March 18, 1877 - President Hayes appoints Frederick Douglass marshal of Washington DC.

April 2, 1877 - The first White House Easter Egg Roll took place during the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes.

April 27, 1877 - President Hayes removes Federal troops from Louisiana, Reconstruction ends.

June 21, 1877 - Ten members of the "Molly Maguires" were hanged for murder (remaining members of the Molly Maguires swiftly disbanded their organization). A strident band of anthracite miners from Pennsylvania, the "Mollies" had formed a few years earlier in hopes of improving in the work conditions for their fellow miners. Indeed, coal miners received scant pay for toiling long hours in hot and hazardous conditions. The Mollies borrowed their nom de guerre from a radical Irish mining organization. they donned women's clothes and waged a campaign of violence and intimidation against the mine bosses.

May 10, 1877 - President Rutherford B. Hayes has the White House’s first telephone installed in the mansion’s telegraph room. White House phone number was "1"; Treasury Department possessed the only other direct phone line to the White House at that time.

July 14, 1877 - Baltimore and Ohio Railroad workers (suffered through two pay cuts since the start of the Panic of 1873) walked off the job to agitate for higher pay and fairer work conditions; July 20, 1877 -  - Maryland militia, called in to break the strike, opened fire on a crowd of strikers, killing nine of the workers. Along with sparking four days of riots in Baltimore, the deaths of the rail strikers unleashed a torrent of labor activity: workers at other rail lines, as well as in other industries, called massive sympathy strikes, some of which were also marred by violence between strikers and State troopers. In the end, this summer of strikes had mixed results: while the wave of walkouts helped refuel the once-flagging labor movement, some workers--most notably the strikers at the Baltimore and Ohio company--were cowed into signing agreements that did little, if anything, to help their plight.

October 10, 1877 - The U.S. Army holds a West Point funeral with full military honors for Lieutenant-Colonel George Armstrong Custer (youngest major general in the U.S. Army). Killed the previous year in Montana by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Custer's body had been returned to the East for burial on the grounds of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, where Custer had graduated in 1861-at the bottom of his class. Though Custer was controversial in his day, his spectacular death at the Little Big Horn transformed him into a beloved martyr in the eyes of many Americans, especially those who were calling for wholesale war against the Indians. Some newspapers began to refer to Custer as the "American Murat," a reference to a famous martyr of the French Revolution, and they called for decisive retaliation against the "treacherous Indians" who had murdered the golden-haired general. Others refused to believe that Custer's own tactical mistakes could alone explain the disaster at Little Big Horn, and they instead sought to place the blame on the shoulders of other commanders who had been at the battle. (Tellingly, no one suggested that clever tactics and leadership by the Indians might have been the cause for Custer's defeat.) Custer's widow, Elizabeth, also worked to transform her husband into a legend by writing several adulatory books chronicling his career. Hundreds of other books and movies, many of them more fiction than history, helped cement the image of Custer as the great fallen leader of the Indian wars in many American minds. Custer's status as a national hero and martyr only began to be seriously questioned in the 1960s, and since then he has often been portrayed as a vain and glory-seeking man whose own ineptitude was all the explanation needed for the massacre at Little Big Horn. The truth about George Custer is probably somewhere in between these two extremes.

June 4, 1878 - Turkey turned Cyprus over to the British.

June 11, 1878 - Washington, DC is given a new government by Congress, 3 commissioners appointed by president (change in 1974).

January 12, 1879 - British-Zulu War begins as British troops under Lieutenant General Frederic Augustus invade Zululand from the southern African republic of Natal. 1843 - the British took over Natal and Zululand. 1872 - King Mpande died and was succeeded by his son Cetshwayo, who was determined to resist European domination in his territory. December 1878 - Cetshwayo rejected the British demand that he disband his troops, and in January British forces invaded Zululand to suppress Cetshwayo. The British suffered grave defeats at Isandlwana, where 1,300 British soldiers were killed or wounded, and at Hlobane Mountain; March 29, 1879 - the tide turned in favor of the British at the Battle of Khambula. July 1879 - at Ulundi, Cetshwayo's forces were utterly routed, and the Zulus were forced to surrender to the British. 1887 - faced with continuing Zulu rebellions, the British formally annexed Zululand;  1897 - it became a part of Natal, which joined the Union of South Africa in 1910.