From New York’s many New Year’s “sports and entertainments”—including football games, an open house at the Young Men’s Christian Association and an exhibit by the Society of Amateur Photographers, to name a few—to the fireworks, pealing bells and “general clamor” in Saint Paul, Minn., the decade of the 1890s was met with celebration and high hopes for an “America the Beautiful” that reached “from sea to shining sea.”

Meanwhile, half a world away, 25-year-old journalist Nellie Bly was “speeding towards the Japanese coast,” closing in on the final stages of her around-the-world trip for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

The Western Pennsylvania-born Bly personified the enterprising “New Woman” of the 1890s. Increasingly, women would challenge traditional gender roles by pursuing education, careers and political or social activism outside the home.

As symbols of that new independence, young women wore their hair in a looser, “Gibson Girl” style and ignited another liberating trend: a national bicycle-riding craze.

While women stretched their boundaries on two or more wheels, stylish men of the 1890s adopted a new sense of fashion with stiff collars and bow ties. Atop their dapper heads lay a bowler hat or perhaps a straw hat for the dog days of summer. Mustaches still adorned the stiff upper lips of America’s businessmen, but the long whiskers of previous decades were definitely on their way out.

Still, the majority of Americans lived in rural communities and worked in agriculture, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Their hard lives, working the fields and hauling crops to market, stood in sharp contrast to the evolving social and fashion ideals of the 1890s, highlighting the gritty reality faced by most Americans.

After generations of increasingly violent conflict, Native Americans were increasingly confined to Western reservations away from their ancestral lands. Harsh weather conditions, limited natural resources and the near-extinction of buffalo made living conditions dire.

The situation came to a tragic head Dec. 29, 1890, as U.S. Army soldiers attempted to block the movement of a group of Miniconjou Lakota near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Less than an hour after the first shot was fired, as many as 300 mostly unarmed Lakota, including women, children and elders, lay dead on the snowy ground.

Correspondents who rushed to the scene, including Teresa Howard Dean writing for the Chicago Herald, came face-to-face with the harrowing results. Dean declared the incident seemed like “cold-blooded murder” after encountering the bodies of “three little children and their mother lying on their faces in the snow.”

Victims were buried unceremoniously in a mass grave.

Widely condemned even at the time, Wounded Knee was the last of the major armed conflicts between the U.S. government and Native Americans.

Eight hundred miles to the east, America’s great city on the frontier, Chicago, hosted the event of the decade: the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s famous journey to America.

More than 27 million people visited the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed site between May and October 1893 to see the latest technological innovations and cultural displays.

In addition to the unprecedented use of electricity to light up the beaux arts-style exposition grounds, visitors were swept away by other newfangled inventions like Cracker Jack, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum and the Ferris Wheel. And a new lager-style beer from the Pabst Brewing Company won its famous “Blue Ribbon.”

Entering the golden years of Tin Pan Alley, Americans of the 1890s sang popular music like “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” (1891) and saluted the flag with patriotic melodies like John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” (1897).

Rapt audiences read Arthur Conan Doyle’s timeless “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” (1892) and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (1897), while children delighted in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book (1894).

In New York, the vagabond New York Symphony had been performing at piano company showrooms and borrowed music halls. Finally, it made its debut at a new performance space, Carnegie Hall, a “world-class,” 3,000-seat venue funded by Andrew Carnegie, at the corner of 57th Street and 7th Avenue in today’s midtown Manhattan.

Horse-drawn carriages snaked through Midtown Manhattan for opening night on Tuesday, May 5, 1891. The inaugural concert featured Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky himself conducting the symphony.

After decades of overspeculation in railroads and an inflationary monetary policy, the nation plunged into the most severe economic downturn in its history, later dubbed the Panic of 1893.

With a precipitous 24% crash of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the failure of hundreds of financial institutions, the crisis devastated rural communities with plummeting farm prices and motivated labor discontent in industrial regions.

With unemployment as high as 20% and as high as 25% in Pennsylvania, Americans demanded solutions to the era’s deep and complex economic issues, resulting in a dramatic economic and political realignment that would shape the nation’s governance for years to come.

