French officer Alfred Dreyfus, condemned for passing military secrets to the Germans, is stripped of his rank in a humiliating public ceremony in the courtyard of Paris’ Ecole Militaire. The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular trial, began his life sentence on the notorious Devil’s Island Prison in French Guyana four months later.

Writer Oscar Wilde is arrested after losing a libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry.

On April 21, 1895, Woodville Latham and his sons, Otway and Gray, demonstrate their “Panopticon,” the first movie projector developed in the United States.

Writer Oscar Wilde is sent to prison after being convicted of sodomy. The famed writer of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest brought attention to his private life in a feud with Sir John Sholto Douglas, whose son was intimately involved with Wilde.

John Wesley Hardin, one of the bloodiest killers of the Old West, is murdered by an off-duty policeman in a saloon in El Paso, Texas.

On October 4, 1895, 21-year-old Englishman Horace Rawlins wins the first U.S. Open golf tournament, edging Willie Dunn and others with a 36-hole total of 173 at the Newport (Rhode Island) Golf Club, an oceanside course.

On November 8, 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923) becomes the first person to observe X-rays, a significant scientific advancement that would ultimately benefit a variety of fields, most of all medicine, by making the invisible visible.

On this Thanksgiving Day in 1895, piloting a gas-powered “horseless carriage” of his and his brother’s own design, the mechanic, inventor and now racecar driver Frank Duryea wins the first motor-car race in the United States. The race, sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald, was intended to drum up publicity for the nascent American car industry. It worked, especially for the Duryeas: In the year after the Times-Herald race, the brothers sold 13 of their eponymous Motor Wagons, more than any other carmaker in America.

On Christmas night 1895, a barroom argument between two men—one named Billy and another named "Stag" Lee—takes place, leading to murder. The killing would inspire an iconic blues song.

On December 28, 1895, the world’s first commercial movie screening takes place at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumière, two French brothers who developed a camera-projector called the Cinematographe. The Lumière brothers unveiled their invention to the public in March 1895 with a brief film showing workers leaving the Lumière factory. On December 28, the entrepreneurial siblings screened a series of short scenes from everyday French life and charged admission for the first time.