1796

1796 was a leap year starting on Friday. (see link for calendar)

February 1 - The capital of Upper Canada is moved from Newark to York.
February 9 - The Qianlong Emperor abdicates at age 84 to make way for his son, the Jiaqing Emperor.

March 9 - Widow Joséphine de Beauharnais marries General Napoléon Bonaparte.
March 30 - Carl Gauss obtained conditions for the constructibility by ruler and compass of regular polygons and was able to announce that the regular 17-gon was constructible by ruler and compasses.

April 2 - The only night of would-be Shakespearean play of Vortigern and Rowena (actually written by William Henry Ireland) ends into audience's laughter.

July 10 - Carl Friedrich Gauss discovered that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most three triangular numbers.
July 11 - The U.S. takes possession of Detroit from Great Britain under terms of the Jay Treaty.
July 22 - Surveyors of the Connecticut Land Company name an area in Ohio "Cleveland" after Gen. Moses Cleaveland, the superintendent of the surveying party.

The Ron Santa Teresa distillery is established in Venezuela.
British government purchase a 40 acre (162,000 m²) site at Norman Cross the first purposely built prisoner of war camp in England at that time.
Mungo Park visits Segu kingdom.
The British seize Ceylon from the Dutch.

In a chapter of the TV animated series The Simpsons Jeremiah Springfield with a group of colonists from Massachusetts founded the town of Springfield.

January 13 - John H. D. Anderson, Scottish scientist and inventor (b. 1726)
February 23 - Jean-Nicolas Stofflet, French royalist general (executed) (b. 1751)
March 6 - Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, French writer (b. 1713)
March 19 - Hugh Palliser, British naval officer and administrator (b. 1722)
May 12 - Johann Peter Uz, German poet (b. 1720)
May 29 - Carl Fredrik Pechlin, Swedish politician (b. 1720)
June 11 - Samuel Whitbread, English brewer and politician (b. 1720)
June 21 - Richard Gridley, American Revolutionary soldier (b. 1710)
June 30 - Abraham Yates, American Continental Congressman (b. 1724)
July 16 - George Howard, British field marshal (b. 1718)
July 21 - Robert Burns, Scottish poet (b. 1759)
August 1 - Robert Pigot, British army officer (b. 1720)
August 21 - John McKinly, American physician and President of Delaware (b. 1721)
September 21 - François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers, French royalist general (killed in battle) (b. 1769)
October 7 - Thomas Reid, Scottish philosopher (b. 1710)
November 6 - Catherine the Great of Russia (b, 1729)

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