* 1848 – The United States annexes New Mexico.

* 1848 – California Gold Rush: the New York Herald breaks the news to the East Coast of the United States of the gold rush in California ( although the rush started in January ).

In 1848, the New York and New Haven Railroad Line was completed through Connecticut, providing a direct, faster rail connection from New York City to Boston.

Concerning its domestic borders, the 1803 Louisiana Purchase doubled the nation's geographical area ; Spain ceded the territory of Florida in 1819 ; annexation brought Texas in 1845 ; a war with Mexico in 1848 added California, Arizona and New Mexico.

* 1848 – Women's rights: a two-day Women's Rights Convention opens in Seneca Falls, New York.

He obtained an appointment in 1850 to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, from Representative Thomas Hamlet Averett, the man who had defeated his father in the 1848 election.

* 1848 – The ship John Wickliffe arrives at Port Chalmers carrying the first Scottish settlers for Dunedin, New Zealand.

1848 edition of American Phrenological Journal published by Fowlers & Wells, New York City. In the Victorian age, phrenology as a psychology was taken seriously and permeated the literature and novels of the day.

The colony of New Brunswick soon followed on May 1848 when Lieutenant Governor Edmund Walker Head brought in a more balanced representation of Members of the Legislative Assembly to the Executive Council and ceded more powers to that body.

He married his second wife, Sarah Elizabeth Griswold on August 10, 1848 in Utica, New York and had four children ( Samuel b. 1849, Cornelia b. 1851, William b. 1853, Edward b. 1857 ).

While scattered movements and organizations dedicated to women's rights existed previously, the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York is traditionally held as the start of the American women's rights movement.

The Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in Oneida, New York, was a utopian religious commune that lasted from 1848 to 1881.

* Seneca Falls Convention ( first convention for women's rights ) in Seneca Falls, New York ; 1848

* July 13 – Kate Sheppard, New Zealand Women's suffrage for voting ( b. 1848 )

The California leaves New York Harbor on October 6, 1848, rounds Cape Horn at the tip of South America, and arrives at San Francisco, California after the 4 month 21 day journey.

* High Bridge, part of the former Croton Aqueduct, built in 1848, is the oldest surviving bridge in New York City.

In February 1848 Polk surprised everyone with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War and gave the U. S. vast new territories ( including California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico ).

As Democrats convened in Baltimore in June 1852, four major candidates vied for the nomination: Lewis Cass of Michigan, the nominee in 1848, who had the backing of northerners in support of the Compromise of 1850 ; James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, popular in the South as well as in his home state ; Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, candidate of the expansionists and the railroad interests ; and William L. Marcy of New York, whose strength was centered in his home state.

The Oneida Community was a religious commune founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York.

* General Zachary Taylor, who became the Whig candidate in 1848 and then President from March 1849 to July 1850, proposed after becoming President that the entire area become two free states, called California and New Mexico but much larger than the eventual ones.

Zachary Taylor avoided the issue as the Whig candidate during the 1848 U. S. presidential election but then as President attempted to sidestep the entire controversy by pushing to admit California and New Mexico as free states immediately, avoiding the entire territorial process and thus the Wilmot Proviso question.

A serious movement for merger of law and equity began in the states in the mid-19th century, when David Dudley Field II convinced New York State to adopt what became known as the Field Code of 1848.

Charles Louis Napoléon ( 1808 – 1873 ), son of Louis Napoléon, was president of France in 1848 – 1852 and emperor in 1852 – 1870, reigning as Napoléon III ; his son, Eugène Bonaparte ( 1856 – 1879 ), styled the Prince Imperial, died fighting the Zulus in Natal, South Africa.

In an attempt to reverse the decline, from 1848 to the early 1870s Macau engaged in the infamous trade of coolies ( slave labourers ) as a transit port, shipping locals from southern China to Cuba, Peru, and other South American ports to work on plantations or in mines.

A particularly famous sea serpent sighting was made by the men and officers of HMS Daedalus in August 1848 during a voyage to Saint Helena in the South Atlantic ; the creature they saw, some long, held a peculiar maned head above the water.

The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five bills, passed in September 1850, which defused a four-year confrontation between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War ( 1846 – 1848 ).

Starting in about 1848 the South Alternate of Oregon Trail ( also called the Snake River Cutoff ) was developed as a spur off the main trail.

In 1848, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a Briton, and John Robert Godley, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, founded the Canterbury Association to establish an Anglican colony in New Zealand's South Island.

The London and South Western Railway ( L & SWR ) reached Waterloo in 1848.

The London and South Western Railway ( L & SWR ) opened the station on 11 July 1848 as ' Waterloo Bridge Station ' ( from the nearby crossing over the Thames ) when its main line was extended from Nine Elms.

Inspired by blackface minstrels who visited Cape Town, South Africa in 1848, former Javanese and Malaysian slaves took up the minstrel tradition, holding emancipation celebrations which consisted of music, dancing and parades.

Chartered in 1848, the Kings Mountain Railroad Company began construction of a connecting line between Yorkville and the Charlotte and South Carolina Railway at Chester completed in 1852.

The Louisiana Baptist Convention was founded in 1848 at historic Mount Lebanon Baptist Church in the community of Mount Lebanon, originally settled by pioneers from South Carolina.

Bertha, who had come to the United States in 1848, a refugee from Rhenish Bavaria and the revolution there, had lived in the South before her 1853 marriage with Julius, and during the war sympathized with the South, though their differing sympathies didn't separate their household.

First incorporated as part of Thomaston in 1777, and then as part of South Thomaston in 1848, Owls Head was itself set off and incorporated on July 9, 1921.

On July 28, 1848, South Thomaston was set off from Thomaston and incorporated as a separate town.

Biloxi Lighthouse, built in 1848 and reputed to be one of the most photographed objects in the American South.

Portions of the township were taken to form Cape Island Borough ( March 8, 1848, now known as Cape May city ), Cape May Point borough ( created April 19, 1878, restored to Lower Township on April 8, 1896, recreated April 6, 1908 ), Holly Beach ( April 14, 1885, now part of Wildwood city ), South Cape May ( August 27, 1894, restored to Lower Township after the borough was dissolved on April 30, 1945 ), Wildwood Crest ( April 6, 1910 ) and North Cape May ( March 19, 1928, restored to Lower Township after it was dissolved on April 30, 1945 ).

In 1847 and 1848, part of the town was added to the Town of South Valley.

Parts of the Towns of Bristol and South Bristol were added to Richmond in 1848, but were returned to the source towns in 1852.

James Augustus Black, ( 1793 – 1848 ), was born in Ninety Six and became a United States Congressman from South Carolina.

When the first pioneer families settled in the South Cottonwood area in the fall of 1848, they selected the low or bottom lands along the streams of Little Cottonwood Creek and Big Cottonwood Creek where they found an abundance of grass for their cattle and horses.

The first Mormon pioneer settlers, Joseph and Susanna Harker from England built a log cabin on the west side of the Jordan River in November 1848 on what was called then “ the Church Farm ” near 3300 South.