Events of 1854

January - June

• January 21 - Loss of the RMS Tayleur - 380 drowned, later dubbed "the first Titanic".
• January 3 - Charles Dickens commences writng the novel Hard Times
• February 11 - Major streets lit by coal gas for first time.
• February 13 - Mexican troops force William Walker and his troops to retreat to Sonora.
• February 14 - Texas is linked by telegraph with the rest of the United States, when a connection between New Orleans and Marshall, Texas is completed.
• February 17 - The British recognize the independence of the Orange Free State. The official independence of the Orange Free State is declared six days later.
• February 27 - Britain sends Russia an ultimatum to withdraw from two Ottoman provinces it had conquered, Moldavia and Wallachia.
• March 1 - German psychologist Friedrich Eduard Beneke disappears, two years later his remains are found in the canal near Charlottenburg.
• March 3 - Australia's first telegraph line, linking Melbourne and Williamstown, opens.
• March 11- Royal Navy fleet sails from Britain under Vice Admiral Sir Charles Napier.
• March 20 - The Boston Public Library opens to the public.
• March 27 - United Kingdom declares war on Russia - Crimean War begins.
• March 28 - France declares war on Russia.
• March 31 - Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy, signs the Treaty/Convention of Kanagawa with the Japanese government, to be precise, Tokugawa Shogunate, opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American trade. (See History of Japan)
• April 1 - Hard Times begins serialisation in Charles Dickens' magazine, Household Words.
• May 18 - Foundation of the Catholic University of Ireland, the forerunner of University College Dublin.
• May 27 - Taiping Rebellion: United States minister Robert McLane arrives at the Heavenly Capital aboard the USS Susquehanna.
• May 30 - Kansas-Nebraska Act becomes law, rescinding the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and creating Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory. Provision that settlers will vote on slavery in the new territories leads to Bleeding Kansas violence beginning the next year.
• June - The Grand Excursion takes prominent Eastern United States inhabitants from Chicago, Illinois to Rock Island, Illinois by railroad, then up the Mississippi River to St. Paul, Minnesota by steamboat.
• June 10 - The first class of the United States Naval Academy graduate at Annapolis, Maryland.
• June 21 - In the battle at Bomarsund in Åland, Royal Navy mate Charles D. Lucas throws a live Russian artillery shell overboard by hand before it explodes - the incident is the first that will be retroactively awarded the Victoria Cross in 1857.

July - December