This Year in History:
1852
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
Russ Mitchell recaps the historical events that occurred on March 18th in this video clip from This Day in History. Henry Wells and William Fargo founded their company, Wells Fargo Shipping and Banking Company, making it the first nationwide express. It was founded during the Gold Rush to transport people and goods across the nation. […]
On March 18, 1852, in New York City, Henry Wells and William G. Fargo join with several other investors to launch their namesake business, today one of the world’s largest banks. The discovery of gold in California in 1849 prompted a huge spike in the demand for cross-country shipping. Wells and Fargo decided to take […]
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is published. The novel sold 300,000 copies within three months and was so widely read that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” Stowe was born in 1811, the seventh child of […]
On May 1, 1852, the adventurer and performer Calamity Jane is born near Princeton, Missouri. The myths and fabrications concerning the life of Calamity Jane are so numerous it is difficult to discover her true story. Legend has it that at various times Jane worked as a dishwasher at Fort Bridger, a laborer on the […]
During an Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivers what would become his most celebrated speech, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Tensions over slavery in the early 1850s are high, and the famed abolitionist’s oration serves as a searing reminder that at the time, only […]
The Saturday Evening Gazette publishes “The Rival Painters: A Story of Rome,” by Louisa May Alcott, who will later write the beloved children’s book Little Women (1868). Alcott, the second of four daughters, was born in Pennsylvania but spent most of her life in Concord, Massachusetts. Her father, Bronson, was close friends with Transcendentalist thinkers […]
