• Zachary Taylor, 12th President of the United States.
• German mathematician and astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, famous for Bessel Curves as well as deducing that an as-yet-undiscovered planet was perturbing the orbit of Uranus.
• Scottish poet Allan Cunningham.
• Andrew T. Judson, presiding judge in the Amistad case.
• Elizabeth Clovis Lange, founder of the Oblate Sisters of Providence.

• English writer and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson.
• Sister Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker sect.
• American poet Phyllis Wheatley.
• French encyclopedist Denis Diderot.
• German composer Wilhelm Friedemann Bach.
• Italian composer Andrea Bernasconi.
• Spanish missionary Father Junipero Serra.

• ]Immanuel Kant] publishes An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"
• The new United States government enacts a treaty with the six Iroqouis nations, rewarding the Oneida and Tuscarora who had fought on their side, and circumscribing the lands of the Seneca, Mohawk, Onandaga, and Cayuga who had fought on the side of the British.
• the British Parliament under William Pitt the Younger passes the India Act.
• John Goodricke discovers that the star Delta Cepheid varies its brightness.  It and later stars like it are now called Cepheid variables.
• Charles Messier publishes his famous catalog of 103 nebulous objects and star clusters.
• The Spanish government in Louisiana enters into a treaty with the Creeks. Choctaws, Chickasaws, and other Southern Indian tribes.  The same year, they close the Mississippi River to travel because of encroaching American settlment.

1783 - 1784 - 1785