On March 18, 1852, in New York City, Henry Wells and William G. Fargo join with several other investors to launch their namesake business, today one of the world's largest banks.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is published. The novel sold 300,000 copies within three months and was so widely read that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”

On May 1, 1852, the adventurer and performer Calamity Jane is born near Princeton, Missouri.

On May 8, 1852, The Boston Olive Branch publishes “The Rival Painters: A Story of Rome,” the first known story to appear in print by Louisa May Alcott, who will later write the beloved children’s book Little Women (1868). For this, she is paid $5.

During an Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivers what would become his most celebrated speech, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Tensions over slavery in the early 1850s are high, and the famed abolitionist’s oration serves as a searing reminder that at the time, only a fraction of the U.S. population enjoyed the freedom celebrated by the nation.