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Russia's Catherine II (the Great) appoints a commission of 564 deputies to make recommendations for the modernization of the empire, with limits on the powers of landowners over their serfs and plans for comprehensive education. Included are landowners, burghers, administrators, Cossacks, and ethnic minorities, but no clergymen or serfs.
Britain's Chatham ministry resigns in December. A new Tory ministry headed by August Henry Fitzroy, 32, 3rd duke of Grafton, will rule until January 1770.
Burmese forces sack Siam's capital Ayutthaya in August and establish a new dynasty (see 1593; 1752; Siam, 1703). The Siamese general Phraya Taksin, 33, has fled the city before its fall and made his way to the southeast, where he raises fresh troops, regains the lower Chao Phraya River Valley, and makes himself king, beginning a reign that will continue until his death in 1782.
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania by Philadelphia lawyer John Dickinson, 34, are published in their first installments. Dickinson drafted the resolutions and grievances of the Stamp Act Congress 2 years ago as a member of that body, and his Letters on the nonimportation and nonexportation agreements will continue to appear through much of 1768, winning him wide popularity in the colonies.
The Mason and Dixon line between the Pennsylvania and Maryland colonies is completed after a 4-year survey that has cost $75,000. British colonial authorities have engaged English surveyor-astronomers Charles Mason, 37, and Jeremiah Dixon to settle a century-old dispute as to ownership of lands that include the large fertile peninsula between Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay. Self-educated Philadelphia astronomer David Rittenhouse, 31, has established an arc of 12 miles' radius centered at New Castle, Delaware; Mason and Dixon have used that as the basis of their amazingly accurate demarcation line. Marked by handsome boundary stones, with the Penn coat-of-arms on their north sides and the Calvert coat-of-arms on their south sides, it extends westward to the "top of the Great dividing Ridge of the Alleghaney Mountains," beyond which Mason and Dixon's Indian guides have refused to proceed out of fear of the Delaware and the Shawnee.
Explorer Jonathan Carver leaves the Falls of St. Anthony and travels east (see 1766). En route back to Mackinac, he reaches the mouth of the Wisconsin River, where he encounters a party sent by Major Robert Rogers to seek a possible route to the Pacific Ocean. He joins the group as draftsman and third in command, travels with it up the Mississippi, Chippewa, and St. Croix rivers to Lake Superior, and proceeds to the Grand Portage (see 1768).
North Carolina woodsman Daniel Boone, 33, goes through the Cumberland Gap found in 1750 and reaches "Kentucke" in defiance of King George's 1763 decree. A veteran of the 1756 French and Indian Wars who has learned woodcraft from the Cherokee, Boone is reputed to be able to smell salt deposits 30 miles away, and in "Kentucke" he comes upon a huge brine lake—a salt lick that attracts game and makes the region a hunting ground contested by various Indian tribes (see 1773).
English-born Hudson's Bay Company explorer Samuel Hearne, 22, leads an expedition from Fort Prince of Wales to check reports of mineral deposits to the northwest of the Bay and search for a Northwest Passage; he will find remains of the ill-fated 1719 James Knight expedition on Marble Island (see 1771).
A fleet of 50 American whalers makes a foray into the Antarctic, the first whaling venture into that region.
French navigator Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 38, explores Oceania in hopes of expanding French whaling operations into the Pacific.
The Townshend Revenue Act passed by Parliament June 29 imposes duties on tea, glass, paint, oil, lead, and paper imported into Britain's American colonies in hopes of raising £40,000 per year. A town meeting held at Boston to protest the Townshend Act adopts a nonimportation agreement (see 1770).
The History and Present State of Electricity by English clergyman-chemist Joseph Priestley, 34, is published at Leeds and explains the rings (later to be called Priestley rings) that are formed by an electrical discharge on a metallic surface. Priestley proposes an explanation of the oscillatory character of the discharge from a Leyden jar (see 1745; 1746; Aepinus, 1759).
Joseph Priestley begins a study of "different kinds of airs." Knowing that carbon dioxide, or "fixed air," is present above the open vats where beer mash is fermenting at the Leeds brewery, he holds two containers close to the surface of the fermenting mash and pours water back and forth between them; the water becomes charged with CO2.
Geologist Johann Gottlob Lehmann dies at St. Petersburg January 22 at age 47, having been invited by the Imperial Academy of Sciences to the Russian capital in 1761 to become professor of chemistry and director of the academy's natural-history collection.
Nonfiction: "Essay on the History of Civil Society" by philosopher Adam Ferguson traces humanity's progression from barbarism to social and political refinement, suggesting that something has been lost in the process. Ferguson rejects any notion that man lived as an individual in a "state of nature" before the establishment of society, that commerce breeds economic competition, and the state system breeds war; Physiocracy and Of the Origin and the Progress of a New Science by Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, who expresses the notion that there is a presocial natural order in which man has rights and duties based on the physical necessities of life, that his natural source of wealth is land, and all forms of industry beyond agriculture are secondary and to be discouraged. Only hereditary monarchy can ensure the proper use of natural resources, he argues, and good government should work to eliminate custom barriers along with excessive and unproductive taxation that inhibits the growth of agriculture and trade; Phädon by philosopher and biblical scholar Moses Mendelssohn, now 38, is based on Plato's Phaedo and argues that the soul is immortal.
Jurist-author Emmerich de Vattel dies at Neuchâtel December 28 at age 53.
Fiction: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne appears in its eighth and final volume after 7 years of earlier volumes; l'Ingénu by Voltaire criticizes French society from the viewpoint of an imaginary Huron sauvage: "History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes" (X).
Painting: Portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds by Angelica Kauffmann.
Theater: Eugénie by French playwright-watchmaker Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, 35, 1/25 at the Comédie-Française, Paris; The Free Thinker (Der Freigeist) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing at Frankfurt-am-Main; Minna von Barnhelm, or The Soldier's Fortune (Minna von Barnhelm, oder Das Soldatenglück) by G. E. Lessing 9/30 at Hamburg's Nationaltheater.
Opera: Apollo et Hyacinthus 5/13 at Salzburg, with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Alceste 12/16 at Vienna's Burgtheater, with music by C. W. Gluck.
"Dissertation on the Principles of Musical Harmony" ("Dissertazione dei principi dell'armonia musicale") by violinist-composer Giuseppe Tartini expands on his 1754 treatise.
Composer Georg Philipp Telemann dies at Hamburg June 25 at age 86. He has been music director of Hamburg's Johanneum since 1721.
Joseph Priestley pioneers carbonated water (and soft drinks). "Sometimes in the space of two or three minutes [I have] made a glass of exceedingly pleasant sparkling water which could hardly be distinguished from very good Pyrmont," he writes. The beverage has been known since the 16th century in Germany as "Selterser wasser" and is thought to have medicinal value, but Priestley will devise a more convenient way to make it (see 1772; carbonic acid, 1770).
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