Timeline

The Year Was 1853
The year was 1853 and in the U.S., Franklin Pierce took the oath of office, succeeding Millard Fillmore. The inauguration was a sad one for President Pierce and his wife Jane. A couple months before the family was in a train wreck in Massachusetts and their eleven-year-old son Ben was killed.
Another train wreck that year was considered the first major railroad disaster when a New Haven train plunged through an open drawbridge into the Norwalk River. Forty-six passengers were killed and many more injured.
Railroads were connecting the country and making it easier to move westward. Southerners hoped for a transcontinental railroad that would take a southern route and at the end of 1853, the Gadsden Purchase was signed defining the U.S./Mexican border west of El Paso, Texas. While the transcontinental railroad took a more northerly route, the purchase for the sum of $10 million dollars did add more than 29,000 square miles in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona.
In Cincinnati, Ohio, progress was being made in the field of firefighting. Prior to April of 1853, firefighting crews mainly consisted of volunteers. As they began receiving payments from insurance companies and private parties, competition heightened. That changed on 1 April, when the Cincinnati Fire Department became the first full-time professional fire department in the country. )
In New Orleans, Louisiana, that year "Yellow Jack," or yellow fever, wreaked havoc killing more than 7,800 people. If you have an ancestor that you believe may have died in New Orleans that year, check out the Louisiana USGenWeb Project, Orleans Parish Archive, which includes an index to the burials in New Orleans that summer--"The Epidemic Summer, A Review of the Yellow Fever, Its Causes, etc., and An Interesting and Useful Abstract of Mortuary Statistics, Published by the Proprietor of the True Delta, 1853."
In other parts of the world, tension over holy sites in Palestine erupted into the Crimean War. By the end of 1853, France, Britain, and Turkey had formed an alliance that pitted them against the Russians in a war that would last until the Treaty of Paris in 1856.
Around the world in China, a bloody civil war was raging. At the heart of the rebellion was Hung Hsiu-ch'uan, a Cantonese student who had visions in which he believed he was visited by God the Father and his son, Jesus Christ. He began a movement that turned into a full- blown rebellion when the government began targeting them. By that time, the movement had a large army and had built up a treasury. The Taiping Rebellion is largely considered to have been one of the bloodiest conflicts in history with casualties estimated at around 20 million.
To end on a lighter note (if you don't count the calories), 1853 also marks the birth of the potato chip. They were the brainchild of George Crum, an American Indian working at a resort in Saratoga Springs, New York, after a guest rejected his french fries for being too thick. French fries had been introduced to America by Thomas Jefferson, who served them to rave reviews at Monticello.

The Year Was 1863
The year was 1863 and the U.S. was embroiled in the Civil War. Notable battles that year included those at Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. One of the most well-known battles of the Civil War, 1-3 July 1863, the Union Army, led by General George G. Meade met General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Virginia at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to engage in one of the largest battles to ever take place on American soil involving more than 160,000 men.
The battle would result in more than 23,000 Union casualties and between 20,000 and 25,000 Confederate. Later that year, President Abraham Lincoln was invited to speak at the consecration of a cemetery where he would deliver his famous Gettysburg Address, on 19 November 1863.
Earlier that year, on 1 January, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all slaves held in Confederate states were to be free, and further declared that they "be received into the armed service of the United States." Following this proclamation, the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer infantry became the first northern all-Black Union regiment.
Not all of the Civil War soldiers of 1863 were volunteers. In March of that year, the National Conscription Act began a draft registration for men between twenty and thirty-five. The conscription process allowed for wealthy men to hire substitutes or buy exemption for $300. The process angered those who couldn't afford to get out of service, and following the news of devastating casualties from Gettysburg, when a list of draftees was listed in New York papers, rioting ensued. Mobs attacked the armory and then took to the streets, targeting blacks and abolitionists in a horrific manner. Federal troops, many of them fresh from the fields of Gettysburg, had to be called in to quell the riots.
In partitioned Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus, another protest of a draft, in this case into the Russian Tsarist army, resulted in an insurrection known as the January Uprising. After the uprising failed, the Russian government executed hundreds, and more than 18,000 people were exiled to Siberia.
Another proclamation by President Lincoln would be of a more peaceful nature. On 3 October, he issued a proclamation calling for a national day of Thanksgiving to be held on the last Thursday of November. (The full-text of the proclamation appeared in the 13 October 1863 issue of the "Adams Sentinel," which can be found on the blog entry for this article and in the Ancestry Historical Newspaper Collection.
In other U.S. news in 1863, Arizona and Idaho were organized as U.S. territories, and West Virginia was admitted as the 35th state.
The International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in 1863, inspired by a book written by Henry Dunant, a Swiss man who had visited an Italian battlefield and asked "Would it not be possible, in time of peace and quiet, to form relief societies for the purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous, devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers?"
In London, crowds gathered in January hoping for a ride on the first underground train, a project aimed at cutting down on the congestion on London streets.

Jesse James was killed, telephone lines connected New York and Chicago and international time zones were set. This all occurred during the term of President Chester Arthur, who died this day, November 18, 1886.