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Jamestown Settlement
In 1606, King James I granted to the Virginia Company of London all the lands stretching from present-day North Carolina to southern New York. To honor the memory of Elizabeth I, the never-married “Virgin Queen,” they named the region Virginia. Arriving in Virginia after an exhausting four-month voyage, they settled on a peninsula, which they named Jamestown to honor the king. Jamestown was the first English settlement. -
Pilgrims at Plymouth
102 English Protestants landed at a place they called Plymouth, near Cape Cod. A decade later, a much larger group began to arrive just north of Plymouth, in the newly chartered Massachusetts Bay Colony. By 1640, the region had attracted more than 20,000 migrants. By establishing a “holy commonwealth,” they gave a moral dimension to American history that survives today. -
The Albany Congress
To mend relations with the Iroquois, the British Board of Trade called a meeting at Albany in June 1754. There, a prominent Mohawk leader challenged Britain to defend its interests more vigorously, while Benjamin Franklin proposed a “Plan of Union” among the colonies. The Albany Plan of Union proposed that one general government be formed in America, including all the colonies. It would have created a continental assembly to manage trade, Indian policy, and the colonies defense. -
Sugar Act of 1764
British law that lowered the duty on French molasses and raised penalties for smuggling. New England merchants opposed both the tax and the provision that they would be tried in a vice-admiralty court.This act was intended to make the trade in foreign molasses legal for the first time and collect a duty of 3 pence per gallon, which merchants could pay and still turn a profit. -
The Stamp Act of 1765
British law imposing a tax on all paper used in the colonies.The act would require a tax stamp on all printed items, from college diplomas, court documents, land titles, and contracts to newspapers, almanacs, and playing cards. It was ingeniously designed. Like its counterpart in England, it bore more heavily on the rich. Widespread resistance to the Stamp Act prevented it from taking effect and led to its repeal in 1766. -
Boston Massacre
On the night of March 5, a group of nine British redcoats fired into a crowd and killed five townspeople. A subsequent trial exonerated the soldiers. Boston’s Radical Whigs, convinced of a ministerial conspiracy against liberty, labeled the incident a massacre and used it to rally sentiment against imperial power. One of the victims was an African American sailor and laborer. He was rediscovered by abolitionists and identified as the first black martyr of American liberty. -
Tea Act of 1773
British act that lowered the existing tax on tea and granted exemptions to the East India Company to make their tea cheaper in the colonies and entice boycotting Americans to buy it. The act provided financial relief for the company, a royally chartered private corporation that served as the instrument of British imperialism. Radical Patriots accused the British ministry of bribing Americans with the cheaper East India Company tea so they would give up their opposition to the tea tax. -
Boston Tea Party
In Massachusetts, Royal Governor Hutchinson was determined to land the tea and collect the tax. To foil the governor’s plan, artisans and laborers disguised as Indians boarded three ships on December 16, 1773, broke open 342 chests of tea (valued at about $1.5 million today), and threw them into the harbor. “This destruction of the Tea … must have so important Consequences,” John Adams wrote in his diary, “that I cannot but consider it as an Epoch in History.” -
Thomas's Paine Common Sense
As military conflicts escalated, Americans were divided in their opinions of King George III. Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a rousing call for independence and a republican form of government. In Common Sense, Paine assaulted the traditional monarchical order in stirring language. Within six months, Common Sense had gone through twenty-five editions and reached hundreds of thousands of people. -
Declaration of Independence
Inspired by Paine’s arguments and beset by armed Loyalists, Patriot conventions urged a break from Britain. On July 4, 1776, the Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. A document containing philosophical principles and a list of grievances that declared separation from Britain. Written mainly by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, it ended a period of intense debate with moderates still hoping to reconcile with Britain. -
Battle of Saratoga
A multistage battle in New York ending with the surrender of British general John Burgoyne. The victory at the Battle of Saratoga was the turning point of the revolutionary war. The Patriots captured more than 5,000 British troops and ensured the diplomatic success of American representatives in Paris, who won a military alliance with France. -
Articles of Confederation approved by Continental Congress
The written document defining the structure of the government from 1781 to 1788 after gaining independence from the British. Under which the Union was a confederation of equal states, with no executive and limited powers, existing mainly to foster a common defense. Though the Confederation had significant powers on paper it had major weaknesses as well. -
Treaty of Paris
The treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. By its terms, Great Britain formally recognized American independence and relinquished its claims to lands south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi River. Diplomats took two years to conclude a peace treaty. Talks began in Paris in April 1782, but the French and Spanish, still hoping to seize a West Indian island or Gibraltar, stalled for time. So the Americans negotiated secretly with the British. -
Northwest Ordinance
