This Year in History:
1872
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
President Grant signs the bill creating the nation’s first national park at Yellowstone on March 1, 1872. Native Americans had lived and hunted in the region that would become Yellowstone for hundreds of years before the first Anglo explorers arrived. Abundant game and mountain streams teeming with fish attracted the Indians to the region, though […]
On November 5, 1872, 48 years before American women gain the right to vote with the 19th Amendment, pioneering women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony illegally attempts to cast a vote in the presidential election. Anthony, who had devoted five decades of her life to women’s suffrage, gets arrested for the shenanigan—and is tried and […]
The Dei Gratia, a small British brig under Captain David Morehouse, spots the Mary Celeste, an American vessel, sailing erratically but at full sail near the Azores Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was seaworthy, its stores and supplies were untouched, but not a soul was onboard. On November 7, the brigantine Mary Celeste […]
Already appearing as a well-known figure of the Wild West in popular dime novels, Buffalo Bill Cody makes his first stage appearance on this day, in a Chicago-based production of The Scouts of the Prairie. Unlike many of his imitators in Wild West shows and movies, William Frederick Cody actually played an important role in […]
