The Second Continental Congress, convened on May…

Human knowledge and mastery over nature advances in the year 1775 when James Watt builds a successful prototype of a steam engine, and a scientific expedition continues as Captain James Cook claims the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands in the south Atlantic Ocean for Britain.

Catherine II, in the immediate aftermath of Pugachev’s failed rebellion, initiates a set of local reforms that confirm the privileges of Russia's landowners and deprive the peasants and lower classes in the towns of their traditional advocates, effectively giving the nobles absolute control over their serfs.

The "Great Fire" of Tartu occurs in 1775.

It starts in the backyard of Knights Street (Rüütli tänav) near St. John's Church.

A strong wind allows the fire to spread from building to building, and the wooden bridges allow the fire to cross the river to do further damage.

Nearly two hundred wooden buildings are destroyed and over forty stone buildings.

The city is further damaged when eighteen buildings are purposefully destroyed to create fire breaks.

At the end of the fire only one hundred and sixty buildings remain: most of these are to the north of the city.

There are only forty left standing in the former center of the city.

Uppsala House, which is near St. John's church, will claim to be one of the few buildings now remaining that date from before the fire.

Some of its timbers have been dated to 1750.

Following the fire the city begins rebuilding.

The rules that had required that there be no new stone buildings are reversed and it is now required to construct not only new buildings but also fences and outbuildings without using wood.

Catherine the Great finds twenty-five thousand rubles to ease the situation in Tartu after the fire, and the money is used to build a stone bridge across the river.

The remains of this bridge can still be seen beneath the river Emajõgi but the main part of the bridge will be destroyed during the Second World War.

Tartu had lost most of its major stone buildings when they were blown up in September 1708 on the orders of Peter the Great during the Great Northern War.

The Russian tsar had ordered that the buildings in Tartu (then called Dorpat) should be mined to prevent the Swedes from using the town as a military base.

This was just one of the sieges which Tartu was subjected to during its history, but this time the city had been left burning and in ruins.

When the war finished, the population had returned to Tartu, and the desperate need for houses had created an abundance of new wooden buildings.

The buildings had to be built of wood as the Tsar had laid orders that no stone buildings were to be built anywhere except in the new Russian capital St. Petersburg.

The first large fire had occurred in 1763.

The following year Catherine the Great had visited, and some rebuilding had taken place.

British troops under the command of Colonel Keating leave Surat on March 15, 1775 for Pune, but they are checked by Haripant Phadke at Adas and are totally defeated on May 18, 1775.

Casualties for Keating's force, accompanied by Raghunathrao, included ninety-six killed.

The Marathas' casualties in the Battle of Adas (Gujarat) include one hundred and fifty killed.

Raghunathrao, unwilling to give up his position of power, goes to Khambhat with hope of getting help from the British, who do not help but transport him to Surat from their ship. 

Here he signs the Treaty of Surat on March 6, 1775.

According to the treaty, Raghunathrao cedes the territories of Salsette and Bassein to the British, along with part of the revenues from Surat and Bharuch districts.

In return, the British promise  to provide Raghunathrao with twenty-five hundred soldiers.

Cardinal Braschi is elected to the pontificate on February 15, 1775, and takes the pontifical name of "Pius VI".

He is consecrated into the episcopate on February 22, 1775, by Cardinal Gian Francesco Albani and is crowned that same day by the Cardinal Protodeacon Alessandro Albani.

Pius VI first opens a jubilee his predecessor had convoked and it initiates the 1775 Jubilee Year.

The new pope elevates Romualdo Braschi-Onesti as the penultimate cardinal-nephew.

The earlier acts of Pius VI give fair promise of reformist rule and tackle the problem of corruption in the Papal States.

Though he is usually benevolent, Pius VI sometimes shows discrimination.

He had appointed his uncle Giovanni Carlo Bandi as Bishop of Imola in 1752, then as a member of the Roman Curia, cardinal in the consistory on May 29, 1775, but does not proffer any other members of his family.

He reprimands prince Potenziani, the governor of Rome, for failing to adequately deal with corruption in the city, appoints a council of cardinals to remedy the state of the finances and relieve the pressure of imposts, calls to account Nicolò Bischi for the spending of funds intended for the purchase of grain, reduces the annual disbursements by denying pensions to many prominent people, and adopts a reward system to encourage agriculture.

The death of Pope Clement XIV in 1774 had triggered a conclave to choose a successor.

Spain, France and Portugal drop all objections to the election of Giovanni Angelo Braschi, who is one of the more moderate opponents of the anti-Jesuit stance of the late pope.

Braschi was born in Cesena on Christmas in 1717 as the eldest of eight children to Count Marco Aurelio Tommaso Braschi and Ana Teresa Bandi.

