1859
Centuries: 18th century - 19th century - 20th century
Decades: 1800s 1810s 1820s 1830s 1840s - 1850s - 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s
Years: 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 - 1859 - 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864
Events
- January 2 - Erastus Beadle publishes The Dime Book of Practical Etiquette.
- February 14 - Oregon becomes the 33th state of the United States
- April 25 - Ground is broken for the Suez Canal
- June 24 - Battle of Solferino (Battle of the Three Sovereigns) Sardinia and Napoleon III of France defeat Franz Josef I of Austria-Hungary in northern Italy
- July 11 - A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is published
- August 27 - Edwin Drake drills the first oil well in the United States, near Titusville, Pennsylvania
- September 17 - Joshua A. Norton proclaims himself "Emperor of These United States"
- November 19 - Opera "Genevieve de Brabant", composed by Jacques Offenbach, debuts at the Theatre de Bouffes Parisians in Paris.
- Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species
- Karl_XV succeeds Oskar I as Swedish King
- Codex Sinaiticus found by Constantin von Tischendorf on his third visit to the monastery of Santa Katerina, on Mount Sinai
- Bernhard Riemann formulates the Riemann hypothesis, one of most important open problems of contemporary mathematics
- Solar flares first observed on the Sun by English astronomer Richard Carrington.
- Brisbane declared the capital of Queensland, Australia
Arts, Sciences, Literature and Philosophy
Births
- January 11 - George Nathaniel Curzon (Lord Curzon), British statesman
- January 13 - Karl Bleibtreu, critic (+ 1928)
- January 27 - Wilhelm II of Germany, last German Emperor and Prussian king (+ 1941)
- February 1 - Victor Herbert, composer
- February 3 - Hugo Junkers, industrialist and aircraft designer (+ 1935)
- February 18 - Sholom Aleichem, writer (+ 1916)
- March 2 - Sholom Aleichem, novelist (+ 1916)
- March 8 - Kenneth Grahame, author (+ 1932)
- March 26 - Alfred Edward Housman, English poet
- May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, British writer of the Sherlock Holmes novels
- October 9 - Alfred Dreyfus, French military officer
- October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature
- December 15 - L. L. Zamenhof, Ruso-Polish initiator of Esperanto
- Francesc Macià, President of Catalan Generalitat
Deaths
- September 15 - Isambard Kingdom Brunel, British engineer.
- November 28 - Washington Irving, American author.
- December 2 - John Brown, American abolitionist