1855
year

1855 (MDCCCLV) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar, the 1855th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 855th year of the 2nd millennium, the 55th year of the 19th century, and the 6th year of the 1850s decade. As of the start of 1855, the Gregorian calendar was 12 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 1 – Ottawa, Ontario, is incorporated as a city.'
January 5 – Ramón Castilla begins his third term as President of Peru.
January 23
The first bridge over the Mississippi River opens in modern-day Minneapolis, a predecessor of the Father Louis Hennepin Bridge.
The 8.2–8.3 Mw Wairarapa earthquake claims between five and nine lives near the Cook Strait area of New Zealand.
January 26 – The Point No Point Treaty is signed in the Washington Territory.
January 27 – The Panama Railway becomes the first railroad to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
January 29 – Lord Aberdeen resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, over the management of the Crimean War.
February 5 – Lord Palmerston becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
February 11 – Kassa Hailu is crowned Tewodros II, Emperor of Ethiopia.
The public source identifies “1855” as year. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around year.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7673. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1855 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “1855” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.