1820

Events

• January 1 - Constitutionalist military insurrection at Cádiz leads to summoning of Spanish parliament (March 7) and restoration of 1812 Constitution (March 8) by king Ferdinand VII.
• January 29 - George the Prince Regent becomes king George IV of the United Kingdom, ending the period known as the English Regency.
• January 30 - Edward Bransfield discovers Antarctica.
• February 6 - 86 free African American colonists sail from New York City to Freetown, Sierra Leone.
• February 23 - The Cato Street conspiracy is exposed. The principals are executed on May 1
• March 3 & March 6 - The Missouri Compromise becomes law in the United States.
• March 15 - Maine is admitted as the 23rd U.S. state.
• May 1 - Last hanging drawing and quartering in Britain – Cato Street conspirators for treason (only hanged and beheaded)
• Spring - Joseph Smith, Jr. at age 14 claims to be visited in a vision by God and Jesus Christ (Tradition holds that this occurred on April 6)
• July - Constitutionalist revolution in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
• August 24 - Constitutionalist insurrection at Oporto, Portugal; revolution in Lisbon, September 15
• October 9 - Guayaquil declare independence from Ecuador.
• October 25-November 20 - Congress of Troppau (Opava) between rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia
• November - James Monroe is re-elected, virtually unopposed.
• November 17 - Captain Nathaniel Palmer becomes the first American to see Antarctica (the Palmer Peninsula was later named after him).

• 6th Edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica begins appearing.
• Republic of Buenos Aires (Argentina) establishes penal colony in Falkland Islands.
• Venus de Milo found on island of Melos.
• Hans Christian Orsted discovers relationship between electricity and magnetism.
• In Salem, Massachusetts, general Robert Jackson eats a tomato in public to prove it is not poisonous

Births

• January 17 - Anne Brontë, author
• February 8 - William Tecumseh Sherman, soldier (+ 1891)
• February 15 - Susan B. Anthony, US suffragist
• February 28 - John Tenniel, illustrator
• March 14 - Victor Emmanuel II of Italy
• May 12 - Florence Nightingale, nurse (+ 1910)
• May 27 - Mathilde Bonaparte, hostess and socialite
• July 23 - Julia Gardiner Tyler, later First Lady of the United States.
• September 27 - Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel, classical scholar
• September 29 - Henry, Duke of Bordeaux, posthumous son of the Duke of Berry, future Comte de Chambord and claimant to the French throne
• Harriet Tubman, anti-slavery resistance movement leader

Deaths

• January 29 - King George III of the United Kingdom
• February 14 - Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry, stabbed on February 13
• March 22 - Stephen Decatur, sailor
• June 19 - Sir Joseph Banks, British naturalist and botanist
• September 3 - Benjamin Latrobe, architect
• November 23 - Isaac Todhunter, English mathematician (d. 1884)

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