What was going on in the world when our house on a garden block was built?

(map of Phila, 1872, From Harpers Weekly)

Jan 01: First Patent issued by US Patent Office

Jan 20: Julia Morgan, US architect and first female student & graduate of Ecole des Beaux-Arts, is born.

Feb 20: Hydraulic electric elevator patented by Cyrus Baldwin

March 01: Yellowstone National Park is established as the world’s first national park

March 22: Illinois becomes 1st state to require sexual equality in employment

April 12: Jesse James gang robs a bank in Columbia, Kentucky (1 dead/$1,500 in loot)

May 10: Victoria Woodhull becomes the first woman nominated for President of the United States as a candidate of the Equal Rights Party with abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her running mate. Apparently, Woodhull was a “clairvoyant, spiritualist, advocate of free love, social reformer, newspaper publisher and the first female stockbroker.” She couldn’t vote and the party was not permitted on any ballot.

May 22: U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant signs the Amnesty Act of 1872 into law (which restored full civil rights to all but 500 Confederate sympathizers).

June 5: The Republican Convention was held at the Acadamy of Music in Philadelphia to endorse Grant as their candidate.

July 20: The United States Patent Office awards the first patent for wireless telegraphy to Mahlon Loomis (precursor to radio)

August 18: The 1st mail-order catalog was issued, by A. M. Ward

October 02: In the book “Around the World in Eighty Days” by Jules Verne, Phileas Fogg sets off on his round the world trip

October 03: Bloomingdale’s department store in NYC opens

November 05: In defiance of the law, Susan B. Anthony votes (for Grant), and is fined $100 in court (which she never paid). As a side note, her 190th birthday was this year and she lived on MADISON Street, Amherst, Mass.

November 05: President Ulysses S. Grant was re-elected. He ran against Horace Greeley.