Constantine S. Rafinesque, Science Professor at Transylvania University, visits Big Bone Lick and the Big Bone Landing.

Thomas Jefferson admits to drafting the Kentucky Resolutions, which argued that states had the right to declare federal laws unconstitutional.

Missouri joins the Union a year after the Missouri Compromise. The state had wanted to ban free blacks and mulattos, but Henry Clay fought the proposal in the Senate.

The American Colonization Society founds the colony of Liberia in West Africa, which it intends to give to freed slaves. The idea that African-Americans could just go back to Africa lingered in intellectual circles until the Civil War.

The first tuition-free public high school in the United States opens in Boston, Massachusetts.

Boone County Tax Lists, 1821.