Friedrich von Schiller dies
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| 1806 | 1806
- Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike spots a mountain in the Colorado foothills
- Napoleon defeats Prussia
- Noah Webster publishes his first dictionary, called Compendious Dictionary of the English Language
- Beethoven: Symphony No. 4
- Ludwig von Arnim/Clemens Brentano: Des Knaben Wunderhorn
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust I
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| 1807 | 1807
- First steamboat in regular service
- A series of essays titled Salamagundi marks the beginning of the Knickerbocker school of writers, who prize realism and humor, plus American subject matter
- Beethoven: Symphony No. 5
- Pleyel piano factory opens in Paris
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| 1808 | 1808
- Jefferson follows Washington's precedent and does not run for a third term
- Slave trade outlawed by Congress
- Union Temperate Society founded in New York
- Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony
- Ricordi Music House opens in Milan
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| 1809 | 1809
- James Madison inaugurated
- Illinois Territory formed from Northwest Territory
- Beethoven: Emperor Concerto
- Washington Irving's humorous Knickerbocker's History of New York
- Felix Mendelssohn born
- Alfred Lord Tennyson born
- Franz Joseph Haydn dies
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1810- Benjamin Carr: Six Ballads from "The Lady of the Lake," Opus 7 (setting the text of Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, whose work The Lady of the Lake was published earlier in the year)
| 1810 |
| 1811 | 1811
- Battle of Tippecanoe
- Early performance of Haydn's The Creation in America
- Harriet Beecher Stowe born
- Franz Liszt born
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1812- Eliakim Doolittle writes "The Hornet Stung the Peacock," a song about how the American sloop of war Hornet engaged and sunk the British brig Peacock during the War of 1812. The song is published in February of 1813 and becomes popular.
- Englishman James Sanderson composes the tune of "Hail to the Chief," though the words (now never sung) are originally from Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake (1810)
- Robert Browning born
- Henry Russell born
| 1812
- War of 1812 begins when the British invade Washington
- Napoleon retreats from Moscow
- Beethoven: Symphony No. 7, Symphony No. 8
- Sir Humphry Davy: Elements of Chemical Philosophy
- Charles Dickens born
- Edward Lear born
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1813- John Sullivan Dwight is born. He will create and publish Dwight's Journal of Music, one of the most important and respected music periodicals in America.
- Henry Stevenson Washburn born
| 1813
- "Uncle Sam" appears for the first time in the Troy Post
- Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
- Johann Wyss: Swiss Family Robinson
- Giuseppe Verdi born
- Richard Wagner born
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1814- Francis Scott Key writes "The Star-Spangled Banner" to the tune of John Stafford Smith's "To Anacreon in Heaven"
- Benjamin Carr: "The History of England," Opus 11
| 1814
- The British set fire to the Capitol and the White House; they unsuccessfully try to take Fort McHenry on the Baltimore harbor
- Treaty of Ghent ends the War of 1812
- Napoleon abdicates with the British invasion of France and is sent to the Island of Elba
- Congress authorizes the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's library, to replace the books in the Library of Congress burned by the British
- C. F. Peters opens in Leipzig
- Beethoven: Fidelio Overture
- Rossini: Il Turco in Italia
- Schubert: "Gretchen am Spinnrade"
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| 1815 | 1815
- War of 1812 ends
- Battle of Waterloo; Napoleon re-exiled to St. Helena
- Handel and Haydn Society organized in Boston
- First issue of the scholarly journal North American Review
- Jane Austen: Emma
- Schubert: "Der Erlkönig"
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| 1816 | 1816
- First black church in America: African Methodist Church in Philadelphia
- James Monroe inaugurated
- First known bicycle invented in Germany
- Argentina declares independence from Spain
- Beethoven: An die ferne Geliebte
- Rossini: The Barber of Seville
- Charlotte Brontë born
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| 1817 | 1817
- Rossini: La Cenerentola
- Schubert: Death and the Maiden
- Frederick Douglass born
- Jane Austen dies
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1818- English writer Emily Brontë is born. Her poetry will be set to music by American composers Ernst Bacon and John Duke, and her novel Wuthering Heights will become the basis of Carlysle Floyd's musical drama by the same name.
