1804
year
1804 (MDCCCIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar and a leap year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar, the 1804th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 804th year of the 2nd millennium, the 4th year of the 19th century, and the 5th year of the 1800s decade. As of the start of 1804, the Gregorian calendar was 12 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 1 – Haiti gains independence from France, becoming the first independent Black state in the New World.
February 4 – The Sokoto Caliphate is founded in West Africa.
February 14 – The First Serbian uprising begins the Serbian Revolution. By 1817, the Principality of Serbia will have proclaimed self-rule from the Ottoman Empire, the first nation-state in Europe to do so.
February 15 – New Jersey becomes the last of the northern United States to abolish slavery.
February 16 – First Barbary War: Stephen Decatur leads a raid to burn the pirate-held frigate USS Philadelphia at Tripoli to deny her further use by the captors.
February 18 – Ohio University is chartered by the Ohio General Assembly.
February 20 – Hobart is established in its permanent location in Van Diemen's Land (modern-day Tasmania) as a British penal colony.
“1804” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1804” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6894. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1804, 1923 and 1817.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “1804”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 1804 primary sources, 1804 archive and year research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “1804”?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “1804” 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.