1789

Historical events in 1789

• A paddle steamer sails up the Forth and Clyde canal, Scotland.
• Electors unanimously chose George Washington to be the first  president of the United States and John Adams as vice-president.
• The U.S. House of Representatives held its first meeting.

• Fletcher Christian lead a mutiny on the Bounty.
• George Washington was inaugurated and took office in New York as the first president of the United States.
• In England William Wilberforce laid out his case for the abolition of slavery to the House of Commons. This speech directly led to Britains abolition of slavery in 1807.
• Parisians rioted over an increase in price of grain. The mob plundered the armories and opened the prison gates of St. Lazare. The King at Versailles refused to withdraw his troops from Paris.
• Bastille Day. Tens of thousands of the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille
• The French Revolution.
• The Constituent Assembly in France dissolved feudal system by abolishing the privileges of nobility.
• The U.S. War Department was established by Congress.
• The Constituent Assembly in Versailles, France, approved the final version of the Declaration of Human Rights.
• James Fenimore Cooper (d.1851), American novelist, was born in Burlington, NJ. "Last of the Mohicans."
• The U.S. War Department established a regular U.S. army with a strength of several hundred men.
• George Washington proclaimed the 1st national Thanksgiving Day to be Nov 26.
• In Versailles France, Joseph Guillotin said the most humane way of carrying out a death sentence is decapitation by a single blow of a blade.
• Bourbon Whiskey, 1st distilled from corn, was made by Elijah Craig in  Bourbon, Ky.
• The first tobacco advertisement came out in the US. It depicted an Indian smoking a long clay pipe.
• The University of North Carolina was chartered.
• The prison ship Lady Julian delivered over 200 women to the penal colony at Sydney harbor.
• In Brazil poet and dentist Joaquim Jose da Silva Xavier helped launch the first Brazilian rebellion against the country's Portuguese rulers.
• Tobias Schmidt, a German piano maker, built the first guillotine.
• In Germany the Brandenburg Gate of Berlin was built.
• 1789-1793    Alexander Mackenzie, Scottish-born fur trader, became the 1st European to cross the North American continent.