Radical Club is established.

(Spring) A discussion club, rather than a dinner club (a journalist once declared the club’s primary distinction was that it survived for years without a kitchen), it meets initially in the home of Rev. and Mrs. John Turner Sargent at 13 Chestnut Street. Members include William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Emerson, Dr. Hedge, Higginson, Howe, Henry James, Longfellow, Wendell Phillips, Whittier, and Julia Ward Howe. Howe, who subsequently lives at this address, later writes, “Society rarely attains anywhere a higher level than that which all must recognize in the Boston of the last forty years.” Membership grows to nearly 200 by the time of the club’s final meeting in 1880.