Transportation goes through some important changes when the first major subway line opens in New York City. Ice cream cones and hamburgers are popular. Popular songs include "Frankie and Johnny" by songwriter Hughie Cannon and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" by George M Cohan. 

• The first tunnel under the Hudson River in New York City is completed on March 8 It will be four years until it officially opens. The tunnel, which connects Jersey City with Manhattan, is more than a mile long.
• Cy Young pitches the first major league "perfect" game May 5 for the Boston Red Sox.
• The Olympic Games open on July 1 in St. Louis, Missouri. The games attract 1,505 contestants from seven countries. 
• On June 15 the sidewheel steamer S.S. General Slocum catches fire in the Hudson River while carrying 1,400 German-Americans from the Lower East Side to Locust Grove on Long Island Sound.
• The first major subway line in New York City opens to the public October 27. It is called the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) line. Tickets cost 5¢ each and 111,000 people ride the first day.
• King C. Gillette received a patent on the safety razor on November 15.
• Broadway musical Little Johnny Jones opens on November 17 at the Liberty Theater, with book, music, and lyrics by George M. Cohan, songs that include "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy".
• Syrian immigrant pastry maker Ernest A. Hamwi popularizes the ice cream cone at the St. Louis Fair. When a neighboring ice cream stand runs out of dishes, Hamwi rolls some of his wafers.
• The hamburger gains popularity at the St. Louis Exposition, where the chopped beef specialty is fried and sold by German immigrants who live in South St. Louis.
• Iced tea is created at the St. Louis fair by English tea concessionaire Richard Blechynden.
• Helen Keller is graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College at age 23 and begins to write about blindness, a subject taboo in women’s magazines.
• No World Series is played because John McGraw of the New York Giants refuses to have his team face the Boston Red Sox.
• Teddy Roosevelt receives 336 electoral votes and is re-elected as President.
• Ivan Pavlov wins the Nobel Prize.
• French's Cream Salad Mustard, is milder than other mustards, it becomes the world's largest selling prepared mustard, outselling all others combined in the U.S. market.
• Claude Monet who begins to concentrate on the Nymphaes (water lilies)
• Mary McLeod Bethune opens the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls in a rented cabin with five students. It will later become Bethune-Cookman College.
• Campbell's Pork and Beans  is introduced by the Joseph Campbell Preserve Company.
• Marie Curie discovers two new radioactive elements - radium and polonium.

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last updated 12/04/05