Count down year by year with real world facts!

[Clippy]

1782

June 18 – In Switzerland, Anna Göldi is sentenced to death for witchcraft (the last legal witchcraft sentence).

Further reading:

A native of Sennwald, Anna Göldi arrived in Glarus in 1765. For seventeen years, she worked as a maidservant for Johann Jakob Tschudi, a physician. Tschudi reported her for having put needles in the bread and milk of one of his daughters, apparently through supernatural means. Göldi at first escaped arrest, but the authorities of the Canton of Glarus advertised a reward for her capture in the Zürcher Zeitung on 9 February 1782. Göldi was arrested and, under torture, admitted to entering in a pact with the Devil, who had appeared to her as a black dog. She withdrew her confession after the torture ended, but was sentenced to execution by decapitation. The charges were officially of "poisoning" rather than witchcraft, even though the law at the time did not impose the death penalty for non-lethal poisoning.

During her trial, official allegations of witchcraft were avoided, and the court protocols were destroyed. The sentence does therefore not strictly qualify as that of a witch trial. Still, because of the apparent witchhunt that led to the sentence, the execution sparked outrage throughout Switzerland and the Holy Roman Empire.

 

[Sanshou Kid]

1781


September 4 – Los Angeles is founded as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciuncula ("City of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula"), by a group of 44 Spanish settlers in California.


And, there was also something called the American Revolutionary War being fought but, that isn't big news.....

 

[Clippy]

1780

May 19 – New England's Dark Day: An unaccountable darkness spreads over New England, regarded by some observers as a fulfillment of Bible prophecy.

An unusual darkening of the day sky was observed over the New England states and parts of Canada. The primary cause of the event is believed to have been a combination of smoke from forest fires, a thick fog, and cloud cover. The darkness was so complete that candles were required from noon on. It did not disperse until the middle of the next night

 

[WaylonMercy5150]

1779

The Spanish declare war on Great Britain.

The Battle of Baton Rouge was a brief siege during the Anglo-Spanish War that was decided on September 21, 1779. Baton Rouge was the second British outpost to fall to Spanish arms during Bernardo de Gálvez's march into British West Florida.

 

[WaylonMercy5150]

1778

Capitan James Cook becomes the first European to land on the Hawaiian island Maui.

 

[WaylonMercy5150]

1777

Vermont declares it's independence from New York, becoming the Vermont Republic an independent country. They would remain this way until 1791 when the joined the US, becoming the 14th State.

 

[WaylonMercy5150]

1776

The Continental Congress ratifies the declaration by the United States of its independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain.

 

[WaylonMercy5150]

1775
"The British are Coming!"

On this night in 1775, Paul Revere was instructed by the Sons of Liberty to ride to Lexington, Mass., to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them.

 

[Milgrim]

1774

Great Britain passes the Stamp act, setting out very generous boundaries for the Province of Quebec and just generally pissing off the American colonists even more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Act

 

[Clippy]

1773

America's first insane asylum opens, for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds, in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The "Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds" was the first building in North America devoted solely to the treatment of the mentally ill. The first patient was admitted October 12, 1773.

Apparently someone made an ornament of it ...

It's not Christmas without ... an ornament of America's first ever insane asylum .... ...

 

[Clippy]

1772

Crisis of 1772

The Credit crisis of 1772 is triggered when, following the flight of their partner Alexander Fordyce to France, the London banking house of Neal, James, Fordyce and Down (which has been speculating in East India Company stock) suspends payment. The resultant panic causes other banks, particularly in Scotland, to fail, extends to Amsterdam and the Thirteen Colonies of British North America, and threatens the East India Company with bankruptcy.

 

[thoughtsone]

1771

Spain cedes the Falklands to Britain

James Cook sails the Endeavour back to Englad.

 

[Clippy]

1770

Christopher Seider, first casualty of the American Revolution

February 22— Christopher Seider, an 11-year old boy in Boston at the British colony of Massachusetts, is shot and killed by a colonial official, Ebenezer Richardson. The funeral sets off anti-British protests that lead to the massacre days later:



March 5 – Boston Massacre: Eleven American men are shot (five fatally) by British troops, in an event that helps start the American Revolutionary War five years later.

http://www.revolutionary-war-and-be...eider-first-casualty-american-revolution.html

 

[Clippy]

1769

Brescia Explosion: The city of Brescia, Italy is devastated when the Church of San Nazaro is struck by lightning. The resulting fire ignites 200,000 lb (90,000 kg) of gunpowder being stored there, causing a massive explosion, which destroys 1/6 of the city and kills 3,000 people. The disaster prompts the Roman Catholic Church to abandon their religious objection to using lightning rods to protect their property.



The church vaults stored 100,000 tons of explosives, resulting in a massive blast that killed 3,000 people and caused widespread destruction in the city. Why store gunpowder in a church? For years, superstition held that ringing church bells could ward off lightning, making the church seem like a good place to store tons of volatile explosives.

 

[davidlemonparty]

1768
A year that is very important in the history of my fair nation. This is the year that Captain (Lieutenant) James Cook departed Plymouth on his first voyage of discovery into the great southern lands aboard the HMS Endeavor. This voyage established Australia as a colony of Great Britain and set the tone for Australia's cultural and social development from 1788 to 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_voyage_of_James_Cook

During this journey, the land then known as Terra Australis Incognita by the Europeans would be claimed by Great Britain. James Cook landed in Botany Bay (the location of modern day Sydney) which represented the first landing on the Eastern Australian Seaboard by a European. This led to the dispatch of the First Fleet in 1788, in part spurred by the loss of the american colonies by those pesky upstart yanks. And the rest, is history.

You cannot go far in Australia without running into something, someone or somewhere named "James Cook", "Cook", or "Endeavour" .

 

[Clippy]

1767

Surveying of the "Mason–Dixon line", which will later become the traditional division between the northern and southern states of the United States, is completed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon after four years, initially to settle a boundary dispute between the colonies of Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland. The survey party is halted at Dunkard Creek when a chief of the Mohawk Indians tells them that they are in Native American territory and that the Mohawks guiding the property "would not proceed one step further Westward"; the line, slightly west the 80th meridian west, is now part of the boundary between Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

 

[Clippy]

1766

African slaves are imported directly into the American colony of Georgia for the first time, as the sloop Mary Brow arrives in Savannah with 78 captives imported from Saint-Louis, Senegal.

Also Ben Franklin did stuff

 

[Clippy]

1765

Royal assent is given to the Duties in American Colonies Act 1765, historically referred to as the Stamp Act, imposing the first direct tax levied from Great Britain on the thirteen American colonies, effective November 1. The revenue measure (which requires the purchase of a stamp to be affixed for validation of all legal documents, but also to licensed newspapers and even playing cards and dice) is made to help defray the costs for British military operations in North America, including the French and Indian War.

This shit pretty much led into the war of independence. Fucking stamps

 

[Clippy]

1764

In what is described 250 years later as "The first documented United States school shooting", a group of four Delaware Indians invade a schoolhouse near what is now Greencastle, Pennsylvania and kill ten schoolchildren and their teacher, Enoch Brown.The massacre happens in the course of Pontiac's War, as retaliation against white settlement of Indian lands in central Pennsylvania. One student, Archie McCullough, manages to escape the carnage; a memorial is erected 120 years later on August 4, 1884.

 

[Clippy]

1763

Seven Years' War – French and Indian War: The Treaty of Paris ends the war, and France cedes Canada (New France) to Great Britain.