The World in 1855 the year a war was photographed

A camera could now bring a war home. Roger Fenton hauled a wagon of glass plates out to the Crimea and came back with pictures of officers, tents and a road littered with cannonballs. Plates needed a long exposure, so nobody moved and nobody smiled. At home, families sat for cheap portraits on glass that came in a little case with a clasp. Pictures of the dead were not printed, so the war on show looked tidier than the one soldiers described in their letters.

The year in 8 events

About one person in seven in the United States was enslaved. In a class of thirty children, that is four of them.

• 🚂Jan 28 The first train crosses the Isthmus of Panama. A trip that took days by mule now takes hours.
• 👑Mar 2 Tsar Nicholas I dies. His son Alexander II inherits a war Russia is losing.
• 🗳️Mar 30 Armed men ride in from Missouri to vote in Kansas, and a pro slavery legislature is elected.
• 🎪May 15 France opens a world's fair in Paris, its answer to London's Great Exhibition.
• 📖Jul 4 Walt Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass, twelve poems he helped set in type himself.
• ⚔️Sep 8 French troops storm the Malakoff fort and Sevastopol falls after nearly a year of siege.
• 🕯️Nov 11 An earthquake shakes Edo, the city that becomes Tokyo. Fires spread and thousands die.
• 💧Nov 16 David Livingstone reaches a huge waterfall on the Zambezi and names it Victoria Falls.

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