US entrepreneur James 'Buck' Duke wins exclusive rights in a machine that can manufacture 100,000 cigarettes a day

Huck Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer continue their exploits on the Mississippi in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham US author William Dean Howells follows the fortunes of a self-made man in Boston

The name Coca-Cola is registered by John S. Pemberton in America for a drink of cocaine, cola nuts and citrus juices

US author Frances Hodgson Burnett publishes Little Lord Fauntleroy, featuring an aristocratic child in a velvet suit

In the Haymarket Affair a demonstration in Chicago against police brutality results in deaths and subsequent executions

The Statue of Liberty, after crossing the Atlantic, is erected on Bedloe's island in the approach to New York harbour

The American Federation of Labor, with Samuel Gompers as its first president, is formed as an umbrella organization to represent all unions

The US Congress passes the Interstate Commerce Act, an early attempt to avoid the excesses of unrestrained capitalism

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

Anne Sullivan works with the deaf and blind 7-year-old Helen Keller, in a relationship that will last nearly half a century

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

The first conference of American nations, in Washington, D.C., launches the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics (later called the Pan-American Union)

The US industrialist Andrew Carnegie argues in The Gospel of Wealth that 'the man who dies rich dies disgraced'

In How the Other Half Lives David Riis alerts middle-class New Yorkers to the appalling slum conditions in lower Manhattan

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

Poems is the first of six collections of Emily Dickinson's poetry, found among her papers on her death and published posthumously

Hundreds of Sioux Indians are killed by US troops in a massacre at Wounded Knee Creek

Canadian athlete James Naismith, at a YMCA college in Springfield, Massachusetts, invents basketball as an indoor winter game

Herman Melville dies in obscurity in New York, with an unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd (not printed till 1924)

Ellis Island in New York Bay opens as the point of reception for arriving immigrants

The Ohio Supreme Court rules that monopolistic practices by Rockefeller's oil company are illegal