1883

• 1883 A collection of businesses called the Western Outpost springs up, one day's ride outside of Blackwood.
  
• 1883 The territorial capital was moved from Yankton to Bismarck and the first capital was constructed. A university (UND) at Grand Forks and a Presbyterian College (now Jamestown College) were established. The Marquis de Mores began a packing plant and other businesses and planned the town of Medora; these enterprises failed in 1886. Theodore Roosevelt first visited Medora; he later established two ranches in that vicinity that he utilized periodically until 1888.
• 1883  Jan 3, Clement Attlee Britain's prime minister [1945-1951; head of Labor Party, was born.
  
• 1883  Jan 16, The U.S. Civil Service Commission was established. The US Civil Service Reform Act prohibited federal employees from contributing to political campaigns.
• 1883  Feb 23, Victor Fleming, director of the movie classics "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind", was born.
• 1883  Mar 14, German political philosopher Karl Marx died in London.
• 1883  Mar 24, Long-distance telephone service was inaugurated between Chicago and New York.
  
• 1883  Mar 30, Jo Davidson, American sculptor, was born.
  
• 1883  Apr 1, Lon Chaney (d.1973), actor know as "man of a thousand faces," (High Noon, Phantom of Opera), was born.
  
• 1883  Apr 15, Vladimir Kovalevsky (b.1842), paleontologist, committed suicide. His work had focused on the evolution of odd-toed and even-toed ungulates. He also was the first translator of Darwin's works into Russian.
  
• 1883  May 5, Charles Bender, the only Native American in baseball's Hall of Fame, was born.
• 1883  May 23, Douglas Fairbanks, actor, was born.
  
• 1883  May 23, The first baseball game between one-armed and one-legged players was played.
• 1883  May 24, The Brooklyn Bridge, hailed as the "eighth wonder of the world," officially opened to traffic. The suspension bridge linking the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn became a symbol of America's progress and ingenuity. The bridge has a span of 1,595 feet with 16-inch steel wire suspension cables fastened to Gothic-style arches 276 feet tall. Civil engineer John Augustus Roebling, inventor of the steel wire cable and designer of the bridge, was killed in a construction accident at the outset of construction in 1869. His son and partner, Washington A. Roebling, supervised the project to its completion in spite of a debilitating illness.
  
• 1883  May 30, 12 people were trampled to death in New York City when a rumor that the recently opened Brooklyn Bridge was in danger of collapsing triggered a stampede.
  
• 1883  Jun 2, The first baseball game under electric lights was played in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
  
• 1883  Jun 5, Economist John Maynard Keynes (d.1946), economist, was born in Cambridge, England. He developed theories on the causes of prolonged unemployment and advised wide government expenditures as a counter measure to deflation and depression. "I do not know which makes a man more conservative -- to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past."
  
• 1883  Jun 16, Both escorted and unescorted ladies were admitted to the New York Giants' baseball park free of charge.
  
• 1883  Jul 3, Franz Kafka (d.1924), Czech novelist, author of "The Metamorphosis," was born in Prague. "The Castle" and "The Trial," were both published after his death. He died of tuberculosis.
  
• 1883  Jul 4, Rube Goldberg (Ruben Lucius Goldberg, 1883-1970) cartoonist, was born in San Francisco. He was known for cartoons featuring absurdly complicated mechanical devices to accomplish absurdly simple tasks.
  
• 1883  Jul 4, One of the first Wild West shows was performed in North Platte, Nebraska, and was organized by Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody), who took the show on the road the following year.
  
• 1883  Jul 23, Lord Allanbrooke (d.1963), English soldier, was born.
  
• 1883  Jul 29, Benito Mussolini, dictator of Fascist Italy, 1922-1945, was born.
  
• 1883  Aug 8, Emiliano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary who occupied Mexico City three times, was born.
  
• 1883  Aug 19, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (d.1971), French fashion designer, was born: "My friends, there are no friends."
  
• 1883  Aug 23, Jonathan Wainwright, U.S. general who fought against the Japanese on Corregidor in the Philippines and was forced to surrender, was born.
  
• 1883  Aug 26, The island volcano Krakatoa in Indonesia began erupting with increasingly large explosions and killed 36,000 people either on the island itself or from the resulting tidal waves that inundated nearby shores.
  
• 1883  Aug 27, The island volcano Krakatoa erupted; the resulting tidal waves in Indonesia's Sunda Strait claimed some 36,000 lives in Java and Sumatra.
  
