Six years after Wilford Woodruff, president of the Mormon church, issued his Manifesto reforming political, religious, and economic life in Utah, the territory is admitted into the Union as the 45th state.

On February 1, 1896, Giacomo Puccini's [La Bohème](http://one of the opera world's most beloved classics) premieres at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy. It would go on to become one of the opera world's most enduring, and beloved, classics.

On April 6, 1896, the Olympic Games, a long-lost tradition of ancient Greece, are reborn in Athens 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. At the opening of the Athens Games, King Georgios I of Greece and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed athletes from 13 nations to the international competition.

Dr. H. H. Holmes, one of America’s first well-known serial killers, is hanged in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In a major victory for supporters of racial segregation, the U.S. Supreme Court rules seven to one that a Louisiana law providing for “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” on its railroad cars is constitutional. The high court held that as long as equal accommodations were provided, segregation was not discrimination and thus did not deprive African Americans of equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

Nicholas II, the last czar, is crowned ruler of Russia in the old Ouspensky Cathedral in Moscow.

At approximately 4:00 a.m. on June 4, 1896, in the shed behind his home on Bagley Avenue in Detroit, Henry Ford unveils the “Quadricycle,” the first automobile he ever designed or drove.

While salmon fishing near the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory on August 16, 1896, George Carmack reportedly spots nuggets of gold in a creek bed. His lucky discovery sparks the last great gold rush in the American West.

The outlaw Bill Doolin is killed by a posse at Lawson, Oklahoma on the night of August 25, 1896.