The US Supreme Court rules in Plessey v. Ferguson that it is legal for a state to provide 'separate but equal' facilities for blacks

US engineer Henry Ford test-drives his first four-wheel internal-combustion vehicle, the Quadricycle, built in a coal shed behind his home

Henry James views the feckless adults in Maisie's life through the eyes of the child herself in What Maisie Knew

Adolph Ochs, a new proprietor of The New York Times, coins the slogan 'All the News That's Fit to Print'

Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes Women and Economics, developing the feminist theme in US cultural and political life

Joshua Slocum reaches Newport, Rhode Island, after sailing 46,000 miles to achieve the first solo voyage round the world

US basketball becomes a professional game with the establishment in Philadelphia of the National Basketball League

5-year-old Mary Pickford plays her first professional role on stage

The Australian soprano Nellie Melba forms the Melba Grand Opera Company as a touring venture in the USA

US social scientist Thorstein Veblen publishes The Theory of the Leisure Class, an attack on capitalist exploitation and 'consumerism'

Marconi equips two ships to send radio reports to New York on the progress of the yachts racing for the America's Cup

US Secretary of State John Hay circulates a proposal that western powers should adopt an open-to-all trading policy in China

Frank Baum introduces children to Oz, in his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

After a prodigiously productive career as novelist and journalist, Stephen Crane dies of tuberculosis at the age of 28

Harvey Firestone sets up the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio

Joshua Slocum publishes Sailing Alone Around the World, an account of his famous 1895-8 circumnavigation

Jack London's first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf, brings him a wide readership

Theodore Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie, receives no publicity because his publisher, Frank Doubleday, considers it immoral

More than 8000 people die when a hurricane demolishes the seaside resort of Galveston in Texas

The American League emerges from baseball's Western League, before going national in 1901

The Voice of the People is the first of Ellen Glasgow's novels set in her native state, Virginia

Wilbur and Orville Wright test a biplane glider at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina

Photographer Eadweard Muybridge extends the range of his studies with Human Figure in Motion

Ransome Eli Olds manufactures the Curved Dash Oldsmobile on assembly line principles in Detroit

The concept of instant coffee is developed in Chicago by the Japanese American chemist Satori Kato