Between 1784 and 1787, the confederation congress issued three ordinances organizing the “Old Northwest.” The Ordinance of 1784 established the principle that territories could become states as their populations grew. The Land Ordinance of 1785 mandated a rectangular-grid system of surveying and specified a minimum price of $1 an acre. Finally, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 created the territories that would eventually become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. -
Judiciary Act of 1789
Act that established a federal district court in each state and three circuit courts to hear appeals from the districts, with the Supreme Court serving as the highest appellate court in the federal system. The act established a three-tiered system: it created federal district courts in each state and three circuit courts above them to which the decisions of the district courts could be appealed. The Supreme Court would then serve as the appellate court of last resort in the federal system. -
Bank of the United States
A bank chartered in 1790 and jointly owned by private stockholders and the national government. Alexander Hamilton argued that the bank would provide stability to the American economy, which was chronically short of capital, by making loans to merchants, handling government funds, and issuing bills of credit. -
Bill of Rights
The Federalists kept their promise to consider amendments to the Constitution. James Madison submitted nineteen amendments to the First Congress; by 1791, ten had been approved by Congress and ratified by the states. These ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights safeguarded fundamental personal rights, including freedom of speech and religion, and mandated legal procedures, such as trial by jury. -
Jay's Treaty
A 1795 treaty between the United States and Britain, negotiated by John Jay. The treaty accepted Britain’s right to stop neutral ships and required the U.S. government to provide restitution for the pre–Revolutionary War debts of British merchants. In return, it allowed Americans to submit claims for illegal seizures and required the British to remove their troops and Indian agents from the Northwest Territory. -
XYZ Affair
A 1797 incident in which American negotiators in France were rebuffed for refusing to pay a substantial bribe. In response to the XYZ Affair, Congress cut off trade with France in 1798 and authorized American privateering (licensing private ships to seize French vessels). This undeclared maritime war curtailed American trade with the French West Indies and resulted in the capture of nearly two hundred French and American merchant vessels. -
Naturalization, Alien, and Sedition Acts
As Federalists became more hostile to the French Republic, they enacted the Naturalization, Alien, and Sedition Acts, limiting individual rights and threatening the fledgling party system. The Naturalization Act lengthened the residency requirement for American citizenship from five to fourteen years, the Alien Act authorized the deportation of foreigners, and the Sedition Act prohibited the publication of insults or malicious attacks on the president or members of Congress. -
Louisiana Purchase
The purchase of French territory west of the Mississippi River that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and nearly doubled the size of the United States. The French invasion of Saint-Domingue was faltering, Napoleon feared an American invasion of Louisiana. He offered to sell the entire territory of Louisiana for $15 million. The purchase required President Thomas Jefferson to exercise powers not explicitly granted to him by the Constitution. -
Embargo Act of 1807
An act of Congress that prohibited U.S. ships from traveling to foreign ports in an attempt to deter Britain and France from halting U.S. ships at sea. The embargo caused grave hardships for Americans engaged in overseas commerce. It overestimated the reliance of Britain and France on American shipping and underestimated the resistance of merchants, who feared the embargo would ruin them. In fact, the embargo cut the American gross national product by 5 percent and weakened the entire economy. -
War of 1812
With Britain assisting Indians in the western territories and seizing American ships in the Atlantic, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun pushed Madison toward war. With national elections approaching, Madison issued an ultimatum to Britain. When Britain failed to respond quickly, the president asked Congress for a declaration of war.The War of 1812 was a near disaster for the United States. The Treaty of Ghent, signed on Christmas Eve 1814, retained the prewar borders of the United States. -
Panic of 1819
Bad banking policies helped bring on the Panic of 1819 which was the first major economic crisis of the United States. Farmers and planters faced an abrupt 30 percent drop in world agricultural prices, and as farmers’ income declined, they could not pay debts owed to stores and banks, many of which went bankrupt. The panic gave Americans their first taste of a business cycle, the periodic boom and bust inherent to a modern market economy. -
Missouri Compromise
The abject failure of colonization set the stage for a major battle over slavery. Controversy raged in Congress before Henry Clay devised a series of political agreements known as the Missouri Compromise. Maine entered the Union as a free state and Missouri followed as a slave state, preserving a balance in the Senate between North and South. Farther west, it set the northern boundary of slavery at the southern boundary of Missouri. -
Monroe Doctrine
Adams persuaded President Monroe to declare American national policy with respect to the Western Hemisphere. President James Monroe declared that the Western Hemisphere was closed to any further colonization or interference by European powers. Monroe pledged that the United States would not become involved in European struggles.Thanks to John Quincy Adams, the United States had successfully asserted its diplomatic leadership in the Western Hemisphere. -
Election of 1824
