istoryworld
All Events
Lee surrenders to Grant at the Appomattox Court House, and is offered conciliatory terms
The third Hampton Court Bridge is built, replacing one on the same line that was pulled down in 1864, made of wrought-iron lattice girders in five spans on cast-iron columns
English surgeon Joseph Lister introduces the era of antiseptic surgery, with the use of carbolic acid in the operating theatre
Samuel Clemens, writing under the pseudonym Mark Twain, has immediate success with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
On a visit to a Washington theatre, Lincoln is assassinated in his box by John Wilkes Booth
Vice-president Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, becomes president on the death of Republican Abraham Lincoln
Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a development of the story he had told Alice Liddell three years earlier
Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde has its premiere in the Munich court theatre
The Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López starts a war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay which eventually kills more than half his population
The southern states pass new Black Codes, designed to limit the freedom granted to African-Americans by the victorious north
A committee to campaign for women's suffrage is formed in Manchester, the first of many in Britain
Leo Tolstoy publishes the first volume of his epic novel War and Peace, following the lives of several aristocratic families during the Napoleonic wars
Palmerston dies in office, and is succeeded as leader of the Liberal government in Britain by his foreign secretary, Earl Russell
The Plains Indians are threatened by settlers pressing west, building railways and slaughtering buffalo
The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits slavery or any 'involuntary servitude' in the USA
The first branch of the Ku Klux Klan is founded at Pulaski, in Tennessee, on Christmas Eve
A pressure group for penal reform in Britain is named after the great prison reformer John Howard
William McCanlis keeps a cricketing diary
A Civil Rights Act is passed by the US Congress, guaranteeing the legal rights of African-Americans
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution (not ratified till 1868) assures equal rights as citizens to all born or naturalized in the USA
Prussia invades its neighbouring German states and launches the Seven Weeks' War
The Prussians achieve the first blitzkrieg in their Seven Weeks' War defeat of the Austrians
Walt Whitman laments the assassinated President Lincoln in his poem 'O Captain! My Captain!', published in Sequel to Drum-Taps
George Eliot publishes Felix Holt the Radical, based on her childhood memories of the period of the great Reform Bill in 1832
Russell's government falls, and Lord Derby returns for the third time, but again briefly, as Britain's prime minister
