This Year in History:
1878
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
On February 11, 1878, the Boston Bicycle Club, the first organization for recreational cyclists, is formed. The following year, a club is formed in Buffalo, followed by a club in New York in 1880. In the ensuing decades, as middle-class participation in cycling grows, hundreds of cycling clubs are formed across the United States. The Boston […]
Long simmering tensions in Lincoln County, New Mexico, explode into a bloody shooting war when gunmen murder the English rancher John Tunstall. Tunstall had established a large ranching operation in Lincoln County two years earlier in 1876, stepping into the middle of a dangerous political and economic rivalry for control of the region. Two Irish-Americans, […]
On February 19, 1878, Thomas Edison is awarded U.S. Patent No. 200,521 for his invention—the phonograph. The technology that made the modern music business possible came into existence in the New Jersey laboratory where Edison created the first device to both record sound and play it back. Edison’s invention came about as spin-off from his […]
Strongly supported by western mining interests and farmers, the Bland-Allison Act—which provided for a return to the minting of silver coins—becomes the law of the land. The strife and controversy surrounding the coinage of silver is difficult for most modern Americans to understand, but in the late 19th century it was a topic of keen […]
Black Bart robs a Wells Fargo stagecoach in California. Wearing a flour sack over his head, the armed robber stole the small safe box with less than $400 and a passenger’s diamond ring and watch. When the empty box was recovered, a taunting poem signed “Black Bart” was found inside: Here I lay me down […]
On August 13, 1878, Kate Bionda, a restaurant owner, dies of yellow fever in Memphis, Tennessee, after a man who had escaped a quarantined steamboat visited her restaurant. The disease spread rapidly and the resulting epidemic emptied the city. Yellow fever, which is carried by mosquitoes, originally came from West Africa and was brought to […]
In the early afternoon on September 17, 1862, just about 200 miles from where the Battle of Antietam was taking place, another Civil War-era tragedy occurs: Three explosions rip through the Allegheny Arsenal and kill 78 workers, mostly young women and girls. At 2 p.m., the first explosion hits, followed shortly by two more; then, […]
Upton Sinclair, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and reformer, is born in Baltimore, Maryland on September 20, 1878. Sinclair came from a once well-to-do Southern family that had suffered reverses. When he was 10, the family moved to New York. Starting at age 15, he earned money writing dime novels, which paid his way through New York’s […]
John Kehoe, the last of the Molly Maguires, is executed in Pennsylvania. The Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society that had allegedly been responsible for some incidences of vigilante justice in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, defended their actions as attempts to protect exploited Irish-American workers. In fact, they are often regarded as one of […]
