Waltz is introduced to Boston.

Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis and Lorenzo Papanti dance a waltz at a party at the Otis mansion. The first waltz danced in Boston, the slow, gliding version comes to be called “The Boston,” But the dance is slow to gain respectability. Cleveland Amory later describes a scandalized father dragging his daughter away from her partner, and later writing to a friend, “I can only describe the position they were in as the very reverse of back-to-back.” It would be exactly 100 years later that Mrs. E. Sohier Welch launches Boston’s annual “waltz evenings,” first at her home on Louisburg Square, then at the Hotel Somerset and Copley Plaza.