This Year in History:
1901
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
The confessed Colorado cannibal Alferd Packer is released from prison on parole after serving 18 years. One of the ragged legions of gold and silver prospectors who combed the Rocky Mountains searching for fortune in the 1860s, Alferd Packer also supplemented his meager income from mining by serving as a guide in the Utah and Colorado wilderness. […]
On January 10, 1901, a drilling derrick at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, Texas, produces an enormous gusher of crude oil, coating the landscape for hundreds of feet and signaling the advent of the American oil industry. The geyser was discovered at a depth of over 1,000 feet, flowed at an initial rate of approximately 100,000 […]
The death of Queen Victoria on January 22, 1901, ends an era in which most of her British subjects know no other monarch. Her 63-year reign saw the growth of an empire on which the sun never set. Victoria restored dignity to the English monarchy and ensured its survival as a ceremonial political institution. Born […]
On January 28, 1901, professional baseball’s American League is founded in Milwaukee. The league plans for a 140-game schedule, 14-man rosters and a players’ union. Franchises are in Baltimore (Orioles), Boston (Americans), Chicago (White Stockings), Cleveland (Blues), Detroit (Tigers), Milwaukee (Brewers), Philadelphia (Athletics) and Washington (Senators). The American League’s formation came shortly after professional baseball’s other […]
On March 15, 1901, paintings by the late Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh are shown at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in what was the artist’s first retrospective exhibit. The 71 paintings, which captured their subjects in bold brushstrokes and expressive colors, caused a sensation across the art world. Eleven years before, while living in […]
On May 21, 1901, Connecticut becomes the first state to pass a law regulating motor vehicles, limiting their speed to 12 mph in cities and 15 mph on country roads. Speed limits had been set earlier in the United States for non-motorized vehicles: In 1652, the colony of New Amsterdam (now New York) issued a […]
William Sydney Porter, otherwise known as O. Henry, is released from prison on this day, after serving three years in jail for embezzlement from a bank in Austin, Texas. To escape imprisonment, Porter had fled the authorities and hidden in Honduras, but returned when his wife, still in the U.S., was diagnosed with a terminal […]
On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley is shaking hands at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York, when a 28-year-old anarchist named Leon Czolgosz approaches him and fires two shots into his chest. The president rose slightly on his toes before collapsing forward, saying “be careful how you tell my wife.” Czolgosz moved over […]
U.S. President William McKinley dies on September 14, 1901, eight days after being shot by a deranged anarchist during the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley won his first Congressional seat at the age of 34 and spent 14 years in the House, becoming known as the leading Republican expert on tariffs. After losing […]
On September 28, 1901, Ed Sullivan, who will become the host of the long-running TV variety program The Ed Sullivan Show, is born in New York City. During the peak of its popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, Sullivan’s program showcased a wide range of entertainers, including Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Rudolf Nureyev, Jerry Lewis and […]
On October 24, 1901, a 63-year-old schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to successfully take the plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel. After her husband died in the Civil War, the New York-born Taylor moved all over the U. S. before settling in Bay City, Michigan, around 1898. In July 1901, […]
On October 29, 1901, President William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, is executed in the electric chair at Auburn Prison in New York. Czolgosz had shot McKinley on September 6, 1901; the president succumbed to his wounds eight days later. McKinley was shaking hands in a long reception line at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New […]
The first Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace on December 10, 1901. The ceremony came on the fifth anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and other high explosives. In his will, Nobel directed that the bulk of his […]
Italian physicist and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. The message—simply the Morse-code signal for the letter “s”—traveled more than 2,000 miles from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, […]
