"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."

Carl Schurz, adding a crucial addendum to Stephen Decatur's famous rallying cry in a speech before the US Senate, February 29, 1872.

In the year AD 1872...

• The HMS Challenger embarks on its pathbreaking four-year round-the-world oceanographic survey expedition that will add almost immeasurably to mankind's knowledge of the Earth's seas.
• The Great Boston Fire of 1872 rages through Boston's financial district, destroying 776 buildings over two days.
• In one of the enduring unsolved mysteries of the seas, the ship Mary Celeste is found sailing under full sail off the coast of Portugal, but without a single member of her crew, who have all vanished without a trace. No member of the crew is ever seen again, and their fate remains unknown to this day.
• The Modoc War breaks out between the Modoc Indians and US army troops along the California-Oregon border.
• In the Maria Luz Incident, the Peruvian ship Maria Luz makes an emergency stop in Japan but is impounded by Japanese authorities because it is carrying Chinese slave laborers. The incident sparks talk of war with Japan in Peru, but is ultimately handled peacefully in Japanese courts, marking an important step toward Japan's full entry into the global system of international law.
• Yellowstone National Park is established by act of the US Congress, becoming the world's first national park.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in New York City.
• George Westinghouse patents the first workable air brake system, which would soon revolutionize railroad safety.
• The Boston Globe is founded.
• The first Bloomingdale's department store opens in New York City, and Montgomery Ward inaugurates his mail-order catalogue business in Chicago.
• Cream cheese is invented by a dairyman in Chester, New York.
• The first Arbor Day is promoted in Nebraska by newspaper editor Julius Sterling Morton.

These people were born in 1872:

• US President Calvin Coolidge.
• Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first to reach the South Pole.
• English philosopher Bertrand Russell.
• US Supreme Court chief justice Harlan Fiske Stone.
• Norwegian king Haakon VII.
• American baseball great Wee Willie Keeler.
• Indian nationalist writer and mystic Sri Aurobindo.
• German chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Richard Willstätter.
• British statesman and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Angell.
• American novelist Zane Grey.
• Canadian soldier and poet John McCrae, best known as the author of the poem "In Flanders Fields."

These people died in 1872:

• American inventor Samuel Morse.
• American newspaper editor Horace Greeley, two weeks after being soundly defeated by Ulysses S. Grant in the 1872 US Presidential Election.
• Mexican president Benito Juárez.
• Swedish king Charles XV.
• American statesman William Henry Seward, best known for purchasing Alaska in an act known at the time as "Seward's Folly."
• German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach.

1871 - 1872 - 1873

19th century