1864
year
1864 (MDCCCLXIV) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and a leap year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar, the 1864th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 864th year of the 2nd millennium, the 64th year of the 19th century, and the 5th year of the 1860s decade. As of the start of 1864, the Gregorian calendar was 12 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January
January 13 – American songwriter Stephen Foster ("Oh! Susanna", "Old Folks at Home") dies aged 37 in New York City, leaving a scrap of paper reading "Dear friends and gentle hearts". His parlor song "Beautiful Dreamer" is published in March.
January 16 – Denmark rejects an Austrian-Prussian ultimatum to repeal the Danish Constitution, which says that Schleswig-Holstein is part of Denmark.
January 21 – New Zealand Wars: The Tauranga campaign begins.
January 22 – the Stifone powder-magazine explosion near Narni, Italy, destroys much of the village of Stifone and kills 12 people.
February
February – John Wisden publishes The Cricketer's Almanack for the year 1864 in England; it will go on to become the major annual cricket reference publication.
February 1 – Danish-Prussian War (Second Schleswig War): 57,000 Austrian and Prussian troops cross the Eider River into Denmark.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7704. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1864 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “1864” 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.