Discontented with the economic state of the nation, Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey was intent on making a speech from the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building.

Accompanied by a group of 100 farmers and unemployed workers—and several hundred additional supporters picked up along the way—“Coxey’s Army,” considered by some to be the first “popular protest march,” arrived in Washington, D.C., on May 1, 1894.

Alas, the speech was not to be. Coxey and others were charged with trespassing at the U.S. Capitol, where they “did injure certain plants and shrubs,” as reported by the Alexandria Gazette. The paper summed up the feelings of many by characterizing the stunt as a “wild goose chase.”

Nevertheless, the Populist Party that represented discontented agricultural workers and others was a strong political force, nominating James B. Weaver for president in 1892 and William Jennings Bryan in 1896.

Though it was largely absorbed into the Democratic Party, many of the movement’s demands—like a graduated income tax, government regulation of the economy and direct election of senators—would come to fruition in the new century.

Tough, intellectual and eloquent Benjamin Harrison, U.S. president from 1889-1893, was deeply respected but not instantly likeable. His detractors, in fact, unbecomingly referred to the Ohio-born former U.S. senator from Indiana as the “human iceberg.”

The Republican was an advocate for civil rights and veterans’ benefits. He installed electricity at the White House—though neither the president nor his wife, Caroline, could bring themselves to operate the electric light switches.

During Harrison’s administration, Congress passed its first billion-dollar budget. With inflation and discontent on the rise, former President Grover Cleveland was re-elected in November 1892.

The hard-working Democrat, however, could not stabilize the economy in time to avoid a collapse the following year, and he, too, was booted, in favor of Ohio Republican William McKinley in 1896.

Affable, dignified and politically astute, the new president had run a “Front Porch Campaign” from his home, where the press and delegations of supporters could stop in for a chat and perhaps a photo. McKinley’s policies, including tariffs and a gold standard, contributed to an economic recovery after 1897.

The youngest first lady in history, Frances “Frank” Folsom Cleveland was adored by the press and the public.

The sociable Wells College graduate had married President Grover Cleveland in the White House in 1886, during his first term. He was 49, and she was a mere 21.

When her first child was born on Oct. 3, 1891, commendations came in from around the country to “Papa” and Mrs. Cleveland on the birth of their daughter.

Ruth Cleveland died of diphtheria at age 12, but she would not be forgotten.

In 1921, the Curtiss Candy Company claimed she was the namesake of its “Baby Ruth” candy bar, conveniently avoiding royalties that might have been—and indeed were—demanded by the Yankees slugger of the same name.

Abby and Andrew Borden had been bludgeoned to death in their Fall River, Mass., home in August 1892. But by whom?

Local authorities determined it was their daughter, Lizzie, after she made inconsistent statements to police. It didn’t help that a witness said the 32-year-old Lizzie had suspiciously burned a dress shortly afterward—purportedly, because it was “covered” with “paint.”

Audiences were riveted as the press covered the 1893 trial and its graphic testimony. But with mostly circumstantial evidence, Borden was acquitted, leaving the murders officially unsolved. Yet suspicions lingered, and she lived out her life as an outcast in the community.

In the aftermath of the trial, the notorious crime scene drew curious onlookers. Even today, brave visitors can spend the night in the Borden home, regarded by some as one of the most haunted places in the U.S.

Pittsburgh’s steel mills were flourishing, with thousands of immigrants and the sons of immigrants producing all of the wire, beams, rails and other steel products a growing nation could need.

While production accelerated and profits expanded, so did the risks to workers. As a new contract was under negotiation, union leaders at Carnegie Steel’s Homestead Works demanded a higher share of the profits.

When a new agreement was not reached, tensions came to a head the first week of July 1892 as company chairman Henry Clay Frick locked the workers out.

Incensed, workers and community members attempted to block strikebreakers, leading to a violent confrontation with Pinkerton agents brought in to quell the violence. The July 6 clash, later known as the Battle of Homestead or the Homestead Massacre, left several on each side dead and dozens wounded.