His siblings are Felice Silvestro, Giulia Francesca, Cornelio Francesco, Maria Olimpia, Anna Maria Costanza, Giuseppe Luigi and Maria Lucia Margherita.

He was baptized in Cesena on the following December 27 and was given the baptismal name of Angelo Onofrio Melchiorre Natale Giovanni Antonio.

After he completed his studies in the Jesuit college of Cesena and receiving his doctorate of both canon and civil law in 1734, Braschi continued his studies at the University of Ferrara.

It was there that he became the private secretary of Cardinal Tommaso Ruffo, papal legate, in whose bishopric of Ostia and Velletri he held the post of auditor until 1753.

Cardinal Ruffo took him as his conclavist at the 1740 papal conclave and when the latter became the Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals in 1740, Braschi was appointed as his auditor.

His skill in the conduct of a mission to the court of Naples won him the esteem of Pope Benedict XIV who appointed him as one of his secretaries in 1753 following the death of Cardinal Ruffo.

The pope also appointed him as a canon of St Peter's Basilica in 1755.

In 1758, putting an end to an engagement to be married he was ordained to the priesthood.

Braschi was also appointed as the Referendary of the Apostolic Signatura in 1758 and held that position until 1759.

He also became the auditor and secretary of Cardinal Carlo Rezzonico, the nephew of Pope Clement XIII. In 1766, he was appointed as the treasurer of the camera apostolica by Pope Clement XIII.

Those who suffered under his conscientious economics had managed to convince Pope Clement XIV to elevate him into the cardinalate.

Braschi had been elevated on April 26, 1773, in Rome as the Cardinal-Priest of Sant'Onofrio.

This was a promotion which rendered him innocuous for a brief period of time.

Braschi receives support from those who dislike the Jesuits and are of the belief he will continue the actions of Clement XIV and hold true to his brief Dominus ac Redemptor (1773) which had seen the dissolution of the order, but the zelanti faction—pro-Jesuit—believes that he is in secret sympathetic towards the Jesuits and expects reparation for the wrongs suffered in the previous reign.

As a result, Braschi—as pope—will be led into situations in which he gives little satisfaction to either side: it is perhaps due to him the Jesuits have managed to escape dissolution in White Russia and Silesia.

A renewed attempt had been made to tax France's privileged and exempted groups, but it was not merely the death of Louis XV in May 1774 that ruined the chancellor: the immediate restoration of the parlements by Louis XVI had been followed by a renewal of the quarrels between the new king and the magistrature.

Maupeou and Terray had been replaced on August 24, 1774, by Miromesnil, then by Malesherbes, recalled from his exile in 1775 to be Secretary of State of the Maison du Roi, and by the economist Turgot.

Dagoty’s portrait of Marie Antoinette in 1775 features the distinctive pouf style coiffure: her own natural blonde hair is extended on the top with an artificial hairpiece of great height and complexity.

The queen's situation becomes more precarious when, on August 6, 1775, her sister-in-law, the comtesse d'Artois, gives birth to a son, the duc d'Angoulême (who will later become the presumptive heir to the French throne when his father, the comte d'Artois, becomes King Charles X of France in 1824).

There follows a release of a plethora of graphic satirical pamphlets, which mainly center on the king's impotence and the queen's searching for sexual relief elsewhere, with men and women alike.

Among her rumored lovers are her close friend, the princesse de Lamballe, and her handsome brother-in-law, the comte d'Artois, with whom the queen has a good rapport.

James Watt and Matthew Boulton form a hugely successful partnership that will last for the next twenty-five years.

John Roebuck, the founder of the celebrated Carron Iron Works and a partner with James Watt in developing the latter's steam engine, had gone bankrupt, and Boulton, who owns the Soho Manufactory works near Birmingham, had acquired his patent rights.

An extension of the patent to 1800 is successfully obtained in 1775.

Through Boulton, Watt finally has access to some of the best iron workers in the world.

The difficulty of the manufacture of a large cylinder with a tightly fitting piston is solved by John Wilkinson, who has developed precision boring techniques for cannon making at Bersham, near Wrexham, North Wales.

Watt had tried unsuccessfully for several years to obtain accurately bored cylinders for his steam engines, and has been forced to use hammered iron, which is out of round and causei leakage past the piston.

In 1774 Wilkinson had invented a boring machine in which the shaft that holds the cutting tool extends through the cylinder and is supported on both ends, unlike the cantilevered borers currently in use.

With this machine he is able to bore the cylinder for Boulton & Watt's first commercial engine, and is given an exclusive contract for the provision of cylinders.

Until this era, advancements in drilling and boring practice had lain only within the application field of gun barrels for firearms and cannon; Wilkinson's achievement is a milestone in the gradual development of boring technology, as its fields of application broaden into engines, pumps, and other industrial uses.