1874

Events from the year 1874 in the United States.
==Incumbents==
===Federal Government===
* President: Ulysses S. Grant (R-IL)
* Vice President: Henry Wilson (R-MA)
* Chief Justice: Morrison Waite (OH) (starting March 4)
* Speaker of the House of Representatives: James G. Blaine (R-ME)
* Congress: 43rd
==Events==
* January 1 – New York City annexes The Bronx.
* February 21 – The Oakland Daily Tribune publishes its first newspaper.
* March 18 – Hawaii signs a treaty with the United States granting exclusive trading rights.
* March 31 – The Young Men's Hebrew Association in Manhattan (which still operates today as the 92nd Street Y) is founded.
* May 20 – Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets. The price is $13.50 per dozen.
* July 1
** Philadelphia Zoo opens, the first public zoo in the U.S.
** Four-year-old Charley Ross, America's first major kidnapping for ransom victim, is taken from his home in Philadelphia.
** The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, with cylindrical platen and QWERTY keyboard, is first marketed.
* November 4 – Democrats regain the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time since 1860.
* November 7 – Harper's Weekly publishes a political cartoon by Thomas Nast considered the first important use of an elephant as a symbol for the Republican Party.
* November 9 – The Sigma Kappa sorority is founded at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, by Mary Caffrey Low, Elizabeth Gorham Hoag, Ida Fuller, Frances Mann, and Louise Helen Coburn.
* November 11 – The Gamma Phi Beta sorority is founded at Syracuse University. This is the first women's Greek letter organization to be called a sorority.
* November 24 – Inventor Joseph Glidden patents barbed wire.
* November 25 – The United States Greenback Party is established as a "National Independent" political party, composed primarily of farmers financially hurt by the Panic of 1873.
* November 28 – King Kalākaua's 1874–75 state visit to the United States begins when the ship carrying him from Hawaii, USS Benicia, docks in San Francisco.
==Memoriam==
* January 7 – John Burton Thompson, U.S. Senator from Kentucky from 1853 to 1859 (aged 63; Harrodsburg, KY, USA)
* January 17 – Chang and Eng Bunker, Thai-American conjoined twin brothers (aged 62; Mount Airy, NC, USA)
* February 24 – John Bachman, Lutheran minister, social activist and naturalist (aged 84; Charleston, SC, USA)
* March 8 – Millard Fillmore, 13th President of the U.S. from 1850 to 1853, and 12th Vice President of the U.S. from 1849 to 1850 (aged 74; Buffalo, NY, USA)
* March 11 – Charles Sumner, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts from 1851 to 1874 (aged 63; Washington, DC, USA)
* May 20 – Paul Jennings, slave of James Madison, writer (aged 75; Washington, DC, USA)
* June 8 – Cochise, one of the greatest leaders of the Apache Indians, dies on the Chiricahua reservation in southeastern Arizona (aged 69; Dragoon Mountains, AZ Territory, USA)
* October 6 – Samuel Kier, industrialist (aged 61; Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
* November 20 – Jackson Morton, U.S. Senator from Florida from 1849 to 1855 (aged 80; Santa Rosa County, FL, USA)
* December 28 – Gerrit Smith, social reformer, abolitionist, politician, and philanthropist (aged 77; New York City, NY, USA)
* December 31 – Eliza Seymour Lee, pastry chef and restaurateur (aged 74; Charleston, SC, USA)
==External links==
* 1874 in the United States
Category:United States History: Volume 10