General
Population: 1.64 Billion*
- Entertainment: Music includes Ravel, Schoenberg, Sibelius (FInlandia), Elgar, Richard Strauss, Bruckner, Scott Joplin and others popularize ragtime music ("Maple Leaf Rag")
Writers include Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Pinero, Ibsen, Stefan George, Andre Gide, Kipling, Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest),
HS Chamberlain, John Dewey (School and Society), Ernst Haeckel, Alexander Bain, James Ward, Kraus begins to publish Fackel in Vienna
- Medicine: Worldwide cholera outbreak to 1923
- Politics: End of Spanish-American War
- Religion: Pope Leo XIII condemns the "Americanism" of Isaac Thomas Hecker
- Science: Rutherford discovers alpha and beta rays in radioactive atoms
Pringsheim and Lummer start radiation studies
First magnetic recording of sound
- Technology: Guglielmo Marconi sends first radio signal across English Channel
Rubber-heel shoes patented
- Deaths: "Waltz king" Johan Strauss, Naval officer Philip Howard COlomb, Horatio Alger, Playwright Augustin Daly, Impressionist Alfred Sisley,
Composer Karl Millocker, RW Bunsen (burner), Artist Giovanni Segantini, Artist Alfred Sisley, Biometrician William Bateson
Africa
- General: African Republics send Britain an ultimatum to be left alone but British overcome
Drought at horn of Africa
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan convention
- Burundi: Germans conquer
- Natal: Boer Wars
- South Africa: South African wars against the British as Second Boer War
Johannesburg Uitlanders complain to Queen Victoria against Boers
- Sudan: British-French (and Egyptian) agreement ends tension over possession of Fashoda
- Transvaal: Bloemfontein Conference on Transvaal - Comments spur Boer War
British defeated at Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso in "Black Week
Canadian and Australian volunteers land in S. Africa
British eventually overcome
Americas
- General: End of Spanish-American War
- Acre: Independence from Bolivia - eventually absorbed into Brazil 1903li>
- Canada: Volunteer troops enter Second Boer War
- Puerto Rico: Hurricane destroys coffee crop
Asia
- India: Drought and Famine
- Laos: France proclaims protectorate status
- Philippines: Rebellion against US control
War as US refuses to recognize independence
Europe
- General: Kaiser Wilhelm II visits England
- Crete: Arthur Evans excavates ruins finding first evidence of Minoans
- France: Annulment of Dreyfus judgement and retrial ordered - Pardon by Presidential decree
- Great Britain: Second Boer War in south Africa
London Borough councils established
Monster of Lough Auna in Ireland seen and described as horse-like
- Netherlands: First Hauge Conference meets for peace - Tsar Nicholas II suggests permanent court to handle international disputes
International agreement at Hague not to drop bombs or use poison gas
- Norway: Storm kills 30
Middle East
- Iraq: Germany secures Baghdad Railroad contract
Pacific
- Australia: Troops sent to fight Second Boer War
- New Zealand: Troops sent to fight Second Boer War
- Samoa: Britain withdraws leaving control to US and Germany to WWI
1899 
