Recovery from serious injury convinces Mary Baker Eddy that sickness and health are spiritually based, and provides her with the impulse to found Christian Science

Secretary of state William Seward negotiates a price of $7.2 million for the purchase of Alaska from Russia, in a deal that some consider 'Seward's Folly'

The British North America Act, acknowledging the fears of French Catholics in Canada, guarantees the rights of "dissentient schools"

The US Congress passes Reconstruction Acts, dividing the defeated South into military districts and insisting on elections by universal male suffrage

The invention of barbed wire is patented in the USA by Lucien Smith, designed to fence in cattle but also a protection for the wheat fields of the midwest plains

Four former colonies (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec) unite to form the new nation of Canada with Ottawa as the capital

The Canadian nation is called the Dominion of Canada – the first example of 'dominion status'

William Cody earns his nickname Buffalo Bill by killing thousands of the animals to feed construction workers on the Union Pacific Railroad

The first collection of 'Negro Spirituals' is published in book form in the US as Slave Songs of the United States

US president Andrew Johnson escapes impeachment (for dismissing his secretary of war) by a single voite

US author Louisa May Alcott begins serial publication of her book for children, Little Women (in book form 1869)

George Custer leads federal troops in the massacre of more than 100 American Indians, on an official reservation beside the Washita river

Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant wins the US presidential election, as the Republican candidate against Democrat Horatio Seymour

The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (ratified in 1870) makes it illegal to deny the right to vote on racial grounds

Cincinnati, Ohio, fielding the first baseball team in which every member is a hired professional, wins every match of the year

The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads meet at Promontory Summit in Utah, completing the first transcontinental line

The territory of the Hudson's Bay Company is transferred to the new state of Canada

John D. Rockefeller and his partners establish the Standard Oil Company of Ohio

Bret Harte's comic ballad Plain Language from Truthful James acquires a popular alternative title, The Heathen Chinee

US anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan inaugurates kinship studies with his massive Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family

Civil War veterans in the USA establish the National Rifle Association to promote marksmanship

US president Ulysses S. Grant uses the new Civil Rights Act to suppress the violent Ku Klux Klan in southern states

A fire in Chicago destroys a third of the city, to be followed by an extremely rapid and successful period of reconstruction

British Columbia agrees to join the Canadian confederation on the promise of a transcontinental railway

Italian US immigrant Antonio Meucci files a patent in New York for the invention of the telephone