Captain Cook sets off, in HMS Resolution, on his second voyage to the southern hemisphere

Haydn's Farewell Symphony gives a subtle hint to his employer at Esterházy that it is time for the musicians to return home

The London brokers who meet to do business in Jonathan's coffee house decide to call themselves the Stock Exchange

Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer is produced in London's Covent Garden theatre

Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele isolates oxygen but does not immediately publish his achievement

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell undertake a journey together to the western islands of Scotland

Responding to pressure from the Catholic monarchs of Europe, Clement XIV abolishes the Jesuit Order

Goethe's romantic novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, brings him an immediate European reputation

Goethe's play Götz von Berlichingen, a definitive work of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), has its premiere in Berlin

Britain's new Coercive (or Intolerable) Acts include the requirement that Massachusetts citizens give board and lodging to British troops

Encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine emigrates to America and settles in Philadelphia

In the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, ending the recent Russo-Turkish war, the Ottoman empire cedes the Crimea to Russia

Illiterate visionary Ann Lee, leader of an English sect, the 'Shaking Quakers', crosses the Atlantic to spread the word

English chemist Joseph Priestley isolates oxygen, but he believes it to be 'dephlogisticated air'

Thomas Gainsborough moves from Bath to set up a studio in London

John Singleton Copley, already established as America's greatest portrait painter, moves to London

Figaro makes his first appearance on stage in Beaumarchais' The Barber of Seville

Talleyrand begins an extremely varied career by becoming an abbot at the age of twenty-one

Captain Cook publishes his discovery of a preventive cure against scurvy, in the form of a regular ration of lemon juice

Francisco de Goya begins a series of designs for tapestries to be made in Spain's Royal Tapestry Factory

Two Boulton and Watt engines are installed, the first of many in the mines and mills of England's developing industrial revolution

English historian Edward Gibbon publishes the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Scottish economist Adam Smith analyzes the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations

Richard Brinsley Sheridan's second play, The School for Scandal, is an immediate success in London's Drury Lane theatre

Benjamin Franklin persuades the French to sign a Treaty of Alliance, committing France to the US cause