1869 is a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar).

Events

• March 1 - North German Confederation issues 10gr and 30gr value stamps, printed on goldbeater's skin
• May 4 - Naval Battle of Hakodate in Japan.
• May 10 - Transcontinental Railroad completed at Promontory, Utah.
• May 15 - Woman's suffrage: In New York, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton form the National Woman's Suffrage Association.
• May 26 - Last public hanging in Britain - Fenian bomber Michael Barrett
• May 29 - British parliament passes the Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill ending public hanging
• August 4/12 - Emperor Norton I of the United States abolished both the Democratic and Republican parties.
• August 9 - Ferdinand Lassalle founds the SAP, the first socialist workers party in Germany.
• August 20 - Abergele Train Disaster - Irish Mail passenger train collides with cargo trucks loaded with paraffin - 33 dead; First major train disaster in Britain
• October 16 - England's first residential college for women, Girton College, is founded.
• November 4 - The first issue of scientific journal Nature is published.
• November 6 - The first intercollegiate American football game is played. Rutgers defeats Princeton, 6 to 4.
• November 17 - In Egypt, the Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea, is inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony.
• November 23 - In Dumbarton, Scotland the clipper ship Cutty Sark is launched (it was one of the last clipper ships to be built, and the only one surviving to the present day).
• December 10 - First American chapter of Kappa Sigma founded at the University of Virginia.
• December 31 - Triple Alliance forces take Asuncion

• Basutoland becomes British protectorate
• British parliament ends transportation to Australia as punishment
• Venancio Flores murdered in Montevideo
• Ulysses S. Grant succeeds Andrew Johnson as President of the United States of America.
• Fire burns down about 75% of Hancock, Michigan
• Mahbub Ali Pasha begins a 42 year reign as Nizam of Hyderabad
• James Bennet of the New York Herald, asks Henry Morton Stanley to go and find Dr Livingstone, despite him not being lost or in difficulty.
• The Meiji Emperor of Japan accepts the surrender of the four most powerful clans (Choshu, Tosa, Hizen and Satsuma) and reappoints the clan chiefs as Provincial Governors, on reduced revenues.
• Invention of barbed wire, see ranching.
• Heinz Established
• Abdur Rahman Khan is exiled from Afghanistan.
• The Roman Catholic Church prohibits abortion under any circumstance.

Births

• January 10 - Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic (d. 1916)
• January 15 - Stanisław Wyspiański, Polish dramatist, poet, painter, architect (d. 1907)
• February 11 - Helene Kroller-Muller Dutch museum founder and patron of the arts (d. 1939)
• February 14 - Charles Wilson, Scottish physicist (d. 1959)
• March 5 - Michael von Faulhaber, cardinal and archbishop (d. 1952)
• March 14 - Algernon Blackwood, English writer (d. 1951)
• March 18 - Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1940)
• March 21 - Florenz Ziegfeld, theatrical producer (d. 1932)
• April 2 - Hughie Jennings, Baseball Hall of Famer (d. 1928)
• April 8 - Harvey Cushing, American neurosurgeon (d. 1939)
• April 11 - Gustav Vigeland, Norwegian sculptor (d. 1943)
• May 14 - Friedrich Karl Kleine , physician (d. 1951)
• August 10 - Lawrence Binyon, English poet and scholar (d. 1943)
• September 2 - Fritz Pregl, Slovenian chemist (Nobel prize 1923) (d. 1930)
• September 23 - Mary Mallon, "Typhoid Mary" Irish domestic servant and cook famous as a carrier of typhoid fever (d. 1938)
• October 2 - Mohandas Gandhi, founder of the modern Indian state, proponent of nonviolence (d. 1948)
• October 25 - John Heisman, American football coach (d. 1936)
• November 25 - Herbert Greenfield, Premier of Alberta (d. 1949)
• December 30 - Stephen Leacock, British-Canadian author and economist (d. 1944)
• December 31 - Henri Matisse, French painter (d. 1954)

Deaths

• March 8 - Hector Berlioz, French composer (b. 1803)
• March 24 - Antoine-Henri Jomini, General (b. 1779)
• April 20 - Carl Loewe, composer
• May 11 - Hijikata Toshizou, 2nd commander of the Shinsengumi
• December 18 - Louis Moreau Gottschalk American composer and pianist