Documents in Year 1869                     

Links of Interest:

• Andrew Johnson, Seventeenth U.S. President

(1865-1869)

• Ulysses S. Grant, Eighteenth U.S. President

(1869-1877)

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• Education: Higher (College)

Morrill Act established Land-grant Industrial colleges to meet the needs of farmers and laborers to improve their social and economic status. 65 new land-grant colleges were established including:
University of Maine (1865)
University of Illinois (1867)
University of West Virginia (1867)
University of California (1868)

Purdue University (1869)

University of Nebraska (1869)

Ohio University (1870)
University of Arkansas (1871)
Texas A&M University (1871)

Source: Foundations of American Education, Sixth Edition page 140-141 / L. Dean Webb, Arlene Metha. Published by Pearson Education. 2010 see 1870 for next event...

• Literature: Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) publishes a travel guide based on his 1867 five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, The Innocents Abroad, which became a best-seller.

  • Biography - learn about Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

  • Memory Game - test what you remember about Mark Twain

  
  

• Native Americans 1869-70:

Smallpox epidemic among Canadian Plains Indians (Great Plains)
Viola, Herman I, North American Indians, Crown Publishers, New York: New York, 1996

• Natural Resources:

  John Muir arrives in Yosemite

• Photography:

  Cowboys

This website of the Cowboy and National Heritage Museum located in Oklahoma City, OK has links to historical photo collections and more.

• Science:

  Periodic Classification of the Elements

Russian physicist and chemist Dmitri Ivanovitch Mendeleev (1834-1907)  presented the Periodic Table of the Elements in 1869 which included 65 elements known in his era.  See 1819 for the symbols used for the elements.

• Technology:

  Transcontinental Railroad

Built from 1863-1869 Union Pacific (started in Council Bluffs, Iowa and headed West) and Western Pacific and Central Pacific (started in San Francisco, California and headed East) Railroads met in Promontory, Utah. The continuous railroad spanned over 1,912 miles.

Golden Spike Ceremony

Ceremonies at Promontory, UT, celebrate completion of the transcontinental railroad on 10 May 1869.

Transatlantic Cable

The Great Eastern lays a cable from France to St. Pierre and then to Duxbury, Massachusetts. Another cable travels from Suez to Bombay.

Brooklyn Bridge

First surveys to position the bridge to link Brooklyn to New York. Designer John Roebling dies of lockjaw after a freak accident when surveying the river and a ferry slams against the dock and his foot is crushed between the pilings. His son, Colonel Washington A Roebling took over as chief engineer. It took 14 years to build.
It's magnificent twin towers, breathtaking span, cutting edge technology, and sheer beauty make Brooklyn Bridge the grandest, and perhaps the most important structure built in America during the nineteenth century. It was called "the eighth wonder of the world."
Curlee, Lynn Brooklyn Bridge New York: Atheneum Books, 2001.