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

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

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

The US Congress establishes Yellowstone, with its famous geysers, as the world's first national park

The Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroad cuts through the territory reserved for American Indians, bringing hordes of 'boomers'

Pragmatism emerges as a philosophical approach in meetings of the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Gilded Age, by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain, provides the familiar name for life in the US towards the end of the nineteenth century

San Francisco merchant Levi Strauss receives a patent for denim jeans, soon to be known as Levi's

US shoe salesman and YMCA member Dwight L. Moody launches into a new career as a revivalist preacher

St Nicholas, a monthly magazine of high literary quality for children, is launched in the USA

Madame Blavatsky founds in New York the Theosophical Society, preaching universal brotherhood with a strong dash of mysticism

Congress passes a Civil Rights Act outlawing segration in the USA on public transport and in hotels and restaurants

Andrew Carnegie's new steel mill near Pittsburgh prospers through automation, new technology and non-union labour