1886
Gold at Witwatersrand
A prospector named George Harrison picked up a chunk of ore on an Afrikaner farm in the Transvaal and recognized reef gold. Within months thousands of fortune hunters - "uitlanders" - were swarming over the veld, and the squalid mining camp of Johannesburg was taking shape. The Boer republics were now very valuable, and the road to war was open.
Haymarket Affair
At a labor rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square, a bomb thrown into a line of advancing police killed seven officers. The police opened fire; several workers died. Eight anarchists were arrested, tried in a carnival atmosphere, and four were hanged on shaky evidence. International Workers' Day, May 1, commemorates them.
Third Anglo-Burmese War
British troops took Mandalay in a brief campaign and exiled King Thibaw and his queen Supayalat to India. Burma was annexed to British India as a province - the first and only time the British swallowed a classical Southeast Asian kingdom whole. Thibaw would die in exile twenty years later, still wearing the royal turban.
Statue of Liberty Dedicated
Bartholdi's enormous copper figure of Liberty, a gift from France, was dedicated on Bedloe's Island in New York harbor by President Cleveland. Fog hid most of her. Emma Lazarus's poem about huddled masses would be added twenty years later. The statue would become the most famous symbol of immigration in the world.
Geronimo Surrenders
After thirty years of raiding across the Arizona and Sonora borderlands, the Chiricahua Apache leader Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson Miles in Skeleton Canyon. He and his band - fewer than forty warriors, tracked by five thousand American troops - were shipped by train to Florida and never saw their homeland again. The Indian wars in the Southwest were over.
Coca-Cola Invented
In Atlanta, a morphine-addicted Confederate veteran turned pharmacist named John Pemberton stirred up a tonic of coca-leaf extract, kola-nut caffeine, and syrup in a brass kettle. It sold poorly at first, mostly as a headache cure at soda fountains. Pemberton sold his rights for a few thousand dollars and died broke.