December 1780 in history

Born in December 1780

Dec 1 Bernhard Rudolf Abeken a German philologist and literature historian.
Dec 13 Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner best known for work that foreshadowed the periodic law for the chemical elements.
Dec 14 Karl Nesselrode a Russian Empire diplomat of German descent. His mother was Jewish by origin and Protestant by faith. For forty years Nesselrode as foreign minister guided Russian policy; he was a leading European conservative statesman of the Holy Alliance
Dec 20 John Wilson Croker an Irish statesman and author.
Dec 26 Mary Somerville a Scottish science writer and polymath, at a time when women's participation in science was discouraged. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and was nominated to be jointly the first female member of the Royal Astronomical Society at the same time as Caroline Herschel
Dec 30 Johann Friedrich Heinrich Schlosser a German jurist, writer and translator.

Died in December 1780

Dec 14 Ignatius Sancho a composer, actor, and writer. He is the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election. He gained fame in his time as "the extraordinary Negro", and to 18th-century British abolitionists he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade. The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, edited and published two years after his death, is one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English by a former slave of Spanish and English families
Dec 15 Charles-Henri-Louis d'Arsac de Ternay a French naval officer. Most active in the Seven Years' War and the War of American Independence, Ternay was the naval commander of a 1762 expedition that successfully captured John's Newfoundland. He was appointed commander of the Marine Royale, French naval forces, as part of the project code named Expédition Particulière that brought French troops to American soil in 1780. He died aboard ship off Newport, Rhode Island
Dec 26 John Fothergill (physician) an English physician, plant collector, philanthropist and Quaker.