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| 1854–55 |
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| The so-called Know-Nothing Party emerged. It protested the Kansas-Nebraska Act and appealed to growing anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, and antiimmigrant sentiment in the wake of the massive Irish immigration into the country. Nearly 1.5 million Irish had entered the U.S. by 1860. The Republican Party also appeared at this time. | 1 |
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| 1854 |
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| Henry David Thoreau published Walden, or Life in the Woods, which followed the lead of the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for a literary declaration of independence from European cultural forms. The poet Walt Whitman and the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville also responded to Emerson's call. However, the best-known novel of the era was Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811–96) Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a forceful piece of abolitionist literature. Other women writers of the period included Sara Parton, Augusta Evans Wilson, and Susan Warner. In music, songs by Stephen Foster (1826–64) were among the first truly American compositions. | 2 |
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| March 31 |
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| Commodore Matthew Perry (1794–1858) negotiated a treaty with Japan, opening the country to commercial interaction with the United States. | 3 |
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| May 30 |
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| The KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT, which repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, opened the Nebraska country to settlement on the basis of popular sovereignty, and provided for the organization of two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. The act undid the sectional truce of 1850 and proved to be the deathblow to the Whig Party. | 4 |
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