1890s

The 1890s (pronounced "eighteen-nineties") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on January 1, 1890, and ended on December 31, 1899.

From top to bottom, left to right: Alfred Dreyfus in captivity at the height of the Dreyfus Affair; Boer commandos during the Second Boer War; Plessy v. Ferguson establishes the American doctrine of racial segregation, leading to the Jim Crow laws; nearly three hundred ethnic Lakota people are massacred by the United States Army at Wounded Knee; the U.S. pays $20 million to annex the Philippines from Spain in the Treaty of Paris; activism spearheaded by Kate Sheppard leads to New Zealand being the first country to give women the right to vote; Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch master of modern art, dies, likely by suicide; Menelik II leads Ethiopia to a sweeping victory over Italy at the Battle of Adwa, First Italo-Ethiopian War.

In the United States, the 1890s were marked by a severe economic depression sparked by the Panic of 1893. This economic crisis would help bring about the end of the so-called "Gilded Age", and coincided with numerous industrial strikes in the industrial workforce. From 1926 the period was sometimes referred to as the "Mauve Decade", because William Henry Perkin's aniline dye (discovered in London in 1856) allowed the widespread use of that colour in fashion[1][2] in the late 1850s and early 1860s.[3]

In France the 1890s formed the core of the so-called Belle Époque.

In the British Empire the 1890s epitomised the late Victorian period.