1889 van Gogh paints his Starry Night
Events
- First Boer War (1880–1881)
- American Indian Wars (Intermittently from 1622 to 1918)
- 20 July 1881 — Sioux chief Sitting Bull leads the last of his fugitive people in surrender to United States troops at Fort Buford in Montana.
- France colonizes Indochina (1883)
- German colonization (1887)
- May to August, 1883: Krakatoa, a volcano in Indonesia, erupted cataclysmically; 36,000 people were killed, the majority being killed by the resulting tsunami.
- September 1887: The Yellow river flooded and killed about 900,000 people.
- Development and commercial production of gasoline-powered automobiles were undertaken by Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler and Maybach
- The first commercial production and sales of phonographs and phonograph recordings occurred.
- Steel frame construction of “sky-scrapers” happened for the first time.
- Home Insurance Building, the first skyscraper in history, becomes the tallest man-made structure ever built after it officially opened in 1885.
- March 31, 1889 – The Eiffel Tower is inaugurated (opens May 6). At 300 m, its height exceeds the previous tallest structure in the world by 130 m.
- 1889: Aspirin patented.
- 1884: Sir Hiram Maxim invents the first self-powered Machine gun.
- 1886: Karl Benz sells the first commercial automobile.
- 1890: The cardboard box is invented.
- 1892: John Froelich develops and constructs the first gasoline/petrol-powered tractor.
- 1894: Karl Elsener invents the Swiss Army knife.
- 1894: First gramophone record.
- 1895: Wilhelm Röntgen identifies x-rays.
- 1895: Volleyball is invented.
- 1886: Construction of the Statue of Liberty; Coca-Cola is developed.
- 1890: First use of the electric chair as a method of execution.
- 1889: Vincent van Gogh paints The Starry Night.
- 1889: Moulin Rouge opens in Paris.
- 1888 — Whitechapel murders by the infamous Jack the Ripper.
Literature and arts
- Friedrich Nietzsche published Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
- Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
- Carlo Collodi published The Adventures of Pinocchio.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov.
- Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward.
- Robert Louis Stevenson published Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
- Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes tale.
- African-American music and ragtime rise to popularity in the later part of the decade.
- Guy de Maupassant wrote The Necklace.
- Henrik Ibsen published Ghosts
