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

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Herman Melville dies in obscurity in New York, with an unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd (not printed till 1924)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

Leaves of Grass, still growing, is published in its ninth edition in the year of Walt Whitman's death

Pudge Heffelfinger becomes the first football pro when the Allegheny Athletic Association pay him $500 to play a game in their team

Dvorák takes a job in New York as director of the National Conservatory, returning to Prague in 1895

In a sensational trial in Massachusetts, Lizzie Borden is acquitted of the charge of killing her father and stepmother with an axe

US author Stephen Crane cannot find a publisher for his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, so issues it privately

Decline in the federal gold reserve and panic by investors prompts a spectacular crash in the US economy

George Westinghouse demonstrates the advantages of AC (Alternating Current) when he provides 100,000 lights for the Chicago World's Fair

Anton Dvorák's Ninth Symphony, subtitled 'From the New World', has its first performance in New York

Wealthy US astronomer Percival Lowell builds an observatory at Mars Hill in Flagstaff, Arizona

William Randolph Hearst buys the New York Journal, the first of numerous purchases in building up his press empire

Stephen Crane succeeds handsomely with his second novel, The Red Badge of Courage, set in the American Civil War

Joshua Slocum sails from Boston in his sloop Spray for his attempt at a solo circumnavigation of the world

The USGA (US Golf Association) stages the first national amateur and open championships

Utah is admitted to the union as the 45th state, after the Mormons agree to give up polygamy

The prolific US poet Edwin Arlington Robinson publishes The Torrent and the Night Before, his first poems about the fictional Tilbury Town