1803 Ralph Waldo Emerson is born

Aug. 6, 1809 Alfred, Lord Tennyson is born

1811 Jane Austen publishes Sense and Sensibility

1812 The war of 1812

Feb. 7, 1812 Charles Dickens is born

1813 Jane Austen publishes Pride and Prejudice

1817 Jane Austen dies

Feb. 14, 1817 Frederick Douglass is born

July 12, 1817 Henry David Thoreau is born

1818 Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein

May 5, 1818 Karl Marx is born

May 31, 1819 Walt Whitman is born

Aug. 1, 1819 Herman Melville is born

Aug. 4, 1821 The Saturday Evening Post is founded

1824 Lord Byron dies

Aug. 28, 1828 Leo Tolstoy is born

1829 Honoré de Balzac publishes Le Dernier Chouan

1830 Emily Dickinson is born

1831 The Liberator is first published by William Lloyd Garrison in Boston

Nov. 30, 1835 Mark Twain is born

1836-1846 Emerson leads Transcendentalism to its peak

July 1840 The Dial is founded in Boston

1844 Alexandre Dumas publishes The Three Musketeers

Oct. 15, 1844 Friedrich Nietzsche is born

1845 Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven

1845 Frederick Douglass publishes his autobiography

1845 Henry David Thoreau establishes residence at Walden Pond

1846-1848 The Mexican War is fought

1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto

Oct. 7, 1849 Edgar Allan Poe dies

1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes The Scarlet Letter

1850 The Compromise of 1850

1850 The Fugitive Slave Act

1851 Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick

1851 The New York Times begins publication

1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom's Cabin

1854 Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden

1855 Walt Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass

1857 The U.S. Supreme Court hands down the Dred Scott decision

Nov. 1857 The Atlantic Monthly is founded

1859 Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species

1859 Charles Dickens publishes A Tale of Two Cities

Apr. 12, 1861 The Civil War Begins

1862 Victor Hugo publishes Les Miserables

May 6, 1862 Henry David Thoreau dies

1863 Leo Tolstoy publishes War and Peace

Jan. 1, 1863 The Emancipation Proclamation

1865 The end of the Civil War

Dec. 18, 1865 Slavery is outlawed

July 28, 1868 Blacks become American citizens

June 9, 1870 Charles Dickens dies

1874 Robert Frost is born

1876 Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

1878 Upton Sinclair is born

1879 Thomas Edison invents the electric light bulb

1881 Thomas Carlyle dies

1882 Ralph Waldo Emerson dies

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