Great Famine in Ireland
Potato blight kills a million and drives a million abroad
Potato blight, arriving from the Americas, destroyed the staple food of Ireland's poor year after year. About a million people died and another million emigrated, mostly to the United States. Ireland's population has never returned to its pre-famine level.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 19th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1853–1856 Crimean War — 8 years later
- 1861 Emancipation of the serfs in Russia — 16 years later
- 1867 Alaska Purchase — 22 years later
- 1869 Tolstoy's War and Peace — 24 years later
Middle East
- 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay — 17 years earlier
- 1839 The Edict of Gülhane opens the Tanzimat — 6 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Anglo-Afghan War — 6 years earlier
Africa
- c. 1835–1846 The Great Trek — 10 years earlier
- 1847 Liberia declares independence — 2 years later
- 1869 Opening of the Suez Canal — 24 years later
Asia
- c. 1831 Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa — 14 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Opium War — 6 years earlier
- 1853–1854 Commodore Perry's Black Ships — 8 years later
- 1868 Meiji Restoration — 23 years later
Americas
- 1835 Darwin in the Galápagos — 10 years earlier
- 1838–1839 Trail of Tears — 7 years earlier
- 1846 First public demonstration of ether anaesthesia — 1 year later
- 1846–1848 Mexican–American War — 1 year later
- 1861–1865 American Civil War — 16 years later
Oceania
- 1851 The Australian gold rushes — 6 years later
Alive at the time
- Charles Darwin (aged 36)
- Abraham Lincoln (aged 36)
- Karl Marx (aged 27)
- Queen Victoria (aged 26)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (aged 24)
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 17)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (aged 11)
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (aged 5)
- Katsushika Hokusai (aged 85)
- Andrew Jackson (aged 78)