1892
Homestead Strike
At Andrew Carnegie's Pennsylvania steel mill, locked-out workers fought a twelve-hour battle with Pinkerton guards on barges on the Monongahela River. Seven Pinkertons and nine workers died. The strike was broken by the state militia. Carnegie, safely in Scotland, blamed his manager Henry Frick. American labor would not recover for forty years.
Ellis Island Opens
The new federal immigration station in New York harbor opened its doors to a fifteen-year-old Irish girl named Annie Moore, the first of millions. Over the next six decades some twelve million immigrants would pass through Ellis Island's great hall and medical inspection rooms. For most, it was the first American ground they touched.
Basketball Invented
At a YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts, a Canadian physical-education teacher named James Naismith nailed two peach baskets to a gymnasium balcony and handed his students a soccer ball. He wrote thirteen rules on a sheet of paper. The game - indoor, non-contact, and oddly American - would escape the gym and conquer the world.
Boll Weevil Crosses Rio Grande
A small beetle with a particular appetite for cotton bolls crossed from Mexico into Texas and began, slowly, to eat its way across the American South. Over the next thirty years it would devastate the cotton economy, drive the Great Migration, and force agricultural diversification. A bug was rewriting the map of Black America.
Lizzie Borden Murders
Andrew and Abby Borden were hacked to death with a hatchet in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home. Andrew's spinster daughter Lizzie was charged and acquitted. A children's rhyme preserved the story; the real killer was never identified. The trial was the first true-crime national sensation of the telegraph age. Lizzie lived another thirty-four years in Fall River, wealthy, ostracized, and forever shadowed by the forty whacks.