1850
Taiping Rebellion Begins
In a Guangxi village, a failed civil-service candidate named Hong Xiuquan, who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ, launched a rising against the Qing. Within five years his Heavenly Kingdom would hold Nanjing and threaten Beijing. Over fifteen years, the war would kill twenty to thirty million - bloodier than any nineteenth-century conflict.
Fugitive Slave Act
Part of Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850, the act required federal marshals and ordinary citizens, North and South, to assist in catching runaway enslaved people - on pain of fine or imprisonment. Northerners who had quietly ignored slavery found themselves conscripted into it. The compromise bought four years of fragile peace.
Great Exhibition Planned
Prince Albert and Henry Cole were busy planning a monster trade show to fill a vast glass-and-iron palace in Hyde Park. Joseph Paxton, a gardener who had built greenhouses, sketched the shed on a piece of blotting paper. It would open the next spring and draw six million visitors - a third of Britain's population.
California Admitted
California, its population exploded by gold and far beyond the numbers required for statehood, joined the Union as a free state under the Compromise of 1850. The Pacific had a star on the American flag. The South had been outnumbered again in the Senate, and the balance the Missouri Compromise had maintained since 1820 was beginning its final unraveling.
Bloomer Dress Introduced
Amelia Bloomer, an American temperance editor, promoted a costume of a knee-length tunic worn over Turkish-style trousers - a rebellion against corsets and hoopskirts. The press mocked it. Feminists wore it for a few years and then mostly retreated. But the idea that women might dress for motion rather than display had made a first small appearance.