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1881 U.S. National Championships (tennis)

1881 US Tennis Championship

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ2714818 ↗
Source-derived summary

The inaugural U.S. National Championship (now known as the US Open) was a tennis tournament that took place in August 1881 at the Newport Casino, Newport, Rhode Island. For the first and only time, only clubs that were members of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association were permitted to enter the tournament. A Men's Singles competition and a Men's Doubles competition were played, and Richard Sears became the first men's singles U.S. National Tennis Champion.

Editorial summary

“1881 U.S. National Championships (tennis)” enters the record as 1881 US Tennis Championship. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what National, Championships and tennis can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1881—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around National, Championships and tennis.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“1881 U.S. National Championships (tennis)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, National, Championships and tennis provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2714818. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1881.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “1881 U.S. National Championships (tennis)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow 1881 U.S. National Championships (tennis) primary sources, 1881 U.S. National Championships (tennis) archive and National research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “1881 U.S. National Championships (tennis)”?
  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “1881 U.S. National Championships (tennis)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.