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  A firei destroys the city of Illinois.
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  The panic of 1873 was a finacial crisis. The United States experiences an economic depression, as over 5,000 companies go out of buisness after a stock market panic.
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  America gets its first public zoo, The Philadelphia Zoological Gardens.
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  United States celebrates 100 years as a Nation
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  Thomas Edison invents the first practical incandescent electric lightbulb at Menlo Park, New Jersey.