| 1810–1859 | USA [agriculture] | US cotton production, the vast majority of which is grown in the southern states, rises from 171,000 bales in 1810 to just under 5.4 million in 1859. |
| 1840–1860 | world [plagues and epidemics] | A cholera pandemic kills millions of people worldwide. |
| 1845–1958 | Germany [earth sciences] | German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt lays the basis of modern geography with the publication of Kosmos/Cosmos, in which he arranges geographic knowledge in a systematic fashion. |
| 1851–1860 | world [photography] | Photographic exposure times become short enough to capture movement. |
| 1851–1860 | USA, UK [statistics and demography] | Emigration to the USA from Britain is 423,964, and from Ireland, 914,119. |
| 1854 | USA [other structures] | US inventor Elisha Graves Otis demonstrates his safety lift at the Crystal Palace Exposition in New York by riding in it and ordering the rope to be cut. |
| 1854 | England [plagues and epidemics] | English physician John Snow traces a local epidemic of cholera and typhoid to a communal pump in Broad Street, London, England. He discovers that the well's water supply is being contaminated by a leakage from a neighbouring sewage tank. |
| 1854 | USA [memoirs] | The US poet and essayist Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden, or Life in the Woods. His best-known work, it records his life in a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts between 1845 and 1847. |
| 1854 | Europe [mountaineering] | The British climber Alfred Wills climbs the Wetterhorn from Grindelwald in the Alps, an event which is regarded as the start of mountaineering as a sport. Within the next 11 years all the Alpine peaks are reached except La Meije. |
| 1854 | England [painting] | The English artist John Everett Millais paints Ophelia. |
| 1854 | USA [fairs and festivals] | The first baby show takes place, in Springfield, Ohio. |
| 1854 | Germany [historical study] | The German historian Theodor Mommsen publishes the first volume of his Römische Geschichte/History of Rome. The last volume appears in 1856. |
| 1854 | France [chemistry] | French scientist Henri-Etienne Sainte-Claire Deville develops a new process for making aluminium. |
| February 1854 | UK [postal services] | The Penny Red, the first perforated stamp in Britain, is created by Henry Archer. |
| 12 March 1854 | UK, France, Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire [political events] | Britain and France conclude an alliance with the Ottoman Empire against Russia. |
| 31 March 1854 | USA, Japan [trade] | The USA makes its first trade treaty with Japan, negotiated by Commodore Matthew Perry, whose naval mission in 1853 had forced Japan to establish preliminary diplomatic links with the outside world. |
| 7 July 1854 | Germany [births and deaths] | Georg Simon Ohm, German physicist who discovered Ohm's law, which relates electric current to voltage, dies in Munich, Germany (67). |
| 12 July 1854 | USA [births and deaths] | George Eastman, US inventor, manufacturer, and philanthropist who introduces the Kodak camera, born in Waterville, New York (–1932). |
| 8 August 1854 | UK, Austrian Empire, France, Russian Empire, Serbia [diplomacy] | The ‘Four Points’ issued by Britain, Austria, and France from the Austrian capital, Vienna, state their conditions of peace with Russia to be Russia's abandonment of its claim to a protectorate over the Ottoman sultan's Christian subjects, revision of the Straits settlement in the interests of European powers, free passage of the mouth of the River Danube, and a guarantee of the integrity of the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, and of Serbia. |
| 14 September 1854 | UK, France, Russian Empire [Crimean War (1854–56)] | Britain and France land unopposed in the Crimea to begin the Crimean War with Russia over its attempt to increase its power in southeast Europe at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. |
| 20 September 1854 | Russian Empire, UK, France [Crimean War (1854–56)] | British and French troops are victorious over Russian forces at the Battle of the Alma in the Crimean War. |
| 17 October 1854 | UK, France, Russian Empire [Crimean War (1854–56)] | English and French forces begin the siege of the Russian-held city of Sevastopol in the Crimea. |
| 25 October 1854 | Russian Empire, UK, France [political events] | British and French forces win a narrow victory over Russia at great cost at Balaclava in the Crimea, following cavalry charges of the British Light and Heavy Brigades. |
| November 1854 | Ottoman Empire [medicine] | English nurse Florence Nightingale arrives in Scutari, Ottoman Empire, and introduces sanitary measures in an effort to reduce deaths from cholera, dysentery, and typhus during the Crimean War. |
| 5 November 1854 | UK, France, Russian Empire [Crimean War (1854–56)] | British and French forces defeat the Russians at the Battle of Inkerman. |
| 9 December 1854 | England, Russia [poetry] | The English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, publishes his poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, a poetic description of the disastrous attack on October 25 1854 by the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War. |
