1853

• In the Gadsden Purchase the United States purchases the southern portions of what is now Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico for $10 million, which is about $337.38 per square mile, securing a potential southern route for the transcontinental railroad. US Minister to Mexico James Gadsden originally negotiated a much larger purchase, in which the US would have acquired a massive section of northern Mexico, but it was rejected by anti-slavery members of Congress, who did not wish to add any more slave-holding territories.
• Native American chef George Crum, makes the first-ever potato chips at the Moon Lake Lodge in Saratoga Springs, New York.
• American songwriter Stephen Foster writes "My Old Kentucky Home."

These people were born:

• Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh.
• British imperialist and Rhodes scholarship founder Cecil Rhodes.
• Cuban revolutionary José Martí.
• Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz.
• Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes.

These people died:

• Japanese shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi, succeeded by Tokugawa Iesada.
• Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, who first hypothesized the Doppler effect.
• Italian composer and guitarist Matteo Carcassi.

1852 - 1853 - 1854

19th century

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