• 1883  Oct 18, The weather station at the top of Ben Nevis, Scotland, the highest mountain in Britain, was declared open.
  
• 1883  Nov 3, U.S. Supreme Court declared American Indians to be "dependent aliens."
  
• 1883  Nov 3, A poorly trained Egyptian army, led by British General William Hicks, marched toward El Obeid in the Sudan--straight into a Mahdist ambush and massacre.
  
• 1883  Nov 18, The United States and Canada adopted a system of Standard Time zones.
  
• 1883  Dec 15, William A. Hinton, developer of the "Hinton Test" for diagnosing syphilis, was born.
  
• 1883  Dec 22, Arthur Wergs Mitchell, first African-American to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, was born.
• 1883  Edward Degas painted "Woman in a Tub."
  
• 1883  Lord Frederick Leighton painted "Kittens."
  
• 1883  Claude Monet made a trip to Italy with Cezanne and Renoir and painted "The Monte Carlo Road."
  
• 1883  Tokonami Seisei, self-taught Japanese artist, painted "Volcano."
  
• 1883  Arthur Conan Doyle published his short story "The Captain of the Pole-Star."
  
• 1883  Jean-Paul Richter published a compilation of Leonardo de Vinci's notebooks.
  
• 1883  Anthony Trollope published "An Autobiography." He wrote harshly about his mother and made her out to be a second-rate writer.
  
• 1883  Bruckner composed his Seventh Symphony.
  
• 1883  John Philip Sousa premiered his "The Transit of Venus March" on the 5th anniversary of the death of scientist Joseph Henry.
  
• 1883  The opera "Mazeppa" by Tchaikovsky was completed.
  
• 1883  The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, originally the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, was established.
  
• 1883  The Elk Cove Inn in Elk, California, was built.
• 1883  In Oakland, Ca. the city engineer, Anthony Chabot, donated the Chabot Observatory and Science Center to the school district.
  
• 1883  Wente Winery was founded in California.
  
• 1883  Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt wore her "Electric Light" gown and stole the show at Alva Vanderbilt's costume party in Newport, Rhode Island.
  
• 1883  Joseph Pulitzer assumed command of the New York World newspaper with a circulation of 15,000.
  
• 1883  Barbed wire that fenced the west at this time was on display at Oracle Junction, Arizona, and includes Baker's 'Odd Barb.'
  
• 1883  The Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act passed by Congress on Mar 1, 1875.
  
• 1883  M.H. Lane set up an assembly line to build carts, buggies, wagons and sleighs at his Michigan Buggy Co. in Kalamazoo, Mich.
  
• 1883  The railroad companies got together and established standard railroad time to increase safety and surmount complex scheduling on local times.
  
• 1883  James Goold Cutler took out a patent on office building chutes for mail. The first one was installed in Rochester N.Y.
  
• 1883  The W.S. Reed Co. of Leominster, Mass., produced a couple of cast-iron mechanical banks, that never made it to mass production.
  
• 1883  The factory of the Racine Silver Plate Co. re-opened in Rockford, Ill and was re-named the Rockford Silver Plate Co. Its factory in Racine had burned down in 1882.
  
• 1883  John Montgomery made the first manned, controlled flight in the US in his "Gull" glider, whose design was inspired by watching birds.
  
• 1883  William Kitchen Parker, English anatomist and embryologist,  produced an illustrated account of skull development in crocodiles and alligators.
  1883  Supply ships failed to arrive at Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic so Lt. Greely and his 24 men retreated south. Only Greely and six others survived.
  
• 1883  Karl Marx died.
  
• 1883  Richard Wagner, German composer, died.
  
• 1883  In Australia an itinerant boundary rider discovered a silver lode at Broken Hill in New South Wales.
  
• 1883  In Britain Francis Galton developed the questionnaire.
  
• 1883  In Chile the Concha y Toro wineries were founded with vines brought from France.
  
• 1883  In England production of Bretby Art Pottery was begun by Tooth & Co. in South Derbyshire.
  
• 1883  Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck adopted the first compulsory health insurance program on a national scale.
• 1883  In Italy the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme was built by the Massimo family in Rome and later converted to an archeological museum.
  
• 1883  In Wales the Treorchy Men's Choir was established in the Rhondda Valley to keep miners out of trouble.
  
• 1883-1884 In Sudan British officered Egyptian armies were defeated by the forces of El Mahdi, called Dervishes by the British.