18th Century

†1759 George Frederick Handel

George Frederick Handel was a German-British Baroque composer well-known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. The Great Mr Handel Full Movie (1942)  Handel received his training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727.  He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel’s music forms one of the peaks of the “high baroque” style, bringing Italian opera to its highest development, creating the genres of English oratorio and organ concerto, and introducing a […]

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1779 Captain James Cook killed

Cook was an 18th century explorer and navigator whose achievements in mapping the Pacific, New Zealand and Australia radically changed western perceptions of world geography. As one of the very few men in the 18th century navy to rise through the ranks, Cook was particularly sympathetic to the needs of ordinary sailors.  James Cook was born on 27 October 1728 in a small village near Middlesbrough in Yorkshire. His father was a farm worker. At the age of 17, Cook moved to the coast, settling in Whitby and finding work with a coal merchant. In 1755, Cook enlisted in […]

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1722 First European land on Easter Island

The first European to land on Easter Island was the Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen, who paid it a single day’s visit in 1722. He and his crew found a population that they described as being of mixed physical types who worshiped huge standing statues with fires while they prostrated themselves to the rising sun. Some of them, said to be “white men,” had their earlobes slit and hanging to their shoulders, a distinctly non-Polynesian custom. An expedition dispatched by the Spanish viceroy of Peru rediscovered the island in 1770. The Spanish spent four days ashore and were the first to […]

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1718 Pirate Blackbeard dies

  Edward Teach (1680 – 1718), better known as Blackbeard, was an English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of Britain’s North American colonies. Little is known about his early life, but he may have been a sailor on privateer ships during Queen Anne’s War before he settled on the Bahamian island of New Providence, a base for Captain Benjamin Hornigold, whose crew Teach joined around 1716. Hornigold placed him in command of a sloop that he had captured, and the two engaged in numerous acts of piracy. Their numbers were boosted by the addition to their fleet of two more ships, one of which was commanded by Stede Bonnet, but Hornigold […]

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1798 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 

 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere), written by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797–98 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, is a poem that recounts the experiences of a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. Some modern editions use a revised version printed in 1817 that featured a gloss. The poem tells of the mariner stopping a man who is on his way to a wedding ceremony so that the mariner can share his story. The Wedding-Guest’s reaction turns from amusement to impatience to fear to fascination as the […]

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1709 First piano is built

The invention of the piano is credited to Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, Italy, who was employed by Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, as the Keeper of the Instruments. Cristofori was an expert harpsichord maker and was well acquainted with the body of knowledge on stringed keyboard instruments. This knowledge of keyboard mechanisms and actions helped him to develop the first pianos. It is not known when Cristofori first built a piano. An inventory made by his employers, the Medici family, indicates the existence of a piano by 1700.  The three Cristofori pianos that survive today date from the 1720s (see picture above). Cristofori named […]

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Events 1790s – The Vancouver Expedition

1791 – 1795 – The Vancouver Expedition  Events 1791: Suppression of the Liège Revolution by Austrian forces and re-establishment of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. 1791–1795: George Vancouver explores the world during the Vancouver Expedition. 1791–1804: The Haitian Revolution. 1791: Mozart premieres The Magic Flute. 1792–1802: The French Revolutionary Wars lead into the Napoleonic Wars, which last from 1803–1815. 1792: The New York Stock & Exchange Board is founded. 1792: Polish–Russian War of 1792. 1792: Margaret Ann Neve (1792–1903) would become the first recorded female supercentenarian to reach the age of 110. 1793: Upper Canada bans slavery. 1793: The largest yellow fever epidemic in American history kills as many as 5,000 people in Philadelphia, roughly 10% of the population. 1793–1796: Revolt in the Vendée against the French Republic […]

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Events 1780s – The French Revolution

1789 The French Revolution Events 1780: Outbreak of the indigenous rebellion against Spanish colonization led by Túpac Amaru II in Peru. 1781: The city of Los Angeles is founded by Spanish settlers.1781–1785: Serfdom is abolished in the Austrian monarchy (first step; second step in 1848). 1782: The Thonburi Kingdom of Thailand is dissolved after a palace coup. 1783: The Treaty of Paris formally ends the American Revolutionary War. 1783: Russian annexation of Crimea. 1785–1791: Imam Sheikh Mansur, a Chechen warrior and Muslim mystic, leads a coalition of Muslim Caucasian tribes from throughout the Caucasus in a holy war against Russian settlers and military bases in the Caucasus, as well as against local traditionalists, who followed the traditional customs and common law (Adat) rather than the […]

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Events 1770s – Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations

1776 Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations Events 1770–1771: Famine in Czech lands kills hundreds of thousands. 1771: The Plague Riot in Moscow. 1771: The Kalmyk Khanate dissolves as the territory becomes colonized by Russians. More than a hundred thousand Kalmyks migrate back to Qing Dzungaria. 1772: Gustav III of Sweden stages a coup d’état, becoming almost an absolute monarch. 1772–1779: Maratha Empire fights Britain and Raghunathrao‘s forces during the First Anglo-Maratha War. 1772–1795: The Partitions of Poland end the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and erase Poland from the map for 123 years. 1773–1775: Pugachev’s Rebellion, the largest peasant revolt in Russian history. 1773: East India Company starts operations in Bengal to smuggle opium into China. 1775: Russia imposes a reduction in autonomy on […]

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