1880 in the United States

Federal Government

President: Rutherford B. Hayes (R-Ohio)

Vice President: William A. Wheeler (R-New York)

Chief Justice: Morrison Waite (Ohio)

Speaker of the House of Representatives: Samuel J. Randall (D-Pennsylvania)

Congress: 46th

Events

February – The journal Science is first published, with financial backing from Thomas Edison.

February 2 – The first electric streetlight is installed in Wabash, Indiana.

March 31 – Wabash, Indiana becomes the first electrically lighted city in the world.

May 13 – In Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison performs the first test of his electric railway.

October 6 – The University of Southern California opens its doors to 53 students and 10 faculty.

October 15 – The first blizzard mentioned in Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter sweeps over the prairie in Dakota Territory.

November 2 – U.S. presidential election, 1880: James Garfield defeats Winfield S. Hancock.

November 4 – The first cash register is patented by James and John Ritty of Dayton, Ohio.

November 22 – Vaudeville actress Lillian Russell makes her debut at Tony Pastor's Theatre in New York City.

Undated

The Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction of the Women's Christian Temperance Union is established.

More than 100,000 Chinese men and 3,000 Chinese women are living in the western United States.

Ongoing

Gilded Age (1869–c. 1896)

January–June

January 6 – Tom Mix, Western film actor (d. 1940)

January 14 – Joseph Warren Beach, poet, novelist, critic and literary scholar (d. 1957)

January 20 – Walter W. Bacon, accountant and politician, 60th Governor of Delaware (d. 1962)

January 26

Sylvia Ashton, silent film actress (d. 1940)

Douglas MacArthur, general (d. 1964)

January 28 – Dorothy Donnelly, actress and lyricist (d. 1928)

January 29 – W. C. Fields, born William Claude Dukenfield, comic actor (d. 1946)

February 12 – John L. Lewis, labor union leader (d. 1969)

February 14 – Frederick J. Horne, admiral (d. 1959)

February 16 – Frank Burke, baseball player (d. 1946)

February 19 – Arthur Shepherd, composer (d. 1958)

February 2 – Angelina Weld Grimke, African American lesbian journalist and poet (d. 1958)

March 4 – Channing Pollock, playwright and critic (d. 1946)

March 10 – Broncho Billy Anderson, Western film actor (d. 1971)

March 11 – Harry H. Laughlin, eugenicist (d. 1943)

March 28 – Louis Wolheim, character actor (d. 1931)

April 18 – Sam Crawford, baseball player (d. 1968)

May 6 – William Joseph Simmons, founder of the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915 (d. 1945)

June 4 – Clara Blandick, actress (d. 1962)

June 9 – William S. Pye, admiral (d. 1959)

June 11 – Jeannette Pickering Rankin, first woman elected to U.S. Congress (d. 1973)

June 17 – Carl Van Vechten, writer and photographer (d. 1964)

June 21 – Arnold Gesell, developmental psychologist (d. 1961)

June 24 – Oswald Veblen, mathematician (d. 1960)

June 27 – Helen Keller, campaigner for the deaf and blind (d. 1968)

July–December

July 10 – Greye La Spina, born Fanny Greye Bragg, fiction writer (d. 1969)

July 12 – Tod Browning, motion picture director, horror film pioneer (d. 1962)

August 2 – Arthur Dove, abstract painter (d. 1946)

August 10 – Robert L. Thornton, businessman, philanthropist and mayor of Dallas, Texas (d. 1964)

August 12 – Christy Mathewson, baseball player (d. 1925)

August 22 – George Herriman, cartoonist (d. 1944)

September 14 – Archie Hahn, sprinter (d. 1955)

September 12 – H. L. Mencken, journalist (d. 1956)

September 24 – Sarah Knauss, supercentenarian, all-time verifiable longest-lived American (d. 1999)

October 4 – Damon Runyon, writer (d. 1946)

November 1 – Grantland Rice, sportswriter (d. 1954)

November 10 – Jacob Epstein, sculptor (d. 1959 in the United Kingdom)

November 12 – Harold Rainsford Stark, admiral (d. 1972)

December 4 – Garfield Wood, motorboat racer (d. 1971)

December 24 – Johnny Gruelle, cartoonist and children's book author (d. 1938)

December 31 – George Marshall, United States Secretary of State, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 (d. 1959)

Deaths

January 1 – Morris Ketchum, financier (b. 1796)

January 8 – "Emperor Norton", eccentric (b. c.1818 in the United Kingdom)

January 12 – Ellen Lewis Herndon Arthur, wife of future President Chester A. Arthur (b. 1837)

January 19 – James Westcott, U.S. Senator from Florida from 1845 to 1849, died in Montréal, Québec, Canada (b. 1802)

February 14 – Samuel G. Arnold, U.S. Senator from Rhode Island from 1862 to 1863 (b. 1821)

February 17 – James Lenox, bibliophile (b. 1800)

May 4 – Edward Clark, Confederate Governor of Texas (b. 1815)

May 8 – Jones Very, Transcendentalist essayist, poet, clergyman and mystic (born 1813)

June 12 – Albert G. Brown, U.S. Senator from Mississippi from 1854 to 1861 (b. 1813)

June 13 – James A. Bayard, Jr., U.S. Senator from Delaware from 1851 to 1864 (b. 1799)

June 17 – James B. Howell, U.S. Senator from Iowa from 1870 to 1871 (b. 1816)

June 28 – Texas Jack Omohundro, frontier scout, actor and cowboy (b. 1846)

July 7 – Lydia Maria Child, novelist and abolitionist (b. 1802)

July 21 – Hiram Walden, politician (b. 1800)

August 9 – William Bigler, U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania from 1856 to 1861 (born 1814)

August 16 – Herschel Vespasian Johnson, United States Senator from Georgia from 1863 till 1865. (born 1812)

August 19 – James Seddon, 4th Confederate States Secretary of War (born 1815)

August 24 – Ouray, Ute leader (b. c. 1833)

September 19 – Lafayette S. Foster, U.S. Senator from Connecticut from 1855 to 1867 (born 1806)

October – Victorio, Chiricahua Apache chief (b. c.1825)

December 20 – Gaspar Tochman, lawyer and Confederate colonel (b. 1797 in Poland)

December 30 – Epes Sargent, editor, poet and playwright (b. 1813)