| 1818
- Connecticut becomes first Eastern state to drop the property requirement for voting
- The Stars and Stripes is approved by Congress as the official flag and the Flag Act is passed
- American premiere of Handel's Messiah (Handel & Haydn Society of Boston)
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein
- Charles Gounod born
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1819- “The Hunter’s Horn” a “new sporting cavatina” by Englishman T. Phillipps, is registered in America, "the first song in the earliest volume of copyright songs in the Library of Congress"
- African-American soprano Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield is born. Born a slave in Mississippi, Greenfield was adopted by a Quaker family in Philadelphia and become known as the "Black Swan" by her fans.
- Joseph Philbrick Webster born
- Julia Ward Howe born
- Herman Melville born
- Walt Whitman born
| 1819
- First serious American financial panic
- Rossini’s The Barber of Seville is first heard in America, at the Park Theater in New York, in English
- Beethoven: Hammerklavier Sonata
- Schubert: Trout Quintet
- Walter Scott: Bride of Lammermoor
- George Eliot born
- Charles Kingsley born
- Jacques Offenbach born
- Clara Schumann born
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| 1820 | 1820
- Missouri Compromise
- Continent of Antarctica discovered
- America begins to feel the influence of European Romanticism
- Walter Scott: Ivanhoe
- Statue of Venus de Milo discovered
- Jenny Lind ("The Swedish Nightingale") born
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| 1821 | 1821
- Republic of Liberia founded as a haven for freed slaves
- As a state of Mexico, Texas is opened to settlement by Moses Austin
- First women's collegiate-level school in American
- First public high school opens in Boston
- Charles Baudelaire born
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky born
- Gustav Flaubert born
- John Keats dies
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1822- English poet Matthew Arnold is born. His text, "Dover Beach" of 1867, is set by composer Samuel Barber in 1936.
- Peter K. Moran publishes his most popular song, "The Carrier Pigeon."
| 1822
- Schubert: Unfinished Symphony
- Alexander Pushkin: Eugene Onegin
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| 1823 | 1823
- Monroe Doctrine
- Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Choral Symphony)
- Rossini: Semiramide
- Schubert: Die Schöne Müllerin
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| 1824 | 1824 |
1825- James Hewitt: "The Minstrel's Return from the War"
- The completion of the Erie Canal, in October, will lead to many songs, including "Low Bridge" and "The E-Ri-E Canal
| 1825
- John Quincy Adams inaugurated
- Thomas Cole's work launches the Hudson River School of landscape painting
- Beethoven: Grosse Fuge
- Alexander Pushkin: Boris Godounov
- Johann Strauss born
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| 1826 | 1826
- McCormick Reaper invented
- Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both die on July 4
- Berlin Philharmonic Society formed
- Gustav Moreau born
- Carl Maria von Weber dies
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1827- American minstrel performer George Washington Dixon popularizes his song "Long Tail Blue," the first song of the black dandy
- Ethel Lynn Beers born
- James Hewitt dies
| 1827
- Beethoven dies
- William Blake dies
- Schubert: Winterreise
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| 1828 | 1828
- Noah Webster publishes his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language
- John James Audubon's first volume of Birds in America
- Dante Rossetti born
- Leo Tolstoy born
- Jules Verne born
- Schubert dies
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1829- The hymn tune “New Britain” is published in the shape-note tunebook Columbian Harmony; the melody becomes paired with the text of “Amazing Grace”
- American minstrel performer George Washington Dixon popularizes his song "Coal Black Rose," the first blackface comic lovesong
- Louis Moreau Gottschalk born
- Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore born
| 1829
- Andrew Jackson inaugurated
- Louis Braille invents the Braille System for the blind
- W.C. Peters opens his music store in Louisville
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre
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| 1830 | 1830
- First railway in America
- July Revolution in Paris
- William Sidney Mount paints his first genre picture, The Country Dance
- Donizetti: Anna Bolena
- Adelbert von Chamisso: Frauenliebe und Leben
- Chopin leaves Poland, never to return
- Christina Rossetti born
