• English author Jane Austen.
• English landscape artist Joseph Mallord William Turner.
• English poet and essayist Charles Lamb.
• English poet Walter Savage Landor.
• French Composer François-Adrien Boieldieu.
• Spanish-English poet Joseph Blanco White.
• Spanish tenor and composer Manuel García.
• French physicist André Ampère.
• Hungarian mathematician Farkas Bolyai.
• Scottish poet John Leyden.

• Italian composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini.

• Outbreak of the American War of Independence.
• (March 22) Edmund Burke gives a speech to Pariament urging conciliation with the American Colonies. Parliament rejects this.
• (March 23) Patrick Henry gives his famous "Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death!" speech to the Virginia House of Burgesses.
• (April 18-19) Battles of Lexington and Concord
• (May 10) Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake George, is captured by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold.
• (June 17)  Cannons from Fort Ticonderoga are used at the Battle of "Bunker Hill".  The Colonials run out of gunpowder and are forced to give up the hill, but the british suffer 1,000 casualties, about half their force.
• (July 5) The Second Continental Congress adopts the Olive Branch Petition appealing directly to King George III for reconciliation. The King refuses to look at it, and (August 23) declares the Colonies in open rebellion.
• (September) Benedict Arnold leads a force through northern Maine and into Canada in an attempt to take Quebec.
• (November) Montreal surrenders to American commander Richard Montgomery.
• (December 31) A disastrous battle near Quebec after a fiasco of a march across Maine's Appalachian Mountains.  Arnold shot in the leg, Montgomery killed, over 600 men captured.
• Kumeyaay Indians burn the mission at San Diego after an attempt to convert them en masse.
• Giovanni Angelico Braschi elected Pope Pius VI.

1774 - 1775 - 1776