/year

The 1860s

1,025 sourced entries across 10 years, inside the 19th century. Each year below opens its own page; the lines under it are that year’s highest-ranked entries.

1860 CE86 entries

  • May 15 – Expedition of the Thousand – Battle of Calatafimi: Troops under Giuseppe Garibaldi defeat the army of Naples in Sicily.
  • October 5 – Austria, Britain, France, Prussia and the Ottoman Empire form a commission to investigate the causes of the massacres of Maronite Christians, committed by Druzes in Lebanon earlier in the year.
  • October – John Hanning Speke and James Augustus Grant leave Zanzibar, to search for the source of the Nile River.

1861 CE113 entries

1862 CE102 entries

  • April 22 – Global financial group UBS is founded in Switzerland as the Bank in Winterthur.
  • August 5 – Battle of Baton Rouge – Along the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Confederate troops drive Union forces back into the city.
  • November 5 – American Indian Wars: In Minnesota, more than 300 Santee Sioux are found guilty of rape and murder of white settlers, and are sentenced to hang.

1863 CE115 entries

  • January 2 – Master Lucius Tar Paint Company (Teerfarbenfabrik Meister Lucius), predecessor of Hoechst as a worldwide chemical manufacturing brand, is founded in a suburb of Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
  • July 30 – Valuev Circular bans the publication of religious, educational and training books in Ukrainian in the Russian Empire.
  • August 1 – The pharmaceutical brand Bayer is founded by Friedrich Bayer in Germany.

1864 CE100 entries

  • May 21 – The Russian Empire begins the Circassian genocide. More than 1.5 million Circassians are driven from their homeland to the Ottoman Empire, ending the Russo-Circassian War.
  • Battle of Brice's Crossroads – Confederate troops under Nathan Bedford Forrest defeat a much larger Union force, led by General Samuel D. Sturgis, in Mississippi.
  • November 4 – American Civil War: Battle of Johnsonville – At Johnsonville, Tennessee, troops under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest bombard a Union supply base with artillery, and destroy millions of dollars' worth of material.

1865 CE107 entries

  • May 12 – Electric equipment and mobile brand Nokia founded in Tampere, Finland.
  • May 28 – The Mimosa sets sail with emigrants from Wales for Patagonia.
  • July 5 – The first speed limit is introduced in Britain: 2 mi/h km/h in town and 4 mi/h km/h in the country.

1866 CE88 entries

  • April 4 – Alexander II of Russia narrowly escapes an assassination attempt in the city of St Petersburg.
  • May 30 – Bedrich Smetana's comic opera The Bartered Bride premiered in Prague.
  • November 7 – The Ruse–Varna railway line (the first railway in Bulgaria) officially opens.

1867 CE100 entries

1868 CE114 entries

  • March 24 – The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company is formed, in New York City.
  • May 16, May 26 – President Andrew Johnson is twice acquitted during his impeachment trial, by one vote in the United States Senate.
  • August 18 – The element later named as helium is first detected in the spectrum of the Sun's chromosphere, by French astronomer Jules Janssen, during a total eclipse in Guntur, British India, but is assumed to be sodium.

1869 CE100 entries

  • July 20 – Children's Hospital Boston is founded by Dr. Francis Henry Brown and other Harvard Medical School graduates, as a 20-bed facility in the South End of Boston, Massachusetts.
  • July 26 – The Irish Church Act 1869 is given royal assent by Queen Victoria, disestablishing the Church of Ireland effective January 1, 1871.
  • December – Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace is published in complete book form, in Russia.