Historical Events in 1820

Jan 12 Astronomical Society of London (now the Royal Astronomical Society) founded in England

Discovery of Antarctica

Jan 27 Russian Antarctic expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev discover the continent of Antarctica

Jan 30 British explorer Edward Bransfield aboard Williams sights Trinity Peninsula, Antarctica, claiming it for Britain
Feb 6 First 86 African American émigrés sponsored by the American Colonization Society set sail from New York City to Sierra Leone to start a settlement (present-day Liberia)
Feb 6 US population announced at 9,638,453, African Americans 1,771,656 (18.4%)
Feb 23 Cato Street conspiracy uncovered, attempt to murder British Prime Minister Earl of Liverpool and Government Ministers
Mar 3 Missouri Compromise passes, allowing Missouri to join the United States despite slavery still being legal there.
Mar 5 Dutch city of Leeuwarden forbids Jews to go to synagogues on Sundays
Mar 9 -11) Philippines chases out foreigners; about 125 die
Mar 10 Karol Kurpiński's opera "Kalmora, or The Paternal Right of the Americans" premieres at the Warsaw Opera
Mar 15 Maine admitted as 23rd state of the Union

Mar 26 Future Mormon church leader Joseph Smith has his "First Vision" in a wooded area of New York, according to Mormon scholars

Apr 8 The famous ancient Greek statue, Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Milos

Apr 12 Alexander Ypsilantis is declared leader of Filiki Eteria, a secret organization founded in Odessa to overthrow Ottoman rule of Greece

Apr 21 Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted is the first to identify electromagnetism, when he observes a compass needle

May 11 Launch of HMS Beagle, the ship that would later take a young Charles Darwin on his famous scientific voyage

Jun 28 Tomato is proven to be non-poisonous by Colonel Robert Gibbon eating a tomato on steps of courthouse in Salem, New Jersey
Jul 1 1st edition of newspaper "Courrier de la Meuse" published in the Netherlands
Aug 1 London's Regent's Canal opens
Aug 7 1st potatoes planted in Hawaii
Aug 14 1st US eye hospital, the NY Eye Infirmary, opens in NYC
Aug 24 Constitutionalist insurrection at Oporto, Portugal; see Portugal's crises of the Nineteenth Century.
Sep 15 Constitutionalist revolution in Lisbon, Portugal
Sep 25 French Physicist François Arago announces electromagnetism in his discovery that a copper wire between the poles of a voltaic cell could laterally attract iron filings to itself
Oct 9 Guayaquil, Ecuador declares its freedom from Ecuador
Nov 3 Cuenca (Santa Ana de los Ríos de Cuenca), Ecuador, declares independence

Nov 7 James Monroe re-elected US president

Nov 18 Antarctica sighted by US Navy Captain Nathaniel B. Palmer
Nov 20 Whaling ship Essex attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in the southern Pacific, only eight of the 20 crew men eventually survive (through cannibalism). Inspiration for the novel "Moby-Dick"
Dec 15 1st General pharmacopoeia in US published, Boston
Dec 20 Missouri imposes a $1 bachelor tax on unmarried men aged between 21 & 50