1849 Events

1849 Elizabeth Blackwell is banned from most hospitals and moves to Paris
Banned from practice in most hospitals she was advised to go to Paris, France and train at La Maternité, but while she was there her training was cut short when she caught a serious eye i...
1849
to 1905
Muhammad Abduh is born
The Egyptian reformer and Muslim apologist Muhammad 'Abduh was a pupil and friend of al-Afghani. Although deeply influenced by him, 'Abduh was less inclined to political activism and conc...
1849 Jan 11 Elizabeth Blackwell becomes first women to earn medical degree in US
When they discovered that she was serious, both students and townspeople were horrified. She had few allies and was an outcast in Geneva. At first, she was even kept from classroom medica...
1849 Mar 5 Zachary Taylor is inaugurated as the 12th president of the United States
For the second time in the history of the Republic, March 4 fell on a Sunday. The inaugural ceremony was postponed until the following Monday, raising the question as to whether the N...
1849 May
to 1850 Nov
Charles Dickens publishes David Copperfield
David Copperfield or The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (which he never meant to publish on any account)...
1849 May 17 The St. Louis Great Fire
The St. Louis Fire of 1849 was a devastating fire that occurred on May 17, 1849 and destroyed a significant part of St. Louis, Missouri and many of the steamboats using the Mississippi Ri...
1849 May 22 Lincoln Receives a Patent
As a young man, Abraham Lincoln took a boatload of merchandise down the Mississippi River from New Salem to New Orleans. At one point the boat slid onto a dam and was set free only after ...
1849 May 25 "Blind Tom" Wiggins is born
Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins was born on May 25, 1849 on the Wiley Edward Jones Plantation in Harris County, Georgia. Blind at birth, he was sold in 1850 along with his slave parents, Chari...
1849 May 29 Louis Pasteur Marries Marie Laurent
Arriving in Strasbourg in January of 1849, he met Marie Laurent, daughter of the university's rector. With characteristic decisiveness, Pasteur proposed marriage within a few weeks, and i...
1849 Aug Edgar Allan Poe Becomes Engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster
August 1849 Engaged Again Poe travels to Richmond and convinces his childhood sweetheart, Elmira Royster Shelton, to become his fiancée. He joins the Sons of Temperance, an organization...
1849 Sep 17 Harriet Tubman and brothers escaped from slavery
Harriet was given a piece of paper by a white abolitionist neighbor with two names, and told how to find the first house on her path to freedom. At the first house she was put into a wago...
1849 Oct 7 Edgar Allan Poe dies
On October 3, 1849, Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore delirious, "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance", according to the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker....
1849 Nov 25 Franklin A. Buck Writes To His Sister Mary
"I have not come 20,000 miles," Yankee trader Franklin A. Buck wrote to his sister Mary on November 25, 1849, "to turn around and go right back again like some persons who have been here...