On March 15, 1869, Cincinnati attorney Aaron Champion hires former cricket player Harry Wright to organize, manage and play for the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who become the first professional baseball team. The organization of the club comes shortly after the National Association of Baseball Players, which had previously banned the payment of players, allows open professionalism after the close of the 1868 season.

On May 10, 1869, the presidents of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads meet in Promontory, Utah, and drive a ceremonial last spike into a rail line that connects their railroads. This made transcontinental railroad travel possible for the first time in U.S. history. No longer would western-bound travelers need to take the long and dangerous journey by wagon train.

Convinced they will have a better chance surviving the desert than the raging rapids that lay ahead, three men leave John Wesley Powell’s expedition through the Grand Canyon and scale the cliffs to the plateau above.

Just after midnight on September 27, 1869, Ellis County Sheriff Wild Bill Hickok and his deputy respond to a report that a local ruffian named Samuel Strawhun and several drunken buddies were tearing up John Bitter’s Beer Saloon in Hays City, Kansas. When Hickok arrived and ordered the men to stop, Strawhun turned to attack him, and Hickok shot him in the head. Strawhun died instantly, as did the riot.

On November 6, 1869, Rutgers beats Princeton, 6-4, in the first college football game. The game, played with a soccer ball before roughly 100 fans in New Brunswick, New Jersey, resembles rugby instead of today's football.

The Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean and the Red seas, is inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony attended by French Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III.

On December 9, 1869, Uriah Smith Stephens, a descendant of Quaker settlers and a former indentured servant, founds a secret order of tailors in Philadelphia called the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor (or KOL). It would become the first major national labor organization in the United States.

Motivated more by interest in free publicity than a commitment to gender equality, Wyoming territorial legislators pass a bill that is signed into law granting women the right to vote.