- Jan 1 Dutch Trade Company NHM gets opium monopoly on Java
- Jan 17 Duke of Wellington appointed British supreme commander
- Feb 7 Ballet (Deserter) introduced to US at Bowery Theater (NYC)
- Feb 27 1st Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans
- Feb 28 1st commercial railroad in US, Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) chartered
- Mar 7 Shrigley Abduction: Ellen Turner, a wealthy heiress in Cheshire, England, is abducted by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a future politician in colonial New Zealand
- Mar 15 University of Toronto is chartered
- Mar 16 First US newspaper, "Freedom's Journal" owned and operated by African Americans begins publishing in New York City
- Apr 2 US inventor Joseph Dixon of Salem, Massachusetts, begins manufacturing lead pencils
- Apr 7 English chemist John Walker sells the world's first friction matches, for 1s 2d (6 new pence) per 100 matches in a tin case with a piece of sandpaper [1]
George Canning Prime Minister
Apr 10 George Canning becomes British Prime Minister upon the resignation of Robert Jenkinson, lives to serve only 119 days
- Apr 23 Irish mathematician and astronomer William Rowan Hamilton presents his Theory of Systems of Rays
- Jun 5 Turks capture the Acropolis and take Athens during the Greek War of Independence
- Jul 4 Slavery abolished in New York
- Jul 23 1st US swimming school opens (Boston, Massachusetts)
- Aug 15 Race riots in Cincinnati, Ohio spurred by city's threat to enforce restrictive residency requirements on Blacks begin; over 1,000 (more than half of the Black population) leave, many bound for Canada
- Aug 17 Dutch King Willem I and Pope Leo XII sign concord
- Aug 22 José de La Mar becomes President of Peru
- Sep 21 According to Joseph Smith Jr., the angel Moroni gave him a record of gold plates, one-third of which Joseph translated into The Book of Mormon
- Oct 1 The Russian army under Ivan Paskevich storms Yerevan, ending a millennium of Muslim domination in Armenia
Darwin Enters Cambridge
Oct 15 Charles Darwin admitted to Christ's College, Cambridge
- Oct 20 Naval Battle of Navarino (off the Peloponnese coast): English, Russian, French combined fleet beat a Turkish and Egyptian force, paving the way for Greek independence
- Oct 22 German chemist Friedrich Wöhler is the first to isolate pure aluminium
- Nov 15 Creek-indians lose all their property in US
- Nov 17 The Delta Phi fraternity, America's oldest continuous social fraternity, founded at Union College in Schenectady, New York
Authors
Civil Rights Activists
Inventors
Kings
Revolutionaries
Scientists