-
First American Settlements
Jamestown, VA
Plymouth, MA -
Period: to
Colonialism
Captain John Smith
Anne Bradstreet
pamphlets, journals, letters, poetry -
Period: to
Enlightenment
Thomas Paine
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Franklin
John Adams
Samuel Adams
Patrick Henry
Phillis Wheatley
Olaudah Equiano
Declaration of Independence
Constitution
Virginia Declaration of Rights
The Federalist essays
"Yankee Doodle" -
Period: to
Great Awakening
Jonathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
George Whitefield
sermons
The Holy Bible -
First Continental Congress
Forefathers plan independence. -
Revolutionary War ends
War lasts eight years.
Fought between American colonies and British Empire. -
Independence
A new country formed. -
War of 1812
War lasts two years.
Fought between United States and British Empire. -
Period: to
Romanticism
Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
Edgar Allan Poe
Davy Crockett
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville -
Period: to
Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Louisa May Alcott
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson -
Period: to
Abolitionism
William Lloyd Garrison
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Frederick Douglass -
Civil War
War lasts four years.
Fought between industrialized free states of the North (Union) and the agricultural slave states of the South (Confederacy). -
Emancipation Proclamation
Slaves freed. -
President Lincoln's Assassination
Lincoln killed at the Ford Theatre by actor John Wilkes Booth. -
Period: to
Realism
Henry James
Ambrose Bierce
Anna Sewell
L. Frank Baum
Jack London -
Period: to
Regionalism
Robert Frost
Charles Chesnutt
Flannery O'Connor
Mark Twain
Robert Penn Warren
John Steinbeck
Kate Chopin
Charlotte Perkins Gilman -
Period: to
Naturalism
Edith Wharton
Stephen Crane
Theodore Dreiser
Upton Sinclair
T. S. Eliot -
Titanic sinks
RMS Titanic strikes iceberg on her maiden voyage and sinks after almost 3 hours, causing the deaths of most passengers. -
World War I
War lasts four years.
Fought between Allied and Central Powers. -
Period: to
Modernism
Ezra Pound
William Carlos Williams
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
William Faulkner
Eugene O'Neill
Sinclair Lewis -
Period: to
Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes
Zora Neale Hurston
W. E. B. DuBois -
Great Depression
Lasts ten years.
Period of unemployment, debt, and poverty throughout United States, especially after the Stock Market Crash of October 1929. -
Dust Bowl
Lasts two years.
Severe drought in midwest USA, contributing partly to years of Great Depression. -
World War II
War lasts 6 years.
Fought between Allies and Axis. -
Period: to
Postwar
Harper Lee
J. D. Salinger
Sylvia Plath -
Cold War
War lasts forty-four years.
Long running period of wars waged between Communist and Anti-Communist forces.
Typically seen as fought between USA and USSR (Russia). -
Period: to
Beat Generation
Jack Kerouac
Allen Ginsberg
Ken Kesey -
Korean War
War lasts three years.
Fought between South Korea and North Korea. -
Vietnam War
War lasts nineteen years.
Fought between Anti-Communist and Communist forces. -
Period: to
Postmodernism
Joseph Heller
Kurt Vonnegut
Margaret Atwood
Hunter S. Thompson
Toni Morrison
Cormac McCarthy -
President Kennedy's Assassination
President Kennedy shot on parade in Dallas, TX, by Lee Harvey Oswald. -
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Assassination
Reverend King shot in Memphis, TN, by James Earl Ray. -
Fall of Berlin Wall
Wall separating East and West Berlin brought down after conclusion of WWII, unifying the two halves into one nation.