Because no candidate received an absolute majority, the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution set the rules: the House of Representatives would choose the president from among the three highest vote-getters. Excluded from the race, Henry Clay used his influence as Speaker of the House to assemble a coalition of representatives that voted Adams into the presidency. Adams showed his gratitude by appointing Clay his secretary of state. Jackson’s supporters accused them of making a corrupt bargain. -
Tariff of Abominations
The major battle of the Adams administration came over tariffs. Northern Jacksonians joined with supporters of Adams and Clay to enact the Tariff of 1828. A tariff that raised duties significantly on raw materials, textiles, and iron goods. It enraged the South, which had no industries that needed protection and resented the higher cost of imported goods.The new tariff was “little less than legalized pillage,” an Alabama legislator declared, calling it a Tariff of Abominations. -
Indian Removal Act
Act that directed the mandatory relocation of eastern tribes to territory west of the Mississippi. Jackson insisted that his goal was to save the Indians and their culture. Indians resisted the controversial act, but in the end most were forced to comply. The Act promised money and reserved land to Native American peoples who would give up their ancestral holdings east of the Mississippi River. It created the Indian Territory on national lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. -
American Anti-Slavery Society AASS
In 1833, Garrison and sixty other religious abolitionists, black and white, established the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS).The first interracial social justice movement in the United States, which advocated the immediate, unconditional end of slavery on the basis of human rights, without compensation to slave masters. These multiracial abolitionist groups were small at first, but they launched a three-pronged attack. -
Start of the Whig Party
The rise of the Democracy and Jackson’s tumultuous presidency sparked the creation in the mid-1830s of a second national party: the Whigs.The Party arose when a group of congressmen contested Andrew Jackson’s policies and conduct. The party identified itself with the pre-Revolutionary American and British parties that had opposed the arbitrary actions of British monarchs. For the next two decades, Whigs and Democrats competed fiercely for votes and appealed to different cultural groups. -
Alamo
The 1836 defeat by the Mexican army of the Texan garrison defending the Alamo in San Antonio. Newspapers urged Americans to “Remember the Alamo,” and American adventurers, lured by offers of land grants, flocked to Texas to join the rebel forces.
The Texans routed Santa Anna’s overconfident army in the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836, winning de facto independence. The Mexican government refused to recognize the Texas Republic but, for the moment, did not seek to conquer it. -
Panic of 1837
Triggered by a sharp reduction in English capital and credit flowing into the United States, the cash shortage caused a panic while the collapse of credit led to a depression that lasted from 1837 to 1843. The panic began when the Bank of England tried to boost the faltering British economy by sharply curtailing the flow of money and credit to the United States. By creating a surplus of unemployed workers, the depression finished off the union movement and the Working Men’s Parties. -
Start of the Trail of Tears
In 1835, American officials and a Cherokee faction negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, which specified that Cherokees would resettle in Indian Territory. When only 2,000 of 17,000 Cherokees had moved by the May 1838 deadline, President Martin Van Buren ordered General Winfield Scott to enforce the treaty. Scott’s army rounded up 14,000 Cherokees and marched them 1,200 miles, an arduous journey that became known as the Trail of Tears. Along the way, 3,000 Indians died of starvation and exposure. -
Start of the Liberty Party
Dissenters from Garrison’s strategy of “moral suasion” focused their energies on electoral politics. Led by key African Americans who had escaped from slavery, this group broke with Garrison and organized the Liberty Party, an antislavery political party that ran its first presidential candidate in 1844, controversially challenging both the Democrats and Whigs. Political abolitionists would, over the next two decades, transform the political system. -
Manifest Destiny
As expansionists developed continental ambitions, the term Manifest Destiny captured those dreams. This term expressed the idea that Euro-Americans were fated by God to settle the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Underlying the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny was a sense of Anglo-American cultural and racial superiority. The “inferior” peoples, Native Americans and Mexicans, would be subjected to American dominion, taught republicanism and converted to Protestantism. -
Seneca Falls Convention
In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized a gathering of women’s rights activists in the small New York town of Seneca Falls. Seventy women and thirty men attended the Seneca Falls Convention. The first women’s rights convention in the United States which resulted in a manifesto extending to women the egalitarian republican ideology of the Declaration of Independence. Most Americans dismissed the Seneca Falls declaration as nonsense. Still, the women’s rights movement grew. -
Compromise of 1850
Laws passed in 1850 that were meant to resolve the dispute over the status of slavery in the territories. The compromise included a new Fugitive Slave Act strengthening federal aid to slave catchers. The legislation also admitted California as a free state, resolved a boundary dispute between New Mexico and Texas in favor of New Mexico, and abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The compromise organized the rest of the conquered Mexican lands into New Mexico and Utah. -
