Alexander Graham Bell makes the first practical use of his telephone, summoning his assistant from another room with the words 'Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.'

George Custer leads a US cavalry attack on the Sioux at the Little Bighorn river, with disastrous results

In 21 years Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass has grown from 12 poems to the two volumes of the sixth edition, published in the USA's centenary year

The US inventor Thomas Edison opens an experimental laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, calling it his 'invention factory'

Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates his new invention, the telephone, at the US Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia

Susan B. Anthony presents a Woman's Declaration of Rights at the US centennial Fourth of July celebrations

Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom and his friends find excitement in a small town on the Mississippi

After a failed bank hold-up in Northfield, Minnesota, the whole of the James gang is killed except Jesse and his brother Frank

The Compromise of 1877 settles the disputed US presidential election but ends active Republican commitment to the cause of Reconstruction in the southern states

Puck is launched in the USA as a an illustrated weekly magazine of political satire

Cattle-rustler William H. Bonney becomes known as Billy the Kid in his brief and murderous career of crime in New Mexico

The Nez Percé Indians are led by Chief Joseph in a war against the US army

A strike against wage cuts by Baltimore railway workers spreads until it becomes almost a national strike

The human voice is recorded for the first time when Thomas Edison recites 'Mary had a little lamb' into his newly patented phonograph

US author Joel Chandler Harris introduces Uncle Remus in a story in the Constitution

Mary Baker Eddy and others found the first Church of Christ, Scientist, in Lynn, Massachusetts

Thomas Edison develops a long-lasting carbon filament light bulb (traditionally 40 hours) and is able to light his Menlo Park laboratory with 30 bulbs

US author Lew Wallace publishes a historical novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

Boston lawyer Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr publishes a legal study that becomes a classic text, The Common Law

In Washington Square Henry James tells the sad story of heiress Catherine Sloper

Joel Chandler Harris publishes Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, the first of many Uncle Remus volumes

P.T. Barnum and his main rival James Bailey merge their enterprises to form America's leading circus

US president James Garfield is shot by Charles J. Guiteau at a Washington railway station, and dies two months later

Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady studies an American girl, Isabel Archer, in the unfamiliar context of Europe

Booker T. Washington, freed at the end of the Civil War, heads a college in the south, in Tuskegee, Alabama, to educate former slaves