1826

Events 
 The first photograph was taken.

 John Adams second president, and third president Thomas Jefferson both died same day Independence Day.

 Births 
 January 12 – William Chapman Rawlston, banker and financier
 January 26 – Louis Favre, Swiss engineer (d. 1879)
 February 16 – Joseph Victor von Scheffel, German poet (d. 1886)
 February 16 – Julia Grant, First Lady of the United States (d. 1902)
 March 4 – Theodore Judah, railroad engineer (d. 1863)
 March 24 – Matilda Joslyn Gage, pioneering feminist (d. 1898)
 March 29 – Wilhelm Liebknecht, German journalist and politician (d. 1900)
 April 6 – Gustave Moreau, French painter (d. 1898)
 May 3 – King Charles XV of Sweden and Norway (d. 1872)
 May 4 – Frederic Edwin Church, American painter (b. 1900)
 June 24 – George Goyder, Surveyor-General of South Australia (d. 1898)
 July 4 – Stephen Foster, American songwriter and poet (d. 1864)
 September 17 – Bernhard Riemann, German mathematician (d. 1866)
 November 13 – Charles Frederick Worth, English couturier (d. 1895)
 November 24 – Carlo Collodi, Italian writer (d. 1890)

 Deaths 
 July 4 – John Adams, 90, second President of the United States, heart failure (b. 1735)
 July 4 – Thomas Jefferson, 83, third President of the United States, uremia (b. 1743)

 Books 
Biographical Sketches and Interesting Anecdotes of Persons of Color – Abigail Mott
The Broken Heart – Catherine Gore
Cinq-Mars – Alfred de Vigny
Deeds of the Olden Time – Anne Hatton
Gaston de Blondeville – Ann Radcliffe
Granby – T.H. Lister
Die Harzreise (The Heart's Journey) – Heinrich Heine
Henry the Fourth of France – Alicia Lefanu
Honor O'Hara – Anna Maria Porter
The Last Man – Mary Shelley
The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
Tales Round a Winter Hearth – Jane Porter & Anna Maria Porter
Vivian Grey – Benjamin Disraeli
Woodstock – Sir Walter Scott