January 1 – TheBritish Empire (except Scotland, which had changed New Year's Day to January 1 in 1600) adopts today as the first day of the year as part of adoption of theGregorian calendar, which is completed in September: today is the first day of the New Year under the terms of last year'sCalendar Act of the British Parliament.[1]
February 23 –Messier 83 (M83), the "Southern Pinwheel Galaxy" and the first to be cataloged outside the "Local Group" ofgalaxies nearest to Earth's galaxy, theMilky Way, is discovered by French astronomerNicolas-Louis de Lacaille.[3] Lacaille, who observes M83 during a research voyage in the Southern Hemisphere, is the first to identify the body as a nebulous object rather than a star. M83, 15 millionlight-years away, is the most distant object to be identified up to that time.
March 14 –Shō Kei, the ruler ofOkinawa Island and theRyukyu Kingdom, dies at the age of 41 after a reign that began when he was 13 years old. He is succeeded by his 12-year-old son,Shō Boku, who reigns for 42 years.
March 18 – The electors of theRepublic of Venice (which includes not only a large part of northern Italy around the city ofVenice, but portions of Eastern Europe along theAdriatic Sea) electFrancesco Loredan as their new executive, theDoge. Loredan's election comes 11 days after the death of the previous Doge,Pietro Grimani, but is not announced until after Easter Sunday.
April 6 – Spanish GovernorTomás Vélez Cachupín ofSanta Fe de Nuevo México, a province that now comprises most of the American state ofNew Mexico, begins the first peace negotiations with the indigenousComanche tribe after inviting tribal representatives to his home inTaos.[6] As a sign of good faith, he unconditionally releases the four Comanche prisoners of war held at Taos. One of the released Comanches reports to his father, Chief Guanacante, about the hospitality extended to him during his imprisonment, and more meetings take place in July and in the autumn.
TheReal Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Spain's Royal Academy of the Fine Arts, is formally established inSpain, eight years after first being proposed to King Fernando VI by Jeronimo Antonio Gil as a small school inMadrid. The foundation of the Royal Academy is considered by historians to be "an essential step in modernizing Spain" during theSpanish Enlightenment.[8]
April 13 – The oldest property insurance company in the United States, "Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire", holds its organizational meeting at the courthouse in Philadelphia to elect a board of directors, largely through the efforts ofBenjamin Franklin. Franklin's newspaper,The Pennsylvania Gazette, has been advertising the meeting since February 18, with a notice that "All persons inclined to subscribe to the articles of insurance of houses from fire, in or near this city, are desired to appear at the Court-house, where attendance will be given, to take in their subscriptions, every seventh day of the week, in the afternoon, until the 13th of April next, being the day appointed by the said articles for electing twelve directors and a treasurer."[9][10] The property insurance company is still in existence more than 250 years later.
April 22 –Adam Smith, appointed the year before as a professor of logic, is unanimously elected by the faculty of theUniversity of Glasgow to be the new Professor of Moral Philosophy "on the express condition that he would content himself with the emoluments of the Logic Professorship until 10 October",[11] in that the 1751-1752 salary budgeted for the job has already been distributed to faculty members who had substituted for the previous moral philosophy professor, Thomas Craigie; from April to October, Smith's remuneration for teaching moral philosophy is limited to fees paid directly to him by his students (ahalf guinea per semester for the public class, and aguinea per semester for the private class). Smith's lectures on ethics are first published in 1759 in his workThe Theory of Moral Sentiments.
