1791

• English physicist Michael Faraday.
• English mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage.
• Italian composer Giacomo Meyerbeer.
• Irish poet and clergyman Charles Wolfe.
• English mathematician George Peacock.
• French architect Louis Visconti.
• Russian guitarist and composer Mikhail Vyssotski.
• Italian painter Francesco Hayez.

• Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
• Methodist founder John Wesley.
• English writer and historian Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay.

• The Constitutional Act amends the Quebec Act to divide that territory into Upper Canada and Lower Canada.
• Having started exporting English convicts to Australia in 1787, Great Britain begins exporting Irish convicts there.
• The infant United States toddles along.
• Vermont is the first state outside the original thirteen to be admitted to the United States after New York finally gives up its claim to the area.
• United States President George Washington learns from his minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, that France is unhappy with 1789 and 1790 acts levying duties levied on foreign ships, because these acts to not exempt France. So "most favoured nation" doesn't mean being favored above all other nations. Surprise, surprise.
• Benjamin Banneker writes a letter to Thomas Jefferson chiding him for still owning slaves. Jefferson returns a polite if somewhat defensive reply.
• A financial panic also sees the first Federal monetary intervention.
• George Washington announces the location of the new Federal capital, a ten-mile-square area straddling the Potomac River. Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker survey the area and lay out its boundaries.  Pierre Charles L'Enfant draws up a plan for the new city, Washington, DC.
• Major General Arthur St. Clair is sent with a force of 3,000 men to establish forts in the Ohio country. The ventual goal is a strategic point on the Maumee River, the present day site of Fort Wayne, Indiana].. The money to supply the troops is embezzled by William Duer. The Miami and Shawnee Indians, led by Little Turtle, surprise St Clair and his army (now reduced to 1400) at Fort Recovery.  700 Americans are killed to 65 Indians.  British governor Henry "Hair Buyer" Hamilton, still at Fort Detroit despite the 1783 Treatry of Paris,
• Thomas Paine publishes The Rights of Man, a response to Edmund Burke's denuncuiation of the French Revolution of the previous year.
• The Polish Sejm, after four years of work, agrees on a Constitution to strengthen the Polish government and keep Poland from being partitioned.
• France's period of relative calm following the 1789 revolution begins to break down.
• Olympe de Gouge writes her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen which points out the inequity in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen passed by the National Assembly in 1789, and offers a remedy to it.  She tries to push this declaration in the National Assembly but gets nowhere, and she will pay for it during the Terror.
• A slave uprising in the colony of Saint-Domingue cannot be put down.
• (June 28) Louis XVI attempts to escape to Austria, but is spotted by a peasant at Varennes who recognizes his face from a coin.  Louis and Marie Antoinette are captured and returned to Paris. Many now consider them traitors.
• (July 4) The National Assembly codifies the equality of freed blacks in Saint-Domingue.
• (July 17) (Massacre of the Champ de Mars) National Guard troops fire on stone-throwers at a political rally.
• (July 18) Jacobins opposed to the removal of Louis, mostly bougeiosie, leave the club to form the Feuillants. Maxamillien Robespierre is not one of them.
• (September 1) France annexes the Papal enclave of Avignon.
• (September 14) King Louis XVI accepts the constitution drawn up by the National Assembly.
• The ancient guild system is abolished.

1790 - 1791 - 1792