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Mathematician Georg Bernhard Riemann suffers another nervous breakdown.

Trinity Church is completed in New York City, and with its 86-meter spire, it becomes the tallest building in Manhattan. It will remain so until the construction of the first skyscraper: the Manhattan Life Insurance Building on Broadway in 1898.

Crimea. Upon hearing the news of the end of the war from the Congress of Paris, strange events unfold: British officers organize horse races to which officers from all belligerent countries, including the enemy, are invited. The races are attended by 3,000 mounted spectators and

The Democratic Party still manages to win the US presidency with Buchanan, but the Republicans win 11 of the 15 Northern states and almost all of the highly populous states of New York and Ohio, while Democrats narrowly win Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. The Democratic

Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, visiting Venice and Milan, found the atmosphere very cold.

Karl Friedrich Gauss dies in Göttingen

Crimea. Battle of the Tchernaya River. The French and Piedmontese engage the Russians. The Allies prevail. The Piedmontese suffer 14 dead and 156 wounded, including General Montevecchio; the French suffer 181 dead and 1,224 wounded; while the Russians suffer so many casualties that they take

Crimea. Two thousand Piedmontese soldiers are stationed in three military hospitals due to the rampant cholera epidemic. Sanitary conditions and medical support are poor and at times ridiculous: Genova di Revel writes of seeing nurses passing among the wounded lying on the bare ground, with

Crimea. Intense bombardment of Sevastopol.

Crimea. The Piedmontese military chaplain dies of cholera. It marks the beginning of a terrible epidemic that, within a few weeks, will reach 73 deaths a day on June 7th.

Piedmontese soldiers, officers first, began landing in Crimea. But the landing was only completed on May 20th.

The Piedmontese parliament approved participation in the Crimean War. The mission was commanded by Alfonso La Marmora. Within a few weeks, 18,000 men were ready under the command of Giovanni Durando and Ardingo Trotti, and the brigades under the command of Manfredo Fanti, Enrico Cialdini,

Rudolf Virchow states that all cells arise from other cells

Alfred Wallace publishes On the Law Which Regulated the Introduction of New Species, in which he enunciates the Sarawak Law (named after the province where Wallace is the guest of the white raja James Brooke, who later inspired Emilio Salgari to create the character of

Russia. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy leaves the Caucasus and reaches Sevastopol in Crimea as a soldier in the Crimean Army. He takes part in the defense of the city’s fourth bastion.

The Charge of the 600. In an episode alternately described as one of the most heroic and most senselessly criminal in British military history, Lord James Cardigan leads a cavalry charge against heavily defended Russian artillery during the Crimean War. The British were victorious at

George Boole develops symbolic logic; he will be derided by his colleagues for the uselessness of the argument and will die of starvation in anonymity.

Street lighting and gas distribution are being installed in Rio de Janeiro; there is already a passenger transport line to Paris and London.

Hermann von Helmholtz enunciates the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the Universe will experience a heat death, that is, a state of uniform heat everywhere.

Canadian Abraham Gesner distills kerosene from petroleum

Georg Bernhard Riemann, in his historic speech at the University of Göttingen, demonstrates that forces can be seen as a consequence of geometry. The laws of physics appear simpler when expressed in higher-dimensional spaces. He concludes that electricity, magnetism, and gravity are caused by the

Bernhard Riemann presents his dissertation. And he makes history in mathematics and physics. In the lecture hall of the University of Göttingen, Bernhard Riemann presents his dissertation: “Uber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zugrunde liegen” (On the Hypotheses on Which Geometry Is Based), completely reformulating

Riemann: concept of integral

Mathematician Georg Bernhard Riemann, an extremely shy man with severe financial problems, suffers a severe nervous breakdown. As often happens, this is also his year of wonders in mathematics, laying the foundations of integral calculus and non-Euclidean geometry in dimensions higher than three.

Puritan John Brown (the one to whom the song “John Brown” was rededicated), a staunch anti-slavery man, settled with his family in Kansas near the Ossawatomie River. When he heard news of the burning of the town of Lawrence by Southerners, and then of Southern

The Kansas-Nebraska Act becomes law: Kansas is divided into two territories, Kansas to the south and Nebraska to the north. The latter is soon invaded by Northern freesoilers, who will soon also reach southern Kansas, which the Act intended to reserve for Southern settlers and

In the Crimean War the English and French made use of the rifled gun for the first time, with a range (900m versus 180m) and much greater accuracy than the smoothbore musket used by the Russians, defenders of the fortress of Sevastopol.