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1831- America, by Samuel Francis Smith, is sung to the tune of "God Save the King"
- Benjamin Carr dies
| 1831
- William Lloyd Garrison founds the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator
- Nat Turner leads slaves in a rebellion and is executed
- Trail of Tears
- Bellini: Norma
- Victor Hugo: Notre Dame de Paris
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| 1832 | 1832
- Black Hawk War with Indians in Wisconsin
- Berlioz: Les Nuits d'Été
- Donizetti: L'Elisir d'Amore
- Sir Edwin Arnold born
- Lewis Carroll born
- Goethe dies
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1833- Nikolas Lenau travels to American Midwest
- Charles Edward Horn arrives from England; compositions will include “Ode to Washington”
- English poet and lyricist Thomas H. Bayley composes "Long, long ago," which is published in Philadelphia in 1844 and becomes one of the most popular songs in 19th-century America
- Emily Huntington Miller born
| 1833
- American Anti-Slavery Society is founded
- Johannes Brahms born
- Oberlin college is the first to admit women alongside men, and the first to admit Blacks
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1834- Minstrel singer George Washington Dixon's tune "Zip Coon" becomes popular, and in 1861, Dan Bryant writes lyrics of "Turkey in the Straw" to that tune
| 1834
- Phillis Wheatley: Memoir and Poems of Phyllis Wheatley
- Alexander Pushkin: The Queen of Spades
- The Stuttgart Congress of Physicists decide on 440 vps as the tone "A" in treble clef
- Edgard Degas born
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies
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| 1835 | 1835
- Andrew Carnegie born
- William Walker's shape-note songbook Southern Harmony is published
- Bellini: I Puritani
- Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor
- Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
- Camille Saint-Saëns born
- Vincenzo Bellini dies
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| 1836 | 1836
- Battle of the Alamo
- Texas achieves independence from Mexico
- Emerson publishes his first essay, Nature, an early landmark of American Transcendentalism
- McGuffey publishes his First and Second Readers
- Georg Büchner: Woyzeck (play)
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| 1837 | 1837
- Martin Van Buren inaugurated
- Queen Victoria crowned
- First daguerreotype
- Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist
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| 1838 | 1838
- Underground Railroad is organized
- Samuel Morse develops his famous Code
- Hector Berlioz: Benvenuto, Cellini
- Georges Bizet born
- Lorenzo da Ponte dies in New York City
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| 1839 | 1839
- Mutiny on the slave-ship the Amistad
- The rules for baseball are established, in Cooperstown NY
- Paul Cézanne born
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| 1840 | 1840
- First national convention of American music teachers
- Donizetti: La Fille du Régiment
- Robert Schumann: Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und -Leben
- Thomas Hardy born
- Claude Monet born
- Auguste Rodin born
- Tchaikovsky born
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1841- Richard Storrs Willis is the first American to study music in Germany; in the next decades this will become a frequent path for American composers. Willis will return to the United States in 1847 and become an important music critic
| 1841
- William Henry Harrison catches cold at his inauguration and dies a month later; John Tyler succeeds him
- John Quincy Adams argues for the Amistad mutineers and they are freed
- Antonin Dvořák born
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir born
- Emerson publishes his first series of Essays
- Wagner: The Flying Dutchman
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| 1842 | 1842
- Massachusetts limits the number of hours that a child may work to 10 hours a day
- Universal male suffrage in Rhode Island after Dorr's Rebellion
- New York Philharmonic Society founded--first symphony orchestra in America
- P.T. Barnum opens his "museum"
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poems on Slavery
- Edgar Allen Poe: The Masque of the Red Death
- Verdi: Nabucco
- William James born
- Stéphane Mallarmé born
- Jules Massenet born
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| 1843 | 1843
- Dorothea Dix begins campaign against poor asylum and prison conditions in the United States
- Donizetti: Don Pasquale
- Dickens: A Christmas Carol
- John Greenleaf Whittier: Lays of My Home and Other Poems
- Henry James born
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| 1844 | 1844
- Samuel Morse sends his telegraph message, "What hath God wrought?"
