1754
year
1754 (MDCCLIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar, the 1754th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 754th year of the 2nd millennium, the 54th year of the 18th century, and the 5th year of the 1750s decade. As of the start of 1754, the Gregorian calendar was 11 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 28 – Horace Walpole, in a letter to Horace Mann, coins the word serendipity.
February 22 – Expecting an attack by Portuguese-speaking militias in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, the indigenous Guarani people residing in the Misiones Orientales stage an attack on a small Brazilian Portuguese settlement on the Rio Pardo in what is now the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. The attack by 300 Guarani soldiers from the missions at San Luis, San Lorenzo and San Juan Bautista is repelled with a loss of 30 Guarani and is the opening of the Guarani War
February 25 – Guatemalan Sergeant Major Melchor de Mencos y Varón departs the city of Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala with an infantry battalion to fight British pirates that are reportedly disembarking on the coasts of Petén (modern-day Belize), and sacking the nearby towns.
March 16 – Ten days after the death of British Prime Minister Henry Pelham, his brother Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle, forms a government as the new Prime Minister of Great Britain.
March 25 – The Clandestine Marriages Act 1753 comes into force in England and Wales, placing marriage in that jurisdiction on a statutory basis for the first time.
April–June
April 30 – Battle of San Felipe and the Cobá Lagoon: Guatemalan Sergeant Mayor Melchor de Mencos y Varón and his troops defeat the British pirates.
May 14 – The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews is founded in Scotland.
May 28 – French and Indian War: Battle of Jumonville Glen – The war begins when George Washington, 22, leads a company of militia from the Colony of Virginia, in an ambush on a force of 35 French Canadians.
“1754” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“1754” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7623. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1754, 1923 and 1753.
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This entry incorporates text from “1754” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.