istoryworld
All Events
Sleeping Beauty, with choreography by Petipa to music by Tchaikovsky, has its premiere in St Petersburg
A vast cantilever bridge, spanning a mile of water, carries the railway across the Firth of Forth in Scotland
In How the Other Half Lives David Riis alerts middle-class New Yorkers to the appalling slum conditions in lower Manhattan
The new young German emperor, Wilhelm II, dismisses the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck
Cecil Rhodes sends colonists to settle the newly won colony of Rhodesia
The Sherman Antitrust Act begins a strong US tradition of protecting the free market
The Manitoba Schools Question reflects the first major clash in independent Canada between French and British interests
Zanzibar, under its Arab sultan, is declared a British protectorate
Poems is the first of six collections of Emily Dickinson's poetry, found among her papers on her death and published posthumously
Henrik Ibsen publishes his play Hedda Gabler, with its powerfully manipulative central character, a year before it is first produced (in Germany)
The world's first electric underground railway passes under the Thames, linking the City of London and Stockwell
Hundreds of Sioux Indians are killed by US troops in a massacre at Wounded Knee Creek
Dial House is extensively restored and altered and the present sundial is installed.
Scottish anthropologist James Frazer publishes The Golden Bough, a massive compilation of contemporary knowledge about ritual and religious custom
9-year-old Daisy Ashford imagines an adult romance and high society in The Young Visiters
Sir Richard Burton is buried in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalen in Mortlake, in a mausoleum resembling an Arab tent, designed by his wife
Germany takes direct control of German East Africa as a protectorate
Rhodes wins the right to adminster the region from the Zambezi up to Lake Tanganyika, forming present-day Zambia
Work begins in the Urals and at Vladivostock, laying track which will eventually join up as the Trans-Siberian railway
A new Populist Party, dedicated to democracy and welfare, begins a brief career of considerable political influence in the USA
Canadian athlete James Naismith, at a YMCA college in Springfield, Massachusetts, invents basketball as an indoor winter game
Civil war breaks out in Chile between supporters of a liberal president and a hostile congress
Britain cedes the tiny island of Heligoland to Germany in return for vast areas of Africa
A Gaelic pressure group, the Highland Association, is founded to preserve the indigenous poetry and music of Scotland
Herman Melville dies in obscurity in New York, with an unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd (not printed till 1924)
