David Livingstone becomes the first European to…

The Point No Point Treaty is signed in the Washington Territory, on January 26, 1855, at Point No Point, on the northern tip of the Kitsap Peninsula.

Governor of Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, had convened the treaty council on January 25, with the S'Klallam, the Chimakum, and the Skokomish tribes.

Under the terms of the treaty, the original inhabitants of northern Kitsap Peninsula and Olympic Peninsula are to cede ownership of their land in exchange for small reservations along Hood Canal and a payment of sixty thousand dollars from the federal government.

The treaty requires the natives to trade only with the United States, to free all their slaves, and it abjures them not to acquire any new slaves.

Governor Stevens' treaty with the Nisqually includes the preservation of indigenous fishing, hunting, gathering and other rights.

It also includes a section that, at least as interpreted by United States officials, requires the Native American signatories to move to one of three reservations.

Doing so will effectively force the Nisqually people to cede their prime farming and living space.

One of the leaders of the Nisqually, Chief Leschi, outraged, refuses to give up ownership of this land and instead fights for his peoples' right to their territory, sparking the beginning of the Puget sound War, which will end in the controversial execution of Leschi.

The British close their penal colony on Norfolk Island in 1855.

Siamese King Rama IV, or Mongkut, absorbed in the study of science and languages, modernizes his country along western lines.

Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong, as representative of England, concludes the trade treaty (later commonly referred to as "the Bowring Treaty") with the Siamese Government in 1855. (The Bowring Treaty will later serve as a model for a series of trade treaties with many other western countries, and historians often give credit to King Mongkut—and Sir John Bowring—for opening the new era of Siam's international commerce.)

Shi Dakai, one of the original five Taiping rebel leaders, assumes the title of i-wang.

The most literate of the Taipings, Shi is an avowed enemy of the alien Qing rulers of China.

It is Yang Xiuqing, the Taiping minister of state, who has organized the new Taiping state and mapped the strategy of the Taiping armies.

Yang has begun to chastise Hong and to usurp his prerogatives as supreme leader.

To legitimize his authority, Yang occasionally lapses into trances in which his voice supposedly becomes that of the Lord's.

In one of his trances, Yang claims that the Lord demands Hong be whipped for kicking one of his concubines (although Taiping followers are allowed no sexual relations with members of the opposite sex, Taiping leaders maintain enormous harems).

Many influential Chinese clans, with all their members, join the Nien cause; and among the Nien leaders, the clan chiefs play an important role.

Gentry of lower strata also join the Nien.

The greater part of the Nien force consists of poor peasants, although deserters from the government-recruited militias and salt smugglers are important as military experts.

The real cause of their strength is supposedly the people's support and sympathy for their leaders, but there is difficulty in creating a power center, because the Nien's basic social unit is the earth-wall community, where a powerful master exercises autonomy.

The Taiping's northern expedition reaches the neighborhood of Tientsin but finally collapses during the spring of 1855.

However, another expedition into the Upper Yangtze Valley, now the main theater of struggle, scores many victories.

A severe clash between Chinese and Muslim miners occurs in 1855 in central Yunnan, which has been haunted by Muslim-Chinese rivalries since 1821.

The prospects for Russian Jewry appear to improve significantly when the relatively liberal-minded Tsar Alexander II ascends the throne in 1855, succeeding his father, Nicholas I.

Ending the practice of drafting Jewish youth into the military, the new tsar grants Jews access, albeit limited, to Russian education institutions and various professions previously closed to them.

Consequently, a thriving class of Jewish intellectuals, the maskalim (”enlightened”), emerges in cities like Odessa, just as they had in Western Europe and Central Europe after emancipation.

The maskalim believe that Tsar Alexander II is ushering in a new age of Russian liberalism that, as in the West, will eventually lead to the emancipation of Russian Jewry.

The lengthy siege of Sevastopol ends after eleven months in 1855 with the Russian evacuation.

Russia’s defeat in the Crimea thwarts Tsarist ambitions in Eastern Europe.

The terms of the peace dictate the withdrawal of Russia from Wallachia and Moldavia and the cession of an adjacent portion of Bessarabia.

The Black Sea becomes a neutral zone and Serbia achieves Western recognition as an independent nation.