This Year in History:
1884
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
February 1, 1884: The first portion, or fascicle, of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), considered the most comprehensive and accurate dictionary of the English language, is published. Today, the OED is the definitive authority on the meaning, pronunciation and history of over half a million English words, past and present Plans for the dictionary began […]
Future President Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother die, only hours apart, on February 14, 1884. Roosevelt was at work in the New York state legislature attempting to get a government reform bill passed when he was summoned home by his family. He returned home to find his mother, Mittie, had succumbed to typhoid fever. On […]
Isoroku Yamamoto, perhaps Japan’s greatest strategist and the officer who would contrive the surprise air attack on U.S. naval forces at Pearl Harbor, is born on April 4, 1884. A graduate of the Japanese naval academy in 1904, Yamamoto worked as a naval attaché for the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., from 1926 to 1927. […]
On May 8, 1884, Harry S. Truman is born in Lamar, Missouri. The son of a farmer, Truman could not afford to go to college. He joined the army at the relatively advanced age of 33 in 1916 to fight in World War I. After the war, he opened a haberdashery in Kansas City. When […]
On June 16, 1884, the first roller coaster in America opens at Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York. Known as a switchback railway, it was the brainchild of LaMarcus Thompson, traveled approximately six miles per hour and cost a nickel to ride. The new entertainment was an instant success and by the turn of the […]
In a ceremony held in Paris on July 4, 1884, the completed Statue of Liberty is formally presented to the U.S. ambassador as a commemoration of the friendship between France and the United States. The idea for the statue was born in 1865, when the French historian and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye proposed a monument […]
On December 6, 1884, in Washington, D.C., workers place a nine-inch aluminum pyramid inscribed with “Laus Deo,” meaning praise (be) to God, atop a tower of white marble, completing the construction of an impressive monument to the city’s namesake and the nation’s first president, George Washington. As early as 1783, the infant U.S. Congress decided that a […]
A central player in the violent Lincoln County War of 1878-81, the cattleman John Chisum dies at Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Born in Tennessee in 1824, Chisum moved with his family to Paris, Texas, when he was eleven years old. For several years he worked as construction contractor, but in 1854, he decided to go into […]
Hideki Tojo, prime minister of Japan during the war, is born in Tokyo. After graduating from the Imperial Military Academy and the Military Staff College, Tojo was sent to Berlin as Japan’s military attache after World War I. Having already earned a reputation for sternness and discipline, Tojo was given command of the 1st Infantry […]
