Explore 963 historical events from 1880–1889.
Paul Charles Morphy was an American chess player. During his brief career in the late 1850s, Morphy was acknowledged as the world's greatest chess master. Later commentators have c…
Paul Morphy, American chess player (born 1837)
Christian Gottlieb Ferdinand Ritter von Hochstetter was a German-Austrian geologist. In 1857 he was appointed geologist on the Austrian Novara expedition to New Zealand, collecting…
Ferdinand von Hochstetter, Austrian geologist and academic (born 1829)
Kiến Phúc was a child emperor of Vietnam, who reigned for less than 8 months, 1883–1884, as the 7th emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty.
Kiến Phúc, Vietnamese emperor (born 1869)
Moses Fleetwood Walker, sometimes nicknamed Fleet Walker, was an American professional baseball catcher credited with being the first black man to play major league baseball. A nat…
Moses Fleetwood Walker (pictured), the last African American in Major League Baseball until Jackie Robinson, played his
William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, was an American soldier, bison hunter, and showman. One of the most famous figures of the American Old West, Cody began perfor…
Buffalo Bill's first Buffalo Bill's Wild West opens in Omaha, Nebraska
Alexander III was Emperor of Russia, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland from 13 March 1881 until his death in 1894. He was highly reactionary in domestic affairs and reversed…
Alexander III is crowned Tsar of Russia
The Orient Express was a long-distance passenger luxury train service created in 1883 by the Belgian company Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL) that operated until 200…
The first regularly scheduled Orient Express departs Paris
The Victoria Hall disaster occurred on 16 June 1883 at the Victoria Hall in Sunderland, England, when the distribution of free toys caused a crowd crush resulting in 183 children t…
The Victoria Hall theatre panic in Sunderland, England, kills 183 children
Krakatoa, also transcribed Krakatau, is a caldera in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Indonesian province of Lampung. The caldera is part of a volcan…
Krakatoa begins to erupt; the volcano explodes three months later, killing more than 36,000 people
The Brooklyn Bridge is a cable-stayed suspension bridge in New York City, spanning the East River between the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Opened on May 24, 1883, the Brookl…
The Brooklyn Bridge in New York City is opened to traffic after 14 years of construction
The Brooklyn Bridge is a cable-stayed suspension bridge in New York City, spanning the East River between the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Opened on May 24, 1883, the Brookl…
In New York City, 12 people are killed in a stampede on the recently opened Brooklyn Bridge
The War of the Pacific, also known by multiple other names, was a war between Chile and a Bolivian–Peruvian alliance from 1879 to 1884. Fought over Chilean claims on coastal Bolivi…
War of the Pacific: Chileans led by Alejandro Gorostiaga defeat Andrés Avelino Cáceres's Peruvian army at the Battle…
The 1883 Casamicciola earthquake, also known as the Ischia earthquake occurred on 28 July at 20:25 local time on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples in Italy. Although the e…
A moderate earthquake measuring magnitude 4.3–5.2 strikes the Italian island of Ischia, killing over 2,300 people.
Aleksanteri Aava, born Aleksanteri (Santeri) Kuparinen, was a Finnish poet and smallholder.
Aleksanteri Aava, Finnish poet (died 1956)
Henry Wood Jameson was an American amateur soccer player who competed in the 1904 Summer Olympics. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri and died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1904 …
Henry Jameson, American soccer player (died 1938)
Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech writer, humorist, satirist, journalist, bohemian, first anarchist and then communist, and commissar of the Red Army against the Czechoslovak Legion. He i…
Jaroslav Hašek, Czech soldier and author (died 1923)
Wang Zhaoming, widely known by his pen name Wang Jingwei, was a Chinese politician and poet who was leader of the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China (RNG), a …
Wang Jingwei, Chinese politician (died 1944)
Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler was an American mathematician. She is best known for early work on linear algebra in infinite dimensions, which has later become a part of functional anal…
Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler, American mathematician (died 1966)
The quagga is an extinct subspecies of the plains zebra which was endemic to South Africa until it was hunted to extinction in the late 19th century. It was long thought to be a di…
The last quagga dies at the Natura Artis Magistra, a zoo in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The Dominican Republic is an island country on the eastern part of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles of the Caribbean Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean. It s…
The first public performance of the Dominican Republic's national anthem, Himno Nacional.
On August 21, 1883, a violent and devastating tornado affected southeastern portions of the U.S. state of Minnesota. The massive tornado, retrospectively estimated to have been an …
An F5 tornado strikes Rochester, Minnesota, leading to the creation of the Mayo Clinic.
The French Third Republic was the system of government adopted in France from 4 September 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War, until 10 Jul…
France and Viet Nam sign the Treaty of Huế, recognizing a French protectorate over Annam and Tonkin.
Between 19 May and 21 October 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa began erupting, lasting more than five months. On 27 August, the island had its most significant eruption, which…
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa begins its final, paroxysmal, stage.
Alberto Collo was an Italian actor who appeared in more than a hundred and thirty films during his career, mostly during the silent era. During the 1910s he starred in several film…
Alberto Collo, Italian actor (died 1955)