Thomas Cole had influenced his artistic peers, especially Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, who had studied with Cole from 1844 to 1846.

Durand’s Kindred Spirits had been commissioned by the merchant-collector Jonathan Sturges as a gift for William Cullen Bryant in gratitude for the nature poet's moving eulogy to Thomas Cole, who had died suddenly in early 1848.

It shows Cole, who had been Jonathan Sturges’ mentor, standing in a gorge in Catskills in company of a mutual friend William Cullen Bryant. (The painting, donated by Bryant's daughter Julia to the New York Public Library in 1904, will be sold by the library through Sotheby's at an auction in May 2005 to Alice Walton for a purported $35 million. The sale will be conducted as a sealed, first bid auction, so the actual sales price is not known. At $35 million, however, it would be a record price paid for an American painting at the time.)

The Fox girls have became famous and their public séances in New York in 1850 attract notable people including William Cullen Bryant, George Bancroft, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Horace Greeley, Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison.

They also attract imitators; during the following few years, hundreds of people will claim the ability to communicate with spirits.

Kate and Margaret Fox have become well-known mediums, giving séances for hundreds of people.

Many of these early séances are entirely frivolous, where sitters seek insight into "the state of railway stocks or the issue of love affairs," but the religious significance of communication with the deceased soon becomes apparent.

Horace Greeley, the prominent publisher and politician, has become a kind of protector for them, enabling their movement in higher social circles, but the lack of parental supervision is pernicious, as both of the young women have begun to drink wine.

The cracking of joints is the theory scientists and skeptics most favor to explain the rappings, a theory dating to 1850.

The physician E. P. Longworthy investigates the sisters and notes how the knockings or raps always come from under their feet or when their dresses are in contact with the table.

He concludes that Margaret and Kate have produced the noises themselves.

John W. Hurn, who publishes articles in the New-York Tribune, also comes to a similar conclusion of fraud.

The Reverend John M. Austin will later claim the noises can be made by cracking toe joints.

The Reverend D. Potts demonstrates to an audience that the raps can be made by this method.

Peter Cooper establishes the Cooper Union in New York City on April 13, 1859, as a college devoted to free adult-education in art, science and technology.

Originally intended to be called simply "the Union," the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art begins with adult education in night classes on the subjects of applied sciences and architectural drawing, as well as day classes for women on the subjects of photography, telegraphy, typewriting and shorthand (in what is called the College's Female School of Design).

Discrimination based on race, religion, or sex is expressly prohibited.

Early board members include New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley and American romantic poet, journalist, political adviser, and homeopath William Cullen Bryant.

Cooper, a workingman's son who had had less than a year of formal schooling, is a principal investor and first president of the New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph Co., which undertakes one of the nineteenth century's monumental technical enterprises—laying the first Atlantic cable.

Cooper has also invented instant gelatin, derived from the bones of geese, with help from his wife, Sarah, who adds fruit to what the world will come to know as Jello.