This Year in History:
1896
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
Six years after Wilford Woodruff, president of the Mormon church, issued his Manifesto reforming political, religious, and economic life in Utah, the territory is admitted into the Union as the 45th state. In 1823, Vermont-born Joseph Smith claimed that an angel named Moroni visited him and told him about an ancient Hebrew text that had […]
By the time the first of his three career-defining operas had its premiere, Giacomo Puccini was no longer living a life of impoverished artistic struggle. His previous opera, Manon Lascaut, had made his name in the world of Italian opera, and, more important, it had earned him a significant advance on his next work. With […]
On April 6, 1896, the Olympic Games, a long-lost tradition of ancient Greece, are reborn in Athens 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. At the opening of the Athens Games, King Georgios I of Greece and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed athletes from 13 nations to the international competition. The […]
Dr. H. H. Holmes, one of America’s first well-known serial killers, is hanged in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Born Herman Mudgett in New Hampshire, Holmes began torturing animals as a child. Still, he was a smart boy who later graduated from the University of Michigan with a medical degree. Holmes financed his education with a series of […]
In a major victory for supporters of racial segregation, the U.S. Supreme Court rules seven to one that a Louisiana law providing for “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” on its railroad cars is constitutional. The high court held that as long as equal accommodations were provided, segregation was not discrimination […]
Nicholas II, the last czar, is crowned ruler of Russia in the old Ouspensky Cathedral in Moscow. Nicholas was neither trained nor inclined to rule, which did not help the autocracy he sought to preserve in an era desperate for change. Born in 1868, he succeeded to the Russian throne upon the death of his […]
At approximately 4:00 a.m. on June 4, 1896, in the shed behind his home on Bagley Avenue in Detroit, Henry Ford unveils the “Quadricycle,” the first automobile he ever designed or drove. Ford was working as the chief engineer for the main plant of the Edison Illuminating Company when he began working on the Quadricycle. […]
While salmon fishing near the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory on August 16, 1896, George Carmack reportedly spots nuggets of gold in a creek bed. His lucky discovery sparks the last great gold rush in the American West. Hoping to cash in on reported gold strikes in Alaska, Carmack had traveled there from California […]
The outlaw Bill Doolin is killed by a posse at Lawson, Oklahoma on the night of August 25, 1896. Born in Arkansas in 1858, William Doolin was never as hardened a criminal as some of his companions. He went west in 1881, finding work in Oklahoma at the big ranch of Oscar D. Halsell. Halsell took a […]
