This Year in History:
1893
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
On the Hawaiian Islands, a group of American sugar planters under Sanford Ballard Dole overthrow Queen Liliuokalani, the Hawaiian monarch, and establish a new provincial government with Dole as president.…
Emmet Dalton, the only survivor of the Dalton Gang’s disastrous attempt to rob two Kansas banks, begins serving a life sentence in the Kansas State Penitentiary. Born in 1871, Emmet…
On March 22, 1893, the first women’s college basketball game is played at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. With each made basket counting as one point and the game lasting…
In an event that would have dramatic repercussions for the people of India, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a young Indian lawyer working in South Africa, refuses to comply with racial segregation…
In Washington, D.C. on June 9, 1893, the interior of ramshackle Ford’s Theatre collapses, causing the deaths of 22 people. The building—where President Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865—houses…
Mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers, creator of detective Lord Peter Wimsey, is born on this day in Oxford, England. Sayers, whose father was an Oxford teacher and minister, became one…
On July 10, 1893, trailblazing physician Daniel Hale Williams successfully performs one of the world’s first open‑heart surgeries at Provident Hospital in Chicago. Not only is he a pioneer of…
Russ Mitchell recaps the major historical events that took place on September 9 in this video clip from This Day In History. One event that took place was President Dwight…
On this day in 1893, President Grover Cleveland’s wife Frances becomes the first first lady to give birth in the White House when the couple’s daughter Esther is born. She…
Frances Folsom Cleveland, the wife of President Grover Cleveland, gives birth to a daughter, Esther, in the White House. On June 2, 1886, in an intimate ceremony held in the…
On September 16, 1893, the largest land run in history begins with more than 100,000 people pouring into the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma to claim valuable land that had once…
With the signing of the Electoral Bill by Governor Lord Glasgow, New Zealand becomes the first country in the world to grant national voting rights to women. The bill was…
October 30, 1893 is the last day of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, a great fair that celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World and offered fairgoers…
On this day, columns by the 20‑year‑old Willa Cather begin appearing in the Nebraska State Journal. Cather was the first of seven children born to an old Virginia family dating…
On December 16, 1893, the Philharmonic Society of New York gave the world premiere performance of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor “From the New World”…