June –Benjamin Franklin reportedly carries out his famouskite experiment, duplicating experiments that show thatlightning andelectricity are the same. According to Franklin, lightning strikes the kite that he is flying during a thunderstorm and produces sparks identical to what he has previously generated artificially in aLeyden jar. However, the report of his experiment is not made until October 19, in Franklin's newspaper,The Pennsylvania Gazette, leading 20th century researchers to doubt that he conducted the experiment, if at all, until sometime after September 28, when he had written in theGazette about other such experiments, and that he was making a claim that he had conceived the experiment independently.[12]
June 3 – A fire destroys 13,000 houses inMoscow in theRussian Empire, only 11 days after a May 23 fire destroyed 5,000 homes; by June 6, two-thirds of the city has been damaged or destroyed.[13]
July 30 – The first of theKronstadt canals, conceived byPeter the Great and designed to link two of the harbors of the Russian city, is completed and opened to maritime traffic.[16]
August 3 –Edward Cornwallis, the BritishGovernor of Nova Scotia, is recalled to Britain after being unsuccessful in pressuring Nova Scotia's Acadian population to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown or to face expulsion. His replacement,Peregrine Hopson, is more lenient with the Acadians but is reassigned less than two years later.[17]
August 25 – The first group of the United Brethren church, commonly called the Moravians, leavesBethlehem, Pennsylvania on a mission to find 100,000 acres (40,000 ha) of land on which to build "Villages of the Lord" for German emigres to settle upon in America; after a 450-mile (720 km) journey, they arrive inEdenton, North Carolina on September 10 and eventually purchase theWachovia Tract, a set of lands in the westernNorth Carolina colony.[19]
September 2 ofJulian calendar (Wednesday) (September 13 "New Style") – Great Britain and theBritish Empire use the Julian calendar for the last time and adopt theGregorian calendar, making the next day Thursday, September 14 in the English-speaking world. A newspaper at the time notes the next day that "Altho' we have more than once, for the Information of our Readers, publish'd some Accounts of the Alteration of theStyle, which took Place this Day, agreeable toa late Act of Parliament, in all his Majesty's Dominions in Europe, Asia, Africa and America" and notes that "The Supputation of the Year began on the first Day of January last, and for the future the first Day of that Month will be stiled the first Day of every Year in all Accounts whatsoever, which Supputation or Reckoning never took Place before this Year in any Courts of Law until the 25th Day of March", and adds, "This Day, had not this Act passed, would have been the 3rd of September, but is now reckoned the 14th, eleven nominal Days being omitted."[20]
October 19 — In his Philadelphia newspaper, thePennsylvania Gazette,Benjamin Franklin first describes the performance inPhiladelphia of thekite experiment that he had proposed in his 1750 book. Although the original account makes no claim that he was the first to do the experiment (which had been done by other scientists (including Thomas-François Dalibard in May), nor that he conducted the test, and it does not give a date for the experiment, it becomes embellished as the story that Franklin "discovered electricity"; in 1766, the story first circulates that Franklin flew the kite in June, 1752, without specifying a date (as Franklin had done in other scientific accounts).[12]
November 3 – A hurricane destroys the Spanish settlement on Florida'sSanta Rosa Island, leaving only two buildings standing;[21] the remaining residents decide to move from thebarrier island on the Gulf of Mexico and to start a settlement on the nearby mainland and construct the Presidio San Miguel de Panzacola, which later forms the nucleus of the city ofPensacola, Florida.
^Benjamin Franklin. Nathan G. Goodman; Peter Conn (eds.).The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: Penn Reading Project Edition. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 92.
^James L. Chen; Adam Chen (2015).A Guide to Hubble Space Telescope Objects: Their Selection, Location, and Significance. Springer. p. 53.Bibcode:2015ghst.book.....C.
^Elizabeth A. H. John,Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1996) p324
^"Afghan-Sikh Wars (Durrani-Sikh Wars)", by Melodee M. Baines, inAfghanistan at War: From the 18th-Century Durrani Dynasty to the 21st Century, ed. by Tom Lansford (ABC-CLIO, 2017) p20
^Kelly Donahue-Wallace,Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) p38
^Ian Simpson Ross,The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford University Press, 2010)
^abcTom Tucker,Bolt Of Fate: Benjamin Franklin And His Fabulous Kite (PublicAffairs, 2009) p135-140
^"Fires, Great", inThe Insurance Cyclopeadia: Being an Historical Treasury of Events and Circumstances Connected with the Origin and Progress of Insurance, Cornelius Walford, ed. (C. and E. Layton, 1876) p52
^Alan Axelrod,A Savage Empire: Trappers, Traders, Tribes, and the Wars That Made America (Macmillan, 2011) p131
^"A. P. Gannibal: On the Occasion of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander Pushkin's Great-Grandfather", by N. K. Teletova, inUnder the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, ed. by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, et al. (Northwestern University Press, 2006) p69
^William Arceneaux,No Spark of Malice: The Murder of Martin Begnaud (Louisiana State University Press, 2004) p56
^Christine Clepper Musser,Images of America: Silver Spring Township (Arcadia Publishing, 2014) p31
^Beverly Hamel,American Chronicles: Bethania— The Village by the Black Walnut Bottom (Arcadia Publishing, 2009)
^Jay Barnes,Florida's Hurricane History (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) p47
^Dianne Marshall,Heroes of the Acadian Resistance: The Story of Joseph Beausoleil Broussard and Pierre II Surette 1702-1765 (Formac Publishing, 2011) p105
^"Aboriginal Rights v. Government Legislation", by Graydon Nicholas, inThe Maritimes: Tradition, Challenge, ed. by George Peabody, et al. (Maritext, Ltd., 1987) p257
^"Shylock as the American Capitalist", by Elaine Brousseau, inMerchants, Barons, Sellers and Suits: The Changing Images of the Businessman through Literature, ed. by Christa Mahalik (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) p95
_by_Edward_Francisco_Burney.jpg)
