The World in 1892 the year you could order almost anything by post

About 450,000 people passed through Ellis Island in its first year. That works out to roughly 1,200 a day, every day, waiting in line for an inspector to wave them through.

Life back then

Farm families shopped from a book. Montgomery Ward's mail order catalog ran to hundreds of pages of plows, stoves, boots and buggy whips, and a young rival named Richard Sears was building one of his own. You filled in the order form, sent it off with the money, and waited for word from the depot that your crate had arrived by freight. The general store in town stocked what its owner chose to stock, at whatever he asked. The catalog printed its prices in plain black type, the same for everybody.

The year in 8 events

• 🚢Jan 1 Ellis Island opens in New York harbour and begins checking arriving immigrants.
• 🏒Mar 18 Lord Stanley, the governor general of Canada, announces he will give a silver cup to the best hockey team.
• 🏭Jul 6 Steelworkers and hired guards shoot at each other at the Homestead mill near Pittsburgh. The strike is broken and the union with it.
• 🕯️Jul 8 Fire destroys much of St. John's, Newfoundland. Thousands of people are left without homes.
• 🏛️Aug 15 William Gladstone becomes British prime minister for the fourth time, at the age of 82.
• 🔭Sep 9 Edward Barnard spots a fifth moon of Jupiter, the first new one seen since Galileo.
• 📖Oct 6 Alfred Tennyson dies at 83, after more than 40 years as Britain's poet laureate.
• 🩰Dec 18 The Nutcracker is danced for the first time, at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg.

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