Under state militia protection, strikebreakers were soon at work and living on company grounds.

Finally, with its funds, resolve and support exhausted, the union voted to return to work, on Nov. 20, 1892.

The failure of the strike, the militancy of the strikers and an attempted assassination of Frick on July 23, 1892, scuttled support for the union, and membership dwindled through the end of the century.

Homer Plessy, a 30-year-old New Orleans shoemaker, bought a first-class train ticket at the depot and sat down on Tuesday, June 7, 1892, in the “whites only car.” He was, after all, “7/8 white.”

In collaboration with the railroad company, which bore extra expenses in providing separate cars for the races, Plessy’s act of civil disobedience was a direct challenge of Louisiana’s “Separate Car Act”—and landed Plessy in jail.

In a notorious 1896 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the district court to uphold a “separate but equal” standard for public accommodations. The ruling protected segregationist policies and Jim Crow laws, especially in the South, until it was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education, nearly 60 years later.

More than 200 male athletes from 14 countries descended on Athens, Greece, for the first Olympics of the modern era in April 1896.

More than 2,500 years after the first recorded Olympic Games, the Greek royal family—King George I, Queen Olga and several of their sons—joined a crowd of at least 60,000 for opening ceremonies, according to the International Olympic Committee.

Track and field competitions were held at the Panathenaic Stadium, a restored marble arena dating from 330 B.C., according to the IOC, while swimmers raced in the Bay of Zea, a seaport on the Mediterranean coast.

U.S. athletes won 11 gold medals in the games. Triple-jumper James Connolly won a gold on opening day, making the Harvard student the first Olympic medalist in more than 1,500 years.

A fierce rivalry was brewing in New York City, but it wasn’t on the track or gridiron. Instead, it was in the newsrooms.

A 17-year-old Jewish immigrant from Hungary, Joseph Pulitzer had arrived in the U.S. virtually penniless in 1864. By the 1890s, he was on top of a publishing empire that sent Nellie Bly on a trip around the world and other daring reporters into the sweatshops, slums and tenements of New York City. Pulitzer’s New York World was a powerhouse of investigative reporting and populist appeal.

His main competitor took the towering form of one William Randolph Hearst. Unlike his main rival, the bombastic Hearst had been born into a wealthy newspaper family and bought the New York Journal in 1895, targeting corruption at city hall and sensational crimes with towering headlines and colorful reporting.

Often prioritizing spectacular visual and verbal affectation over factual reporting, this bombastic style—not only in these newspapers but in others across the country—came to be known as “yellow journalism.” And the readers ate it up.

As newspaper circulation boomed, publishers like Pulitzer and Hearst needed a way to distribute their papers and beat the competition.

The solution came in the form of “newsies,” an 1890s predecessor of today’s paperboys and girls.

While children in rural areas worked in coal mines and textile factories, newsies worked the city streets, hawking newspapers for about 30 cents a day, according to the Library of Congress. The income was vital. Many of the children, often from poor immigrant families or even homeless, were on the streets from early morning until late at night.

Unlike their mid-20th century counterparts, newsies had to buy the papers they sold and eat the cost of unsold papers.

When New York’s World and Journal raised price of their papers, thousands of newsies went on strike in what came to be known as the Newsboys’ Strike of 1899.

Led by teenagers like Kid Blink and Annie Kelly, the action disrupted circulation for two weeks, until the publishers agreed to buy back unsold papers—a partial victory for the young strikers.

1899 brought the decade and the century to a spirited end. Americans were suddenly two-stepping to Scott Joplin’s toe-tapping “Maple Leaf Rag,” getting to know their subconscious mind thanks to Sigmund Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” and perhaps taking the first of many aspirins, thanks to Bayer’s newly patented medicine.

The 19th century had brought the nation from 16 states to 45, and from horse-and-buggy to auto races. Now, it was on to the 20th.

Katrina Jesick Quinn is a faculty member at Slippery Rock University. She is an editor of “From the Arctic to the Orient: Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age” (McFarland) and “The Civil War Soldier and the Press” (Routledge).