On the Hawaiian Islands, a group of American sugar planters under Sanford Ballard Dole overthrow Queen Liliuokalani, the Hawaiian monarch, and establish a new provincial government with Dole as president. The coup occurred with the foreknowledge of John L. Stevens, the U.S. minister to Hawaii, and 300 U.S. Marines from the U.S. cruiser Boston were called to Hawaii, allegedly to protect American lives.

On March 22, 1893, the first women’s college basketball game is played at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. With each made basket counting as one point and the game lasting two 15-minute halves, a sophomore class team prevails over a freshmen team, 5-4. Men are not permitted inside the gym at the all-women college, but a crowd of fascinated women cheer on their fellow classmates from the running track of the campus gymnasium. The winning team earns a gold and white banner.

In an event that would have dramatic repercussions for the people of India, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a young Indian lawyer working in South Africa, refuses to comply with racial segregation rules on a South African train and is forcibly ejected at Pietermaritzburg.

In Washington, D.C. on June 9, 1893, the interior of ramshackle Ford’s Theatre collapses, causing the deaths of 22 people. The building—where President Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865—houses hundreds of clerks employed by the War Department’s Records and Pensions Division. An investigation determines the cause of the tragedy was a pier that had given way during excavation in the basement for an electric-light plant.

On July 10, 1893, trailblazing physician Daniel Hale Williams successfully performs one of the world’s first open-heart surgeries at Provident Hospital in Chicago. Not only is he a pioneer of the procedure; he is one of just three African American physicians practicing in Chicago at a time when many white-run hospitals refused to treat Black patients—much less hire Black doctors.

Frances Folsom Cleveland, the wife of President Grover Cleveland, gives birth to a daughter, Esther, in the White House.

On September 16, 1893, the largest land run in history begins with more than 100,000 people pouring into the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma to claim valuable land that had once belonged to Native Americans. With a single shot from a pistol the mad dash began, and land-hungry pioneers on horseback and in carriages raced forward to stake their claims to the best acres.

With the signing of the Electoral Bill by Governor Lord Glasgow, New Zealand becomes the first country in the world to grant national voting rights to women. The bill was the outcome of years of suffragette meetings in towns and cities across the country, with women often traveling considerable distances to hear lectures and speeches, pass resolutions, and sign petitions. New Zealand women first went to the polls in the national elections of November 1893.

On December 16, 1893, the Philharmonic Society of New York gave the world premiere performance of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor “From the New World” at Carnegie Hall. In his review of the performance the following day, New York Times music critic W.J. Henderson called the piece better known today as the New World Symphony, “a vigorous and beautiful work” that “must take the place among the finest works in this form produced since the death of Beethoven.”