- Shape-note songbook Sacred Heart is published; its title refers to the human voice
- Matthew Brady opens his portrait studio in New York
- Verdi: Ernani
- Alexander Dumas, pére: Three Musketeers
- Mary Cassatt born
- Friedrich Nietzsche born
- Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov born
- Henri Rousseau born
- Paul Verlaine born
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| 1845 | 1845
- James Polk inaugurated
- Texas votes to join U.S. and becomes 28th state
- Great Famine, which lasts through 1852, spurs immigration from Ireland
- First use of the term "Manifest Destiny"
- Richard Wagner: Tannhäuser
- Thoreau goes to live at Walden
- Beginning of the American Renaissance in literature, including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Fuller
- Frederick Douglass: Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
- Alexander Dumas, pére: The Count of Monte Cristo
- Prosper Mérimée: Carmen
- Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven and Other Poems
- Sarah Bernhardt born
- Gabriel Fauré born
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1846- The Negro Singer's Own Book published
- Stephen Foster moves to Cincinnati to work as a bookkeeper for his brother's business
- Dan Emmett: "De Blue Tail Fly (Jimmy Crack Corn)"
- Stephen Foster: "There's a Good Time Coming"
- Frederick W. Root, organist and composer, born
- Sarah Wentworth Morton dies
| 1846
- Mexican War begins; U.S. will acquire substantial Western land
- Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust
- Mendelssohn: Elijah
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| 1847 | 1847
- Elias Howe invents the sewing machine
- Mormons arrive in the Salt Lake Valley
- The abolitionist newspaper North Star begins publication
- Liberia, founded by freed American slaves, becomes the first republic in Africa
- Irish immigration to the United States begins
- Wulf Fries, German cellist, moves to Boston
- Verdi: Macbeth
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Evangeline
- Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
- Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Princess
- Newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer born
- Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn die
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| 1848 | 1848
- Mexican War ends
- First Women's Rights Convention, in Seneca Falls NY
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto
- First American department store opens in New York City
- Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood formed in London
- Gaetano Donizetti dies
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| 1849 | 1849
- Zachary Taylor inaugurated
- California Gold Rush
- Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery
- Elizabeth Blackwell is the first woman in America to receive a medical degree
- Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience
- Otto Nicolai: The Merry Wives of Windsor
- Verdi: Luisa Miller
- Frédéric Chopin dies
- Otto Nicolai dies
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| 1850 | 1850
- Compromise of 1850
- Emerson publishes Representative Men
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese
- Hawthorne publishes The Scarlet Letter
- Neo-Gothic architecture in vogue
- The first opera (Bellini's La Sonnambula) and symphony concert in Chicago, both lead by Julius Dyhrenfurth
- Richard Wagner: Lohengrin
- Robert Louis Stevenson born
- Margaret Fuller dies
- William Wordsworth dies
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1851- Stephen Foster sets Charles G. Eastman's "Sweetly She Sleeps" as well as “Old Folks at Home”. Also known as “Way Down Upon the Swanee River,” the latter becomes hugely popular and eventually the state song of Florida. Foster's song "Ring de Banjo" is also published.
