1862
year
1862 (MDCCCLXII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar, the 1862nd year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 862nd year of the 2nd millennium, the 62nd year of the 19th century, and the 3rd year of the 1860s decade. As of the start of 1862, the Gregorian calendar was 12 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January
January 1 – The United Kingdom annexes Lagos Island, in modern-day Nigeria.
January 6 – French intervention in Mexico: French, Spanish and British forces arrive in Veracruz, Mexico.
January 16 – Hartley Colliery disaster in north-east England: 204 men are trapped and die underground when the only shaft becomes blocked.
January 30 – American Civil War: The first U.S. ironclad warship, USS Monitor, is launched in Brooklyn.
January 31 – Alvan Graham Clark makes the first observation of Sirius B, a white dwarf star, through an eighteen-inch telescope at Northwestern University in Illinois.
February
February 1 – American Civil War: Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" is published for the first time in the Atlantic Monthly.
February 2 – The first railway is opened in New Zealand, by the Dun Mountain Copper Mining Company.
American Civil War:
February 6 – General Ulysses S. Grant gives the Union Army its first victory of the war, by capturing Fort Henry, Tennessee.
“1862” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1862” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7698. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1862 and 1923.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “1862”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 1862 primary sources, 1862 archive and year research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “1862”?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “1862” 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.