John Lawrence Sullivan, who would go on to be America's most famous boxing champion of the nineteenth century, was born this day in Boston to Michael Sullivan and Catherine Kelly Sullivan, both immigrants from Ireland. He would be the last heavyweight champion under bare knuckle rules and held the new gloved championship under the Queensbury rules from 1889 to 1892, although he infamously refused to defend his title against African-American Peter Jackson on racial grounds.  He lost his title to the young "Gentleman Jim" Corbett in a twenty-one round bout. (By John Osborne)

Jacques Offenbach's full length operetta Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld), a comic retelling of the classic Greek legend, opened this day at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens in Paris.  The ire of moralists, and some critics, helped it become one of the most popular pieces ever offered there.  Perhaps most notoriously, the operetta included in its second act the galop infernal, famous ever since as the music for the "Can-Can."  (By John Osborne)

Having arrived from Leavenworth in Kansas at the head of a party of immigrants just six days before, William Larimer laid out a claim for a new town across Cherry Creek from the new mining settlement of Auraria. He shrewdly named the new settlement after the sitting territorial governor, James Denver, and before another week had elapsed, the energetic new arrivals had organized a full city council. This began Denver's dominance over the other towns that had grown up in Colorado after the Pike's Peak Gold Rush. (By John Osborne)