This Year in History:
1844
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
On February 27, 1844, revolutionary fervor boiled over on the eastern side of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Finally coming into the open after years of covert planning, a group known as La Trinitaria seized the fortress of Puerta del Conde in the city of Santo Domingo, and beginning the Dominican War of Independence. Much […]
On February 28, 1844, President John Tyler cruises the Potomac with 400 others aboard the U.S. Navy’s new steam frigate USS Princeton, not realizing that his life will soon be in danger. In attendance that day were political dignitaries and their guests, which included the wealthy New Yorker David Gardiner and his two daughters. The […]
In a demonstration witnessed by members of Congress, American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse dispatches a telegraph message from the U.S. Capitol to Alfred Vail at a railroad station in Baltimore, Maryland. The message—“What Hath God Wrought?”—was telegraphed back to the Capitol a moment later by Vail. The question, taken from the Bible (Numbers 23:23), had […]
Fifty-four year old widower President John Tyler marries 21-year-old Julia Gardiner on June 26, 1844. It was his second marriage. At the time, Julia was the youngest first lady in history. Tyler had wooed Julia from the time she was 19, but it took a tragedy and a narrow escape from death for her to […]
Joseph Smith, the founder and leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (more commonly known as Mormonism), is murdered along with his brother Hyrum when a mob breaks into a jail where they are being held in Carthage, Illinois. Born in Vermont in 1805, Smith claimed in 1823 that he had been […]
After Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormonism, and his brother, Hyrum, were murdered by an angry mob in an Illinois prison six weeks earlier, Elder Brigham Young is chosen to be the Church’s next leader. The decision, made in Nauvoo, Ill. on the Mississippi River, was not […]
On November 3, 1844, William Makepeace Thackeray completes The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century, which is published in Fraser’s Magazine. Thackeray was born in Calcutta in 1811. As a young man, he attended Cambridge but left without a degree, then drifted through a variety of professions. He tried studying law, […]
