Our Family Tree

History of Denmark

1849 May 3, Jacob Riis (d.1914), American reporter and reformer (How the Other Half Lives), was born in Denmark.
1849 Denmark became a constitutional monarchy
1852 May 8, A war between Denmark and Prussia lasted three years (1848 to 1850) and ended only when the Great Powers pressured Prussia into accepting the London Protocol of 1852. This was the revision of an earlier protocol, which had been ratified on August 2, 1850, by the major Germanic powers of Austria and Prussia. The 1852 London Protocol confirmed that the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein should remain undivided.
1855 Nov 11, Soren A. Kierkegaard (b.1813), Danish philosopher and theologian, died. In 2005 Joakim Garff authored Søren A. Kierkegaard: A Biography."
1857 Jun 2, Karl Gjellerup, poet, novelist (Nobel 1917), was born in Denmark.
1859 Hans Christian Anderson gave his story "The Philosopher's Stone" to a family during his trip to the Jutland region. The 13-page script was sold at auction in 1999 for $75,400.
1864 May 9, Austria and Denmark held a ship battle at Helgoland.
1864 Prussia and Austria snatched Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark. The border was redrawn by plebiscite in 1920. After 1945 Germany and Denmark agreed to recognize the rights of minorities on both sides.
1864 Denmark fights Prussia and Austria
1865 May 21, C.J. Thomsen, archaeologist who named the Stone, Iron and Bronze Ages, was born in Denmark.
1865 Jun 9, Carl Nielsen, Danish composer, was born.
1866 Denmark passed a law against blasphemy.
1867 Denmark reached a deal to transfer Saint Thomas and Saint John (part of the Virgin Islands) to the United States to the US for $7.5 million, but a hurricane, earthquake, tsunami and fire, as well as domestic and int'l. political conflicts delayed the transfer for 50 years.
1868 Oct 16, Denmark ended its involvement in India by selling the rights to the Nicobar Islands to the British.
1870 Only 25% of the population of Denmark lives in towns and cities
1871 In Denmark the Jutland-based Jyllands-Posten newspaper was founded.
1872 Aug 3, Haakon VII, King of Norway, was born in Charlottenlund, Denmark.
1884 In Denmark the Alexander Nevski church was built in Copenhagen on a request by Czarina Maria Feodorovna, the Danish-born mother of Nicholas II.
1875 Aug 4, Hans Christian Andersen (b.1805), Danish fairy tale writer, died. Over his life he wrote 156 fairy tales as well as numerous novels and travel books. His biography was later written by Elias Bredsdorff (d.2002 at 90).
1885 Apr 17, Karen Blixen-Finecke (Isak Dinesen, d.1962), Danish writer (Out of Africa), was born. God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road."
1885 Oct 7, Nils Bohr, Danish physicist who won the 1992 Nobel Prize for physics and later worked on the first atom bomb, was born.
1889 May 29, August Strindberg's "Hemsoborna" premiered in Copenhagen.
1890 Mar 20, Lauritz Melchior, baritone, tenor (Met Opera), was born in Copenhagen, Denmark.
1899 Mar 11, Frederick IX, King of Denmark, was born.
1901 44% of the population of Denmark lives in towns and cities
1902 Apr 18, Denmark became the 1st country to adopt fingerprinting to identify criminals.
1904 A new Danish law forced the people to stick with the names they had, as opposed to the previous system where people where named after their fathers first name.
1904 Denmark and Sweden issued the first Christmas seals to raise money to fight tuberculosis.
1905 Nov 18, The Norwegian Parliament elected Prince Charles of Denmark to be the next King of Norway. Prince Charles took the name Haakon VII.
1909 Jan 3, Victor Borge (d.2000 at 91), musical humorist, was born as Borge Rosenbaum in Copenhagen. In 1953 he opened his "Comedy in Music" at the Golden Theater on Broadway and played for 849 performances .
1909 Wilhelm Johanssen (Johannsen), Danish botanist, coined the word "gene" to describe whatever it was that Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) had found in his studies of inherited traits.