1788
First Fleet Arrives at Botany Bay
Eleven British ships - six of them floating prisons - dropped anchor in Botany Bay after an eight-month voyage. The bay proved unsuitable; Governor Phillip moved the fleet to Port Jackson. On January 26 he raised the flag at Sydney Cove. A continent began its transformation into a British penal colony.
U.S. Constitution Ratified
New Hampshire's convention, ninth to approve, put the new Constitution into effect. Virginia and New York soon followed after tight votes; North Carolina and Rhode Island lagged. The Articles of Confederation quietly expired. On March 4 of the next year the first Congress under the new charter would open for business.
Mozart's Last Three Symphonies
In six weeks of the Viennese summer, broke and unwell, Mozart composed Symphonies 39, 40, and 41. He may never have heard any of them performed. Together they are one of the peaks of classical music - the great G-minor minor, the 'Jupiter' closing in a blazing five-voice fugue. No composer before or since has produced three works of such sustained genius in so brief a span.
First Fleet Arrives at Sydney Cove
Eleven ships carrying 750 convicts and their marine guards anchored in Sydney Cove after eight months at sea. Captain Arthur Phillip raised the British flag on a shore where the Eora people had fished for millennia. A penal colony was planted on the oldest continuously inhabited continent. Australia's colonial clock began ticking.
Kant's Critique of Practical Reason
Konigsberg's punctual bachelor followed his first Critique with a second, this one on morals. His conclusion: the moral law within him, like the starry heavens above, could command absolutely. The categorical imperative had a formula. Ethics, once the property of priests and traditions, would now also belong to professors. Kant's moral philosophy remains the foundation on which most secular ethical theory in the Western world still rests.
Onset of George III's Madness
The king began to talk incessantly, froth at the mouth, and converse with trees in Windsor Park. His doctors, baffled, restrained him in a straitjacket and blistered his skin. Parliament debated a regency. He recovered by spring. His illness - perhaps porphyria, perhaps something worse - would return. Each crisis raised the specter of his son the Prince of Wales assuming power, a prospect that terrified Tories.
The Times of London Founded
John Walter, a bankrupt coal merchant experimenting with a new 'logotype' printing method, retitled his Daily Universal Register as The Times. It would take a generation, but his paper - sober, accurate, and politically independent - became the global standard of newspapers. The words 'Thunderer' and 'Fourth Estate' were still to come.