Modena. The perimeter walls of the Citadel are included in the promenade of the walls of Modena by Duke Ercole III. The work is entrusted to engineers Pietro Giardini and Angelo Scarabelli Pedona. Giardini is the superintendent of water and roads and the designer of the road to Abetone, which will bear his name.

London. The opposition begins its attack in Parliament on the government’s plans to end the war effort in the former American colonies.

London. Lord George Germain resigns as head of the American Colonies for Lord North’s government. He suffers the consequences of the defeat at Yorktown, Virginia. He had held the position for almost seven years.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant distinguishes between objective truth and truth that our mind is capable of understanding.

Immanuel Kant publishes “Critique of Pure Reason.” He wants to make philosophy fully scientific.

Yorktown, Virginia. 2:00 PM. British officers in bright red uniforms appear before the French in white. When General O’Hara rides toward Rochambeau at the head of the French troops, the latter shakes his head and tells them, in French, that he is subject to the Americans, gesturing toward George Washington. O’Hara rides toward the American general, apologizes for Cornwallis’s absence, and offers the British surrender.

Yorktown, Virginia. 9:00 a.m. A British drummer boy appears on the barricades and shouts, “Parlay! Parlay!” His shouts are barely heard above the roar of the cannon fire, but many see him. The guns fall silent. An officer steps out into the open with a white handkerchief. He is blindfolded and taken to George Washington, to whom he presents Cornwallis’s request for an armistice.

Yorktown, Virginia. 8:00 PM. George Washington decides the time has come to charge the besieged enemy with the bayonet.

Yorktown, Virginia. The siege artillery totals 52. The British realize their days are numbered unless Clinton and Graves’s expedition from New York arrives in time (it never does).

Yorktown, Virginia. Four more siege artillery pieces are added, bringing the total to 46.

Chesapeake, off Yorktown. 4:15 PM. The British fleet has received two contradictory orders, causing confusion in the formation. The French fleet, after an initial confusion, is now fairly aligned. The leading ships open fire. Up to thirty cannonballs, each weighing 10 kg, are hurled at their opponents with each salvo. But it is the splinters that the sailors fear most. The first British ship to take a broadside (from the Pluton) is the 74-gun Shrewsbury, whose damaged masts force her to withdraw from the action. Then comes the Marseillas, which disables the Intrepid, which has arrived to cover the Shrewsbury. The British flagship Princess intervenes, forcing the Reflechi and the Pluton to withdraw, and then the Caton as well.

Chesapeake, off Yorktown. 10:00 a.m. The British ship Bedford sights at least 15 French ships. The guns are loaded, nets are hauled onto the upper decks, carpenters prepare to repair the leaks in the hull, and sand is spread on the decks. The British tactic, as always, is still to hit the French ships at the waterline. The French tactic, on the other hand, is to target the masts, to cripple the British ships and make them difficult to repair.

Hood’s English war fleet sails from Yorktown back to New York

Hood’s English war fleet arrived at Yorktown from the English West Indies before de Grasse’s French fleet, thanks to the copper bottoms of British ships that protected them from leaks and worms. However, Hood, not finding the French fleet, set sail again for New York on August 28th.

Battle of King’s Mountain, border between South and North Carolina. British General Ferguson and his 1,100 militiamen are attacked by approximately the same number of Americans. The British have the advantage of position on the mountain but are massacred by the American rebels. The American Frontiersmen and Over-mountain men, accustomed to conflict with the Indians, shout the so-called Tennessee yell, a shrill war cry characteristic of the Cherokee Indians (and still used a century later by Confederate rebels). The survivors attempt to surrender, but Ferguson, on horseback, lowers two flags with his saber. At this point, a barrage of gunfire rains down on the British general: perhaps fifty shots. Ferguson is hit by six or seven bullets, both arms broken, and falls from his horse. The Americans fire at will despite some white handkerchiefs as a sign of British surrender. They award him the so-called Tarleton Quarter. The British lose 290 soldiers and more than 700 are captured. The Americans lose 29 soldiers. The effect of the battle, a revenge for the defeat at Camden, forced the British to retreat to better protected positions. The British would no longer dare enter the South Carolina woods.

Sycamore, North Carolina. Frontiersmen and Over-Mountain men (from the western part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, present-day eastern Tennessee) gather at Sycamore Shoals, each with his horse and Kentucky rifle, excellent for hunting. They are mostly North Carolina rebels of Irish and Scottish descent, but also Virginians. There are 1,000 men in total on horseback. They pursue Ferguson’s British troops toward the South Carolina border—toward Kings Mountain.

Battle of Camden, South Carolina. The Americans under Horatio Gates are heavily defeated by the British under General Cornwallis and pushed back into the interior. The Americans lose 900 men and 1,000 are captured. The British suffer 68 killed and 245 wounded.

A French contingent of 5,500 men landed at Newport, Rhode Island to aid the Americans; the British failed to intercept them.

The Massachusetts state constitution declares that “all men are born free and equal.”

Cook is assassinated on the island of Hawaii by the natives

Sir Henry Clinton and his army of 8,500 soldiers set sail from New York for Charleston. The British intended to open a new front by attacking Charleston and establishing a beachhead from which to launch a land campaign toward Virginia.

