1867

Events

January

• January 1 – The Covington–Cincinnati Suspension Bridge opens between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky, in the United States, becoming the longest single-span bridge in the world. It is renamed after its designer, John A. Roebling, in 1983.
• January 8 – African-American men are granted the right to vote in the District of Columbia.
• January 11 – Benito Juárez becomes Mexican president again.
• January 15 – Regent's Park skating disaster in London: 40 people die when ice on a lake breaks.
• January 30 – Emperor Kōmei of Japan dies suddenly, age 36, leaving his son Mutsuhito to succeed him.
• January 31 – Maronite nationalist leader Youssef Bey Karam leaves Lebanon aboard a French ship for Algeria.

  February

• February 3 – The late Emperor Kōmei's 14-year-old son, Prince Mutsuhito, becomes Emperor Meiji of Japan in a brief ceremony in Kyoto, ending the Late Tokugawa shogunate.
• February 7 – West Virginia University is established in Morgantown.
• February 13 – The Covering of the Senne in Brussels begins.
• February 14 – Augusta Institute is founded in Augusta, Georgia, later known as Morehouse College.
• February 15 – Johann Strauss II's waltz The Blue Danube is first performed, at a concert of the Vienna Men's Choral Association. Later this year, Strauss will adapt it into its popular purely orchestral version for the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
• February 19 – Battle of Inlon River: The Qing dynasty defeats the Nien rebels in Hubei, China.
• February 22 – The Indiana Daily Student is established at Indiana University in Bloomington.
• February 28 – The United States Congress forbids taxpayer funding of diplomatic envoys to the Holy See, begun in 1848, and breaks off relations. Funding resumes, along with relations, in 1984.

  March

• March 1 – Nebraska is admitted as the 37th U.S. state.
• March 5 – The Fenian Rising breaks out in Ireland.
• March 16 – An article by Joseph Lister outlining his use of antiseptic surgery is first published in The Lancet.
• March 23 – William III of the Netherlands accepts an offer of 5,000,000 guilders from Napoleon III for the sale of Luxembourg, leading to the Luxembourg Crisis.
• March 29 – The British North America Act receives royal assent, forming the Dominion of Canada, in an event known as the Confederation. This unites the Province of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia on July 1. Ottawa will become the capital.
• March 30 – Alaska Purchase: Alaska is purchased for US$7.2 million from Alexander II of Russia, about 2 cents/acre, by United States Secretary of State William H. Seward. Newspapers call this Seward's Folly.
• March – The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is established.

  April

• April 1 – The Strait Settlement of Singapore, formerly ruled from Calcutta, becomes a Crown colony, under the jurisdiction of the Colonial Office in London.
• April 1–November 3 – Exposition Universelle, an international exhibition in Paris. Among the visitors is Abdülaziz, making the first visit of a Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to Western Europe.
• April 28 – I.C. Sorosis, the first women's fraternity founded upon the men's fraternity model, with Pi Beta Phi as its motto, is founded at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois. In 1888, the motto becomes the name of the organization.

  May

• May 1 – The first political May Day march takes place in Chicago.
• May 7 – Alfred Nobel patents dynamite in the United Kingdom.
• May 11
• * Treaty of London: The great powers of Europe reaffirm the neutrality of Luxembourg, ending the Luxembourg Crisis. The Duchy of Limburg is formally re-incorporated into the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
• * Cox and Box, by Francis Burnand and Arthur Sullivan, is first publicly performed, at the Adelphi Theatre, London.
• May 24 – Robert William Keate becomes Lieutenant-governor of the Colony of Natal.
• May 29
• * The Austro-Hungarian Compromise is born through Act 12, which establishes the Austro-Hungarian Empire; on June 8 Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria is crowned King of Hungary.
• * Canadian Confederation: Queen Victoria signs the British North America Act, creating the Dominion of Canada, effective July 1.

  June

• June 15 – The Atlantic Cable Quartz Lode gold mine is named in Montana.

• June 19 – A firing squad executes Emperor Maximilian of Mexico and two of his lieutenants.
• June 20 – The first recorded association football match in Argentina takes place in Buenos Aires.