The Crimean War can be seen as one of the few “hot” episodes in the very long “cold” war between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia, with the Mediterranean and India in mind. Some compare the Crimean War to the Korean War of

France and England ally against Russia, which has just attacked Turkey. It is the Crimean War. France also invites Austria to join the coalition. The Franco-Austrian entente, fortunately for Cavour’s plan, fails. Cavour will seize the opportunity to join the Franco-British alliance to sit at

Kazakhstan, Tsarist Russia. The Cossacks founded the city of Vernyj, next to a pre-existing fort, which later became Alma Ata (which in Kazakh, strangely enough, means “Grandfather of Apples”) under the Soviets in 1921.

Tokyo Bay, Japan. Commodore Perry’s American fleet returns as promised, with nine warships. The shoguns respond with the first treaty with a Western country. It is a momentous compromise for Japanese culture, until then completely closed to foreign influence. Japan opens two ports to American

London. A second cholera epidemic erupts in the city, 22 years after the first. It kills over 500 people in the SoHo neighborhood in just two weeks. Then, doctor John Snow maps all known cholera cases and discovers they are clustered around the Broad Street

England. Work on the Difference Engine, Charles Babbage’s first mechanical calculator, is suspended, never to be resumed. (It will be completed over a century later at the Science Museum in London.)

John Ericsson designs the first battleship with revolving turrets in New York

California mines three times more gold than the rest of the world combined.

Crimean War between Türkiye and Russia.

Thomas Alva Edison’s public education didn’t extend beyond the beginning of second grade: “I could never get by in school; I was always at the bottom of my class. My father thought I was stupid.”

With Matthew Perry’s expedition, the Americans broke Japan’s centuries-old commercial and cultural isolation. With this contact with Western culture, the Japanese drew the opposite conclusions from the Chinese, who instead withdrew into Western culture. Japan would become the first non-Western society to experience the transformation

Japan. When Commodore Perry arrives in Japan, Tokyo has already been the largest city in the world for over a century and a half.

Tokyo Bay, Japan. A fleet of American ships led by Commodore Perry sails into the bay. They demand open trade with the West and rights for captured American sailors. It is the beginning of a revolution for Japan, which will lead to the Meiji Era.

William Wallace, the third son of Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary, is born.

Mazzini founds the Action Party.

Milan. Mazzini promotes a popular uprising that, however, meets with total failure, fueled also by the distrust between Mazzini’s bourgeoisie and Mazzini’s common people.

Alfred Wallace, returning from Brazil, but without any insect specimens because the ship was wrecked, publishes his recollections in A Travel Narrative on the Amazons and Rio Negro

John Davis discovers gold in the Transvaal of South Africa

Hawaii. The indigenous population had shrunk from 500,000 at Cook’s arrival in 1779 to just 84,000, due to epidemics of typhus, gonorrhea, syphilis, tuberculosis, and influenza. In 1853, smallpox arrived, killing another 10,000 of the survivors.

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born in Groot Zundert, Holland, the son of a Protestant pastor.

Invention of Blue Jeans

Piedmont. From November 1852 until his death in 1861, Cavour remained almost uninterruptedly at the helm of the government, transforming Piedmont from a backward and absolutist state into a modern and advanced state, radically different from other Italian states, under the banner of consolidated bourgeois

By 1852, 21 small planets had been discovered in the Asteroid Belt, and this number would rise to 300 in the 1890s.

Russian mathematician Paphnutij Chebyshev proved Bertrand’s Postulate, which had been proposed by Frenchman Joseph Bertrand just seven years earlier: if you take a prime number, say 1009, and keep counting until you reach double the prime number, you are guaranteed to encounter at least one

Ada Lovelace, considered the world’s first computer programmer, dies of cancer at just 36. The ADA programming language will be dedicated to her.

La Spezia. The first American base in Europe is built. It provides logistical support for the American Marines fighting pirates under the protection of the Ottoman Empire. At Camposanto deiGenchi (distortion ofYankee) there is also an American war cemetery (also the first in Europe).

France. Reigns Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, known as Napoleon the Little.

Charles Darwin publishes Barnacles in 4 volumes

Giuseppe Garibaldi lives in New York in Antonio Meucci’s house on Staten Island.

Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace Park in Sydenham, south-east London.

Bukhara, Central Asia. Giovanni Orlandi of Parma is captured and sold as a slave to the emir. He manages to gain his favor by making him a large clock and a telescope. One day, the telescope falls and breaks. The emir summons the Italian to

Muslim Western China. Nian Rebellion. It will continue bloodily for nearly two decades.

In France, a coup d’état by Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III) is launched. The ghost of communism fades throughout Europe, and the power of the bourgeoisie is consolidated everywhere.

Russia. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy leaves for the Caucasus, where he joins his older brother Nikolai, an officer in a small garrison. He will remain there until 1854.

England. Second attempt to lay an insulated copper cable between Dover and Calais. This time the cable is composed of four independent insulated wires, protected by layers of hemp and tar, and reinforced with wire. It proves to be more resistant than the previous one.

London. Sir Joseph William Bazalgette draws up a comprehensive plan for new sewers and diversion channels to prevent sewage from being discharged into the River Thames in central London, which has always caused all sorts of problems, including cholera. The work will be completed in

Duchy of Modena and Reggio. Duke Francis V signed a railway agreement in Rome to run the railway between Modena and Reggio Emilia. He had it run close to his home: between the Ducal Palace and the Villa Ducale Pentetorri, with the train station right

Scotsman James Harrison, who emigrated to Australia in 1837, built a refrigerator based on the vapor compression of ether for an Australian brewery. Harrison and American Alexander Twining, who had simultaneously done much the same thing but with vapor compression, are considered the inventors of

England. William Lassell discovers Uranus’s satellites Ariel and Umbriel (the third and fourth).

Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia. Professor Thomas Jonathan Jackson (who later became the legendary Stonewall Jackson in the American Civil War) teaches “Natural and Experimental Philosophy.” It’s a physics course, one of the most difficult at the institute, and he’s greatly feared by the students.

Prussia, although militarily and politically strong, fails in its attempt to lead a Confederation of German States by riding the wave of widespread unification sentiment, which Austria opposes (Humiliation of Olmutz).

Birth of Charles Doolittle Walcott, America’s most powerful scientific administrator, and discoverer of the Burgess Shale Bestiary

Henry Clay, a Kentuckian and longtime leader of the conservative Whigs, proposed to the Senate a compromise between Northerners and Southerners on the issue of slavery in the new states that had joined the Union. The proposal was met with coldness by both sides.

The population of the United States of America is 23,261,000.

In the United States, 10.67% of the population is illiterate (5.80% of people over 20). In Italy, 78% of the population is illiterate.

In Chicago, where the McCormick reaper has been mass-produced (5,000 a year) for three years, the combined reaper (Combined or Combine Harvester) is also invented.

After Stephenson’s Rocket in 1829 (the first steam locomotive), Western Europe was already a dense railway hub with over 40,000 km of railways. In contrast, Asia, Africa, and South America as a whole still had only 4,000 km of railways combined. The first railway in

From exile in Gaeta (due to the riots that broke out in Rome) Pope Pius IX celebrates the Jubilee

Venice. Cholera, fueled by the lack of drinking water and sanitation, causes 2,788 deaths. The city, besieged by the Austrians for two months, is exhausted. The epidemic and hunger deal the final blow to the populace, who rise up in revolt. Manin signs the surrender

Comacchio. 5:00 PM. Garibaldi and his patriots arrive at the Podere Zanetto, owned by the Patrignani family, where Teresa De Carli, wife of Antonio Patrignani (Colonel of the National Guard and Gonfaloniere of Comacchio), is tending to the very precarious condition of poor Anita, who

Comacchio. 11:00 a.m. Garibaldi and his patriots set out, dragging the pregnant and very tired Anita with them. Joined by Filippo Patrignani, they reach the Podere Cavallina farmhouse, where the mother is assisted.

San Marino. The Austrians offer Giuseppe Garibaldi surrender, but Garibaldi, probably rightly, is wary. He leaves San Marino and follows the Rubicon River to Cesenatico, where, arriving at 8:30 PM, he disarms a small Austrian garrison.

The Austrians shot all Garibaldi’s men they managed to capture. D’Aspre’s men, starting with Gorzkowski, spared no effort even in this final phase, shooting all the fugitives, as they had already done, for example, to Captain Basilio Bellotti from Romagna and five others on July