Savannah, Georgia. D’Estaing’s French fleet heavily bombards the city for six days, then attacks in an attempt to capture it. A counterattack by British marines repeles the Franco-American offensive.

Maritime communication between the British Antilles and the North American colonies became impossible due to the French domination of North America and the Caribbean by d’Estaing. The British took several steps to ease the situation, the most serious (and unfortunate) of which was the evacuation of Rhode Island, which would once again become easy prey for the Franco-Americans.

English Channel. The French and Spanish decide to definitively abandon (that is, for the current year…) the attempt to land in England.

English Channel. 31,000 French and Spanish soldiers are ready to land in England. The two Bourbon powers (the Bourbons were then reigning on the throne of France with Louis XVI, on the throne of Spain with Charles III, on the throne of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with Ferdinand IV, and on the throne of the Duchy of Parma with Ferdinand I of Parma) have effectively allied themselves to take advantage of England’s temporary weakness. The British are engaged on multiple fronts around the world and domestically with the revolts in Ireland. Soldiers are concentrated at St. Malo and Le Havre to land at Portsmouth. The Franco-Spanish forces have maritime supremacy in the Channel. The English are on the defensive and are organizing a counterattack inland. The crescendo reaches its peak in mid-August when the English king and the Franco-Spanish believe a clash between their fleets is inevitable. Forty-five British warships, including the Arrogant, the St. Albans, the Isis, the Blenheim, and the Amelia, assemble to face the enemy fleet of 65 to 85 ships. Due to the weather and poor Franco-Spanish coordination, the battle and landing never took place. But for weeks to come, the British lived in fear of invasion, unaware of the enemy’s decisions.

Admiral D’Estaing’s French fleet attacks the British possession of Grenada. Lord Macartney and his 159 regulars and 400 militiamen defending the island surrender shortly thereafter. The richest sugar-producing island in the British Lesser Antilles thus falls into French hands, as Dominica and St. Vincent had already done.

The Royal Navy has 102 warships (including 6 60-gun ships) for a total of 155,000 tons, compared to 118 warships (including 29 60-gun ships) for a total of 158,000 tons twenty years earlier, in 1759. For the first time in the 18th century, the English do not have a clear naval supremacy against their French, Spanish, and Dutch adversaries.

The German physician Franz Anton Mesmer moved to Paris, the most open and lively capital in the world at the time, encompassing within himself that old mixture so often generated by freedom: intellectual ferment at the highest level mixed with charlatanism in its most abject forms; Mesmerism would gain proselytes throughout the world: Mesmer affirmed that the universe is pervaded by a subtle fluid that unites all bodies and attributed all illnesses to alterations in this fluid; he genuinely believed in the scientific nature of this thesis and subjected his discipline to a rigorous scientific control that would unequivocally demonstrate its groundlessness and the placebo effect in 1784.

By the time of the Hawaiian Islands’ “discovery” by Western civilization, the individual islands had already undergone a long and bloody process of unification within each island, maintaining their independence from one another. Upon the arrival of Western settlers, King Kamehameha I quickly purchased guns and ocean-going ships from the colonists and invaded and conquered the adjacent islands: first Maui and then Oahu. Once again, as in the case of the Moriori and Maori in the Chatham Islands, it was circumstances and means that made the difference, as Jared Diamond argued in his “Guns, Germs, Steel.”

Georgia. British Colonel Archibald Campbell, with the 71st Highlanders, occupied all of Georgia, starting from Savannah, and was the first officer to remove a star and a stripe from the newly created Stars and Stripes.

Caribbean (West Indies). The temporary French superiority at sea (led by D’Estaing) has only led to the conquest of Dominica. The English (led by Grant), however, have conquered Saint Lucia, which had long been a thorn in the side of English possessions as it cut off the English Windward Islands. And English reinforcements under Byron are arriving to the rescue. Superiority at sea has passed to the English.

Caribbean (West Indies). British General Grant leads his troops off the French island of Saint Lucia. With his full ranks and all British (without mercenaries), he quickly takes possession of the island.

Caribbean (West Indies). The French governor of Martinique takes advantage of the inaction of the Englishman Barrington in Barbados due to a lack of reinforcements, to land a force of 2,000 men on Dominica, where the British resist for a short time before surrendering. The confrontation in the Western Hemisphere between the French and the British is continually being played out on the soil and seas of the newly formed United States and the Caribbean.

Newport, Rhode Island. American and French troops begin landing, and Rhode Island, abandoned by the British.

The Royal Navy pursues Admiral d’Orvilliers’s French fleet in the English Channel and catches up with it off the Breton island of Ushant. The battle is fierce, as in many 18th-century sailing battles, and ultimately, as on other occasions, the outcome is inconclusive, with both sides heavily damaged. The French suffer 736 casualties and the British 408, but the British ships are the most damaged: practically immobilized due to their fallen mainmasts. The French, however, postpone the invasion of England for now.

The French, now allied with the Americans against the British, besieged the British Isles in preparation for a landing. The British prepared a counterattack further inland: in Essex, Kent, and the outskirts of London. Many warships had to remain in the English Channel to defend the homeland.