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

The emperor Pedro II frees all the remaining slaves in Brazil without compensating their owners

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

Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison wins the US presidential election, defeating the incumbent president Grover Cleveland

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

A collapsing dam sends 40 feet of water through Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing more than 2000 people

US reformer Jane Addams sets up Hull House as a neighbourhood social centre in a deprived area of Chicago

The French Panama Canal company goes into liquidation with work still in progress

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

A coup removes emperor Pedro II from his throne in Brazil, putting in his place a military dictatorship

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

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