1839 Events

1839 Douglass Subscribes to The Liberator
Douglass continued traveling up to Massachusetts. There he joined various organizations in New Bedford, including a black church, and regularly attended abolitionist meetings. He subscrib...
1839 Elizabeth Blackwell takes up career in teaching
After the death of her father, Blackwell took up a career in teaching in Kentucky. She did this to make money to pay for medical school. Blackwell found this work unpleasant. Desiring to ...
1839 "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" Edgar Allan Poe's first volume of short stories is published
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque is a collection of previously-published short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. It was published by the Philadelphia firm Lea & Blanchard and released in...
1839 Jan 24 Charles Darwin was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London
Darwin considered Malthus's argument that human population increases more quickly than food production, leaving people competing for food and making charity useless. He later formulated t...
1839 Jan 29 Charles Darwin Married Emma Wedgwood
Charles Darwin married Emma Wedgwood at St. Peter's Church at Maer. The newlyweds returned to London rather hastily, making the guests quite upset. One possible explanation for leaving ea...
1839 May Joseph Smith Jr. Settles In Nauvoo, Illinois
In 1839 Joseph Smith and his followers, the Mormons, settled in this area after they were forced out of Missouri by religious persecution. The Mormons were granted a very liberal charter ...
1839 Jul Edgar Allan Poe Becomes Assistant Editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine
July 1839 Magazine Editor Poe is hired as an editor at Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, a job he holds until June 1840.
1839 Jul 23 The Battle of Ghuznee
The Battle of Ghuznee took place in city of Ghazni in central Afghanistan on July 23, 1839 during the First Anglo-Afghan War. By the 1830s the British Indian Empire stretched to the bo...
1839 Nov 25 The Indian Cyclone of 1839
On November 25, 1839 a huge cyclone hit Coringa, India with a 40ft storm surge and killed 300,000 people. The entire city was destroyed by this wave and the city was then never rebuilt. O...