California Gold Rush
Flakes in a mill race reshaped the American West
On 24 January 1848 carpenter James Marshall spotted flakes of gold in the channel of Sutter's sawmill. The news spread worldwide, and within a few years some 300,000 fortune-seekers, the 'forty-niners', arrived from every continent. San Francisco grew from a village into a city of tens of thousands, and by 1850 California had become a state.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 19th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Europe
- 1839 Birth of photography: the daguerreotype — 9 years earlier
- 1845–1852 Great Famine in Ireland — 3 years earlier
- 1848–1849 Revolutions of 1848 — same year
- 1848 The Communist Manifesto — same year
- 1861 Unification of Italy — 13 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1853–1856 Crimean War — 5 years later
- 1861 Emancipation of the serfs in Russia — 13 years later
- 1867 Alaska Purchase — 19 years later
- 1869 Tolstoy's War and Peace — 21 years later
Middle East
- 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay — 20 years earlier
- 1839 The Edict of Gülhane opens the Tanzimat — 9 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Anglo-Afghan War — 9 years earlier
Africa
- c. 1835–1846 The Great Trek — 13 years earlier
- 1847 Liberia declares independence — 1 year earlier
- 1869 Opening of the Suez Canal — 21 years later
Asia
- c. 1831 Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa — 17 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Opium War — 9 years earlier
- 1853–1854 Commodore Perry's Black Ships — 5 years later
- 1868 Meiji Restoration — 20 years later
Oceania
- 1851 The Australian gold rushes — 3 years later
Alive at the time
- Charles Darwin (aged 39)
- Abraham Lincoln (aged 39)
- Karl Marx (aged 30)
- Queen Victoria (aged 29)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (aged 27)
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 20)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (aged 14)
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (aged 8)
- Thomas Edison (aged 1)
- Katsushika Hokusai (aged 88)