Federal government edit

• 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

• 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 11 – Mussel Slough Tragedy: A land dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and settlers in Hanford, California, turns deadly when a gun battle breaks out, leaving 7 dead.
• May 13 – In Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison performs the first test of his electric railway.
• May 30 – League of American Wheelmen is founded in Newport, Rhode Island.
• June 1 – United States Census is 50,155,783.
• September 30 – Amateur astronomer Henry Draper takes the first ever photograph of the Orion Nebula.
• 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 edit

• The Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction of the Women's Christian Temperance Union is established.
• Charles Wesley Emerson founds the Boston Conservatory of Elocution, Oratory, and Dramatic Art, predecessor of Emerson College.
• More than 100,000 Chinese men and 3,000 Chinese women are living in the western United States.

Ongoing edit

• Gilded Age (1869–c. 1896)

• September 15 – The Chicago White Stockings clinch their Second National League pennant with a 5–2 win over the Cincinnati Reds.

January–June edit

• 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 – Maud E. Craig Sampson Williams, African American suffragist (d. 1958)
• 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 26 – Mitchell Lewis, actor (d. 1956)
• June 27 – Helen Keller, campaigner for the deaf and blind (d. 1968)^[1]

July–December edit

• 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)
• July 26 – Jean Clemens, youngest child of Mark Twain (d. 1909)
• July 30 – Robert R. McCormick, newspaper publisher (d. 1955)
• August 2 – Arthur Dove, abstract painter (d. 1946)
• August 10
  • Robert L. Thornton, businessman, philanthropist and mayor of Dallas, Texas (d. 1964)
  • Catherine Evans Whitener, textile manufacturer (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)^[2]
• September 24 – Sarah Knauss, supercentenarian, all-time longest lived American (d. 1999)
• October 4 – Damon Runyon, writer (d. 1946)^[3]
• October 31 – A. J. Rosier, politician (d. 1932)^[4]
• 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)

Undated edit

• Eliza Grant, African American midwife^[5]
• Aunt Molly Jackson, folk singer and union activist (d. 1960)

• 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 until 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)
• November 3 - Solon Robinson, founder of Crown Point, Indiana (born 1803)
• November 9 – Edwin Drake, first American to successfully drill for oil (b. 1819)
• November 11 – Lucretia Mott, abolitionist and women's rights activist (born 1793)
• December 20 – Gaspar Tochman, lawyer and Confederate colonel (b. 1797 in Poland)
• December 30 – Epes Sargent, editor, poet and playwright (b. 1813)

• Timeline of United States history (1860–1899)

•   Media related to 1880 in the United States at Wikimedia Commons