This Year in History:
1850
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of adultery and betrayal in colonial America, The Scarlet Letter, is published. Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. Although the infamous Salem witch trials had taken place more than 100 years earlier, the events still hung over the town and made a lasting impression on the young Hawthorne. Witchcraft figured […]
On July 9, 1850, after only 16 months in office, President Zachary Taylor dies after a brief illness. The exact cause of his death is still disputed by some historians. On a scorching Fourth of July in Washington, D.C., Taylor attended festivities at the newly dedicated grounds upon which the Washington Monument would be erected. […]
On July 10, 1850, Vice President Millard Fillmore is sworn in as the 13th president of the United States. President Zachary Taylor had died the day before, five days after falling ill with a severe intestinal ailment on the Fourth of July. Fillmore was only the second man to inherit the presidency after a president’s […]
The iconic American huckster, showman and circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum is most often associated not with refined high culture but of somewhat coarser forms of entertainment—the circus, yes, but also Siamese twins and various human “oddities” such as “Zip the Pinhead.” It was none other than P.T. Barnum, however, who brought the greatest opera performer […]
Though it had only been a part of the United States for less than two years, California becomes the 31st state in the union (without ever even having been a territory) on September 9, 1850. Mexico had reluctantly ceded California and much of its northern territory to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of […]
Suffragist organizers hold the first-ever National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts on October 23, 1850. More than 1,000 delegates from 11 states arrived for the two-day conference, which had been planned by members of the Anti-Slavery Society. The convention followed the steps laid out at the landmark Seneca Falls Convention two years before: “In entering […]
