January blizzard and summer drought bring to an end ten years of agricultural boom in the US midwest, prompting a new slogan – 'In Kansas we busted'

The Dawes Severalty Act deprives American Indians of their tribal lands, giving each instead an allotment of up to 160 acres

An American Indian visionary, Wovoka, launches a new religion that will bring the dead back to life, calling it the Ghost Dance

The first Land Run into Oklahoma has settlers galloping in from noon to claim territory previously reserved for American Indians

English musicologist George Grove completes publication of his four-volume Dictionary of Music and Musicians

A vast cantilever bridge, spanning a mile of water, carries the railway across the Firth of Forth in Scotland

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

Work begins in the Urals and at Vladivostock, laying track which will eventually join up as the Trans-Siberian railway

German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal achieves the first of many guided flights in a glider, from a hill near Potsdam

Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen sails into the Arctic in the purpose-built Fram, beginning a three-year expedition to reach the North Pole

Hansel and Gretl, an opera by German composer Engelbert Humperdinck, has its premiere in Weimar

Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book surrounds the child Mowgli with a collection of vivid animal guardians

Joshua Slocum sails from Boston in his sloop Spray for his attempt at a solo circumnavigation of the world

21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in transmitting a radio signal more than a mile at his home near Bologna

General Alfred von Schlieffen devises plans for a potential two-pronged attack against France and Russia in a swift war

Leander Jameson leads a disastrous raid into the Transvaal, in an attempt to topple Paul Kruger's government

The Ethiopian emperor, Menelik II, inflicts a shattering defeat on Italian forces at Aduwa

US engineer Henry Ford test-drives his first four-wheel internal-combustion vehicle, the Quadricycle, built in a coal shed behind his home

The first modern Olympic Games, organized by Pierre de Coubertin, are held in Athens

Otto Lilienthal dies when a wing fractures on his glider and he crashes from a height of 17 metres

The Duc D'Orleans, who had been born at York House in 1869, buys the house and makes major alterations. These include a new east wing housing a museum and swimming pool, and walling the riverside grounds.

Paul Kruger, prime minister of the Transvaal, forms an alliance with the other Boer republic, the Orange Free State

Turbinia, powered by the newly invented Parsons steam turbine, breaks the speed record when Queen Victoria reviews her fleet

English author Bram Stoker publishes Dracula, his gothic tale of vampirism in Transylvania