• Ill-fated British explorer Sir John Franklin.
• German composer Carl Maria von Weber.
• German composer Friedrich Kuhlau.
• English poet Helen Maria Williams.
• Legendary Suquamish Chief Seattle.
• French mathematician Jacques Philippe Marie Binet.
• Tennessee politician Davy Crockett.
• Japanese painter Utagawa Kunisada.
• French physicist Dominique Arago.
• English astronomer Thomas Wright, who suggested that the celestial phenomenon known as the Milky Way was a disc of stars, now called a Galaxy.
• British painter George Jones.
• American general Winfield Scott, commander of forces during the Mexican War and at the beginning of the US Civil War.
• German folklorist Wilhelm Grimm (brother Jacob was born the previous year).
• The future King Ludwig I of Bavaria, father of "Mad" King Ludwig II.
• Irish painter William Mulready.
• English writer Caroline Bowles Southey.
• French botanist Auguste Bachelot De La Pylaie.
• Mexican revolutionary leader Nicolas Bravo.
• The future King Christian VIII of Denmark.

• English organist and composer Joseph Stanley.
• American Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene.
• Spanish governor of Louisiana, viceroy of Mexico, and conqueror of Florida, Bernardo de Galvez.
• Frederick II, King of Prussia.
• Swedish chemist Karl Wilhelm Scheele
• German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

• Benjamin Franklin writes a letter to one to Benjamin Vaughan describing the ill effects of lead poisoning.
• Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York meet in Annapolis, Maryland to form a commission "to Remedy Defects of the Federal Government" attempting to remedy the chaos caused by the Articles of Confederation  (Maryland sent no representative).
• Woolen workers in Leeds (England) publish a petition in local newspapers decrying the use of machines to perform their work.
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart finishes his operas Der Schauspieldirektor and Le nozze di Figaro, along with two dozen other works, including his 38th "Prague" Symphony.
• Virginia passes a religious freedom statute, first proposed by Thomas Jefferson in 1779.
• Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard scale Mont Blanc.
• Lord Charles Cornwallis becomes governor-general of the British-occupied part of India (Bengal and a strip of the Eastern coastline around Madras).
• Captain Daniel Shays leads a rebellion of western Massachussetts farmers who are unable to pay their debts due to a severe economic depression in the infant United States.

1785 - 1786 - 1787