1859

1859 in various calendars
Gregorian calendar	1859; MDCCCLIX
Ab urbe condita	2612
Armenian calendar	1308; ԹՎ ՌՅԸ
Assyrian calendar	6609
Baháʼí calendar	15–16
Balinese saka calendar	1780–1781
Bengali calendar	1266
Berber calendar	2809
British Regnal year	22 Vict. 1 – 23 Vict. 1
Buddhist calendar	2403
Burmese calendar	1221
Byzantine calendar	7367–7368
Chinese calendar	戊午年 (Earth Horse); 4556 or 4349; — to —; 己未年 (Earth Goat); 4557 or 4350
Coptic calendar	1575–1576
Discordian calendar	3025
Ethiopian calendar	1851–1852
Hebrew calendar	5619–5620
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	1915–1916
- Shaka Samvat	1780–1781
- Kali Yuga	4959–4960
Holocene calendar	11859
Igbo calendar	859–860
Iranian calendar	1237–1238
Islamic calendar	1275–1276
Japanese calendar	Ansei 6; (安政６年)
Javanese calendar	1787–1788
Julian calendar	Gregorian minus 12 days
Korean calendar	4192
Minguo calendar	53 before ROC; 民前53年
Nanakshahi calendar	391
Thai solar calendar	2401–2402
Tibetan calendar	阳土马年; (male Earth-Horse); 1985 or 1604 or 832; — to —; 阴土羊年; (female Earth-Goat); 1986 or 1605 or 833

1859 is a common year starting on Saturday.

Years:
1856 1857 1858 - 1859 - 1860 1861 1862

Decades:
1820s 1830s 1840s - 1850s - 1860s 1870s 1880s

Centuries:
18th century - 19th century - 20th century

Events

January 2 - Erastus Beadle publishes The Dime Book of Practical Etiquette.
January 24 - Wallachia and Moldavia are united under Alexander John Cuza under the name Romania (see December 1 1918 for the final unification, Transylvania and other regions were still missing at this time).

February 14 - Oregon is admitted as the 33rd U.S. state.
February 16 - George Washington Gale Ferris Jr born February 16, 1859 Galesburg, Knox, IL

March 26 - French amateur astronomer claims to have noticed a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury - later named Vulcan

April 25 - Ground is broken for the Suez Canal
April 26 - Austro-Sardinian War - Giuseppe Garibaldi's Hunters of the Alps confront Austrian forces led by Field Marshal-Lieutenant Carl Baron Urban at Varese.

July 6 - Queen Victoria signs Letters Patent making Queensland into a separate colony.
July 11 - Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, faced with expensive war against Kingdom of Sardinia and revolution in Hungary, meets Napoleon III at Villafranca. Since the death of Metternich in 1859, he negotiates "personally". Hostilities ceases, partly due to Napoleon's fear of the Nationalism in Italy.

October 12 - Self-described "Emperor of the United States" Joshua A. Norton 'orders' the U.S. Congress to dissolve.
October 16 - John Brown raids Harper's Ferry in Virginia, the signal for a general slave rebellion.
October 18 - Federal Troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee overpower Brown at the Federal arsenal.

November 1 - The current Cape Lookout, North Carolina, lighthouse was lighted for the first time. Its first-order Fresnel lens can be seen for nineteen miles.
November 19 - Opera "Genevieve de Brabant", composed by Jacques Offenbach, debuts at the Theatre de Bouffes Parisians in Paris.
November 24 - British naturalist Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species, a book which argues that organisms gradually evolve through natural selection (it immediately sold out its initial print run).

The French Navy's La Gloire ("Glory"), the first ocean-going ironclad warship in history, was laid down and commisioned.
Island of Timor is divided between Portugal and the Netherlands
Trinity College in Cambridge UK bans Origin of Species
Paraguay mediates a truce between Buenos Aires government and the Argentinean Confederation
Farmer introduces 24 rabbits to Australia - they multiply in huge numbers
Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies is succeeded by his 13-year-old son Francesco I of the Two Sicilies
Charles Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope
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 newly-made-separate colony Queensland, Australia
University of Michigan Law School founded

January 11 - Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, British statesman and Viceroy of India (d. 1925)
January 13 - Karl Bleibtreu, critic (d. 1928)
January 27 - Wilhelm II of Germany, last Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia (d. 1941)
February 1 - Victor Herbert, Irish-born composer (d. 1924)
February 3 - Hugo Junkers, German industrialist and aircraft designer (d. 1935)
February 6 - Elias Disney, American farmer and father of Walt Disney (d. 1941)
February 14 - Henry Valentine Knaggs, English physician and author (d. 1954)
February 19 - Svante Arrhenius, Swedish chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1927)
February 28 - Florian Cajori, Swiss historian of mathematics (d. 1930)
March 2 - Sholom Aleichem, Ukrainian Yiddish novelist (d. 1916)
March 8 - Kenneth Grahame, English author (d. 1932)
March 26 - Alfred Edward Housman, English poet (d. 1936)
April 8 - Edmund Husserl, Austrian philosopher (d. 1938)
May 15 - Pierre Curie, French physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1906)
May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Scottish writer (d. 1930)

July 6 - Verner von Heidenstam, Swedish writer (d. 1940)
July 22 - Emma Lazarus, American poet (d. 1887)
August 4 - Knut Hamsun, Norwegian author, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature (d. 1952)
October 9 - Alfred Dreyfus, French military officer (d. 1935)
October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature (d. 1941)
October 21 - Francesc Macià, President of the Catalan Generalitat (d. 1933)
November 19 - Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, Russian composer (d. 1935)
December 15 - L. L. Zamenhof, Russo-Polish initiator of Esperanto (d. 1917)