  July

• July 1
• * Canadian Confederation: The British North America Act of 29 March comes into force, creating the Dominion of Canada, the first independent dominion in the British Empire.
• * The Constitution of the North German Confederation comes into effect, creating a confederation of states, under the leadership of Prussia and Otto von Bismarck.
• July 9 – Queen's Park F.C., the oldest association football league team in Scotland, is founded.
• July 15 – France declares Cambodia's independence from Siam; Cambodia becomes a protectorate of France and Britain.
• July 17 – In Boston, Massachusetts, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine is established as the first dental school in the United States.
• July 18 – The Battle of Fandane-Thiouthioune: The Serer people defeat the Muslim Marabouts of Senegambia.
• July – The Reverend Thomas Baker, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary is cooked and eaten by Navatusila tribespeople at Nabutautau, Fiji, together with eight of his local followers, the only missionary in that country to suffer cannibalism.

  August

• August 7–September 20 – The first Canadian election sees John A. Macdonald's Conservatives elected to government and Macdonald becomes the Dominion's first prime minister.
• August 15 – Benjamin Disraeli's Second Reform Act enfranchises many men in cities for the first time, and adds 938,000 to an electorate of 1,057,000 in England and Wales.

  September

• September 2 – Emperor Meiji of Japan marries Empress Shōken. The Empress consort is thereafter known as Lady Haruko.
• September 4 – The Sheffield Wednesday F.C. is founded, at the Adelphi Hotel in Sheffield.
• September 14 – The first volume of Das Kapital is published by Karl Marx.
• September 30 – The United States takes control of Midway Island.

October

• October 12 – End of penal transportation from Britain as the last convict ship, the Hougoumont, departs from Portsmouth on an 89-day passage to Western Australia. 62 Fenians are among the transportees.
• October 18 – Alaska is transferred from Russia to the United States, becoming the Department of Alaska.
• October 21 – 'Manifest destiny': Medicine Lodge Treaty – Near Medicine Lodge Creek, Kansas, a landmark treaty is signed by southern Great Plains Indian leaders, requiring Native American Plains tribes to relocate to a reservation in western Oklahoma.
• October 27 – Italian unification: Giuseppe Garibaldi's troops march into the Papal States.

  November

• November 2 – The first issue of the women's fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar is published. It is issued weekly, but later monthly.
• November 9 – The last shōgun of Japan, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, tenders his resignation to Emperor Meiji.
• November 21 – American temperance crusader Carrie Nation marries Charles Gloyd.
• November 23 – The three 'Manchester Martyrs' are hanged in England for the murder of a policeman whilst attempting to rescue two Irish Republican Brotherhood members from imprisonment on 18 September.

  December

• December 2 – In a New York City theater, English author Charles Dickens gives his first public reading in the United States.
• December 4 – Beginning of British expedition to Abyssinia.
• December 13 – The Clerkenwell explosion, the most infamous action carried out by the Fenians in Britain in the 19th century.
• December 18 – Angola Horror : The fiery death of 49 people leads John D. Rockefeller to develop and sell his Mineral Seal Fire-Tested Burning Oil, and George Westinghouse to invent the railway air brake, which is mandated in the United States in 1893.

  Date unknown

• Pierre Michaux invents the front wheel-driven velocipede, the first mass-produced bicycle.
• South African diamond fields are discovered.
• The Prohibition National Committee is formed in the United States.
• Clarke School for the Deaf in Western Massachusetts opens its doors for the first time, becoming the first school for the deaf in the United States to teach its children how to communicate using the oral method.
• At Fountain Point, Michigan, an artesian water spring, begins to gush continuously.
• The modern rose is born, with the introduction of Rosa 'La France' by Jean-Baptiste André Guillot.
• Gorse is naturalised in New Zealand, where it soon becomes the worst invasive weed.
• The Swedish famine of 1867–1869 begins.
• Yellow fever kills 3,093 in New Orleans.
• The Wasps Rugby Football Club is formed in Middlesex, England.
• Margarine Unie, at the time named Antoon Jurgens United, a predecessor of the Unilever, worldwide toiletries, beauty care and beverage brand, is founded in Netherlands.
• Delhaize, as predecessor for Ahold Delhaize, a major retail group in Europe, is founded in Belgium.
• The board game Parcheesi is introduced in the United States.
• The three western provinces of Lower Cochinchina are annexed into the colony of French Cochinchina.