In Her Times

1861-1870

1861-1865 Civil War

1861 Yale University awards first Ph.D. in United States

• first oil refinery is set up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1862 Internal Revenue Service established

• Homestead Act passed, awarding 160 acres of free public land to homesteaders who improve and live on land for five years

1863 Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation frees slaves only in rebel states

• Seventh-day Adventist Church formally organized in Battle Creek, Michigan

1864 George Pullman builds comfortable railroad sleeping car

1865 Freedman's Bureau established in Washington, DC

• 13th amendment, abolishing slavery, ratified

1866 Mary Baker Eddy begins teaching faith healing -- Church of Christ Scientist formally founded in 1879

1867 Howard University founded as a co-educational, integrated school

• farmers begin the Grange movement

• Alaska purchased from Russia for $7.2 million

1868 Louisa May Alcott publishes Little Women

1869 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
(E.C. Stanton shown here) found national Woman Suffrage Association

• transcontinental railroad completed

1871-1880

1871 Great Chicago fire burns for three days

1872 Architect H. H. Richardson begins building Trinity Church in Boston

• Montgomery Ward, first mail-order company, begins operation in Chicago

• Yellowstone Park, world's first national park, established

• People's Party nominates women's rights activist Victoria Woodhall as the nation's first presidential candidate -- Frederick Douglass (Shown Here) is her running mate

1873 cable car starts running in San Francisco

• first penny postcards are issued

• Chautauqua movement begins in New York state

1876 Mark Twain (shown at right) publishes Adventures of Tom Sawyer

• Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates the telephone

• 1877 first nationwide work stoppage, Great Railroad Strike, begins in West Virginia and spreads across the country

• Reconstruction ends in the south as federal troops withdraw and whites return to political power

• Thomas Edison demonstrates the phonograph, records Mary Had a Little Lamb

1879 Frank W. Woolworth opens the "five and dime" store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania

• Thomas Edison (snown at right) invents the light bulb

1879-1880 "Exodusters," ex-slaves begin exodus to Kansas for free land

1880 New York City lights a strip of Broadway with carbon-arc street lamps

• Salvation Army begins work in United States

1881-1883

1881 Clara Barton founds American Association of the Red Cross

• Booker T. Washington founds Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to provide practical education for black men and to train teachers

• President James Garfield assassinated in Washington, DC railroad station

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act denies Chinese laborers entry into United States for ten years-- first major attempt to regulate immigration

• first Labor Day celebrated

1883 Home Insurance Building in Chicago is first US building in which metal skeleton carries the weight of building -- prototype of modern skyscraper

• Buffalo Bills's Wild West Show, with Annie Oakley (shown at right) and Sitting Bull, begins touring country

• Brooklyn Bridge opens in New York City

 

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