| 1851
- Herman Melville: Moby Dick
- First American YMCA opens in Boston
- Verdi: Rigoletto
- Writer Kate O'Flaherty Chopin born
- John James Audubon dies
- James Fenimore Cooper dies
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dies
- Painter Joseph Turner dies
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1852- Lucien H. Southard sets “The Little Sleeper” by J. Clement
- John Sullivan Dwight begins publishing Dwight’s Journal of Music, in Boston
- Frederic Brandeis, a native of Austria, publishes “Was It A Crime to Love Thee” at the age of 17
- The earliest printing of the song "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," which emerged from American minstrelsy
- Stephen Foster: "Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground"
- Isaac Woodbury: "Uncle Tom's Lament for Eva"
- Calamity Jane born
- Thomas Moore dies
| 1852
- Abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Uncle Sam first appears in a comic publication
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| 1853 | 1853
- Franklin Pierce is inaugurated
- E. G. Otis introduces the safety elevator
- "Uncle Sam" appears for the first time in political cartoons
- Anthony Philip Heinrich: The Wildwood Troubadour (autobiographical symphony)
- Steinway & Sons is founded in New York City by German immigrant Henry Engelhard Steinway
- Verdi: La Traviata and Il Trovatore
- Charles Dickens: Bleak House
- Vincent Van Gogh born
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| 1854 | 1854
- Republican Party is born in Wisconsin
- The Ashmun Institute (first black university) is founded
- George F. Root: The Pilgrim Fathers (cantata)
- Henry David Thoreau: Walden
- Charles Dickens: Hard Times
- Boston Public Library and New York's Astor Library open
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| 1855 | 1855
- World Exposition in Paris
- Registered mail is introduced
- Robert Browning: Men and Women
- Frederick Douglass: My Bondage and My Freedom
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Hiawatha
- Ernst Chausson born
- Charlotte Brontë dies
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1856- Walt Whitman publishes a much longer second edition of Leaves of Grass
- Benjamin R. Hanby: "Darling Nellie Grey"--a minstrel song sensitive to the plight of slaves
- Stephen Foster: "Gentle Annie"
- Hart P. Danks: "Anna Lee"
- German composer Julius Eichberg moves to America
- James Berry Bensel born
- May Probyn born
| 1856
- Kansas is coined "Bloody Kansas" after the Pottawatomie Massacre
- Richard Wagner: Die Walküre
- Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
- Sigmund Freud born
- Arthur Rimbaud born
- Heinrich Heine dies
- Robert Schumann dies
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| 1857 | 1857
- James Buchanan is inaugurated
- Transatlantic cable laid
- Dred Scott decision handed down by Supreme Court
- Garibaldi forms the Italian National Association in an attempt at unifying the Italian states
- Opening of Philadelphia's Academy of Music--the oldest grand opera house in the United States still used for its original purpose
- First official Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans
- George F. Root: The Haymakers (cantata)
- Verdi: Simon Boccanegra
- Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal
- Joseph Conrad born
- Edward Elgar born
- Max Klinger born
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1858- Stephen Foster: "Linger in Blissful Repose"
- Daniel Emmett becomes the composer for Bryant's Minstrels
- "The Yellow Rose of Texas (Song of the Texas Rangers)" is published in New York under the name "J.K." The song was probably written in 1836 during the Battle of San Jacinto
- Paul Dresser, composer of the state song if Indiana, "On the Banks of the Wabash," is born
| 1858
- Lincoln-Douglas debates
- India is made a British Crown Colony after the Sepoy Rebellion ends
- William H. Fry’s Italianate opera Leonora is given in New York
- Thomas Carlyle begins Frederick the Great
- Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens
- Jacques Offenbach: Orpheus and the Underworld
- Giacomo Puccini born
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| 1859 | 1859
- Abolitionist John Brown stages raid on Harper's Ferry to free slaves; he is hanged
- Adelina Patti's operatic debut
- Charles Gounod: Faust
- Verdi: Un Ballo in Maschera
- Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde
- Tennyson: Idylls of the King
- Charles Darwin: The Origin of the Species
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