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
A federal law that set up special federal courts to facilitate capture of anyone accused of being a runaway slave. These courts could consider a slaveowner’s sworn affidavit as proof, but defendants could not testify or receive a jury trial. The controversial law led to armed conflict between U.S. marshals and abolitionists. Under the act’s provisions, southern owners located and re-enslaved about 200 fugitives, as well as some free blacks. -
Maine Law
By the early 1850s they turned laws to forbid the manufacture and sale of alcohol. In 1851, the Maine legislature outlawed the sale of alcoholic beverages in the state. The success of this Maine Law, the nation’s first state law for the prohibition of liquor manufacture and sales, shaped the reformers’ goals for decades, all the way up to the adoption of national prohibition in 1919. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
A controversial 1854 law that divided Indian Territory into Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left the new territories to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty. It jolted the political system. It galvanized thousands of northerners, especially Whigs, to stand up against the “slave power.” Far from clarifying the status of slavery in the territories, the act led to violent conflict in “Bleeding Kansas.” -
Dred Scott Decision
The 1857 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The Court ruled against slave Dred Scott, who claimed that travels with his master into free states and territories made him and his family free. The decision also denied the federal government the right to exclude slavery from the territories and declared that African Americans were not citizens. -
Election of 1860
The national Republican convention chose Lincoln as its presidential candidate. Lincoln conveyed a compelling egalitarian image that appealed to smallholding farmers, wage earners, and midwestern voters. Although Lincoln was not on the ballot in any Deep South state, and though he received less than 1 percent of the popular vote in the South and only 40 percent of the national vote, he won 180 electoral votes and thus a majority in the electoral college. -
Homestead Act
Republicans wanted farms as well as factories. The homestead act gave 160 acres of free western land to any applicant who occupied and improved the property. This policy led to the rapid development of the American West after the Civil War; facing arid conditions in the West, however, many homesteaders found themselves unable to live on their land. -
Emancipation Proclamation
President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation issued on January 1, 1863, that legally abolished slavery in all states that remained out of the Union. While the Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately free a single slave, it signaled an end to the institution of slavery. Hailed by reformers in Europe, emancipation helped persuade Britain and France to refrain from recognizing the Confederacy, in a war now being fought between slavery and freedom. -
Battle of Gettysburg
In June 1863, Lee maneuvered his army north through Maryland into Pennsylvania. The Army of the Potomac moved along with him, positioning itself between Lee and Washington, D.C. The two great armies met by accident at Gettysburg. As the three-day battle ended, the Confederates counted 28,000 casualties, while 23,000 of Meade’s soldiers lay killed or wounded. Gettysburg was a tremendous Union victory and, together with the triumph at Vicksburg, marked a military and political turning point. -
Sand Creek Massacre
The November 29, 1864, massacre of more than a hundred peaceful Cheyennes, largely women and children, by John M. Chivington’s Colorado militia. Infuriated by the Sand Creek massacre, Cheyennes carried war pipes to the Arapahos and Sioux, who attacked and burned white settlements along the South Platte River. Ordered to subdue these peoples, the U.S. Army failed miserably. -
Reconstruction Act of 1867
An act that divided the conquered South into five military districts, each under the command of a U.S. general. To reenter the Union, former Confederate states had to grant the vote to freedmen and deny it to leading ex-Confederates.The military commander of each district was required to register all eligible adult males, black as well as white; supervise state constitutional conventions; and ensure that new constitutions guaranteed black suffrage. -
14th Amendment
Anxious to protect freedpeople and reassert Republican power in the South, in June 1866 Congress took further measures to sustain civil rights creating the 14th amendment. Constitutional amendment ratified in 1868 that made all native-born or naturalized persons U.S. citizens and prohibited states from abridging the rights of national citizens, thus giving primacy to national rather than state citizenship. -
15th Amendment
Constitutional amendment ratified in 1870 that forbade states to deny citizens the right to vote on grounds of race, color, or “previous condition of servitude.” Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, despite its limitations, was an astonishing feat. Congressional Republicans had extraordinary faith in the power of the vote. In the election of 1870, hundreds of thousands of African American men voted across the South, in an atmosphere of collective pride and celebration. -
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877
A nationwide strike of thousands of railroad workers and labor allies, who protested the growing power of railroad corporations and the steep wage cuts imposed by railroad managers amid a severe economic depression that had begun in 1873. The strike brought rail travel and commerce to a halt. Thousands of people poured into the streets to protest the economic injustice wrought by railroads. It left more than 50 people dead and caused $40 million worth of damage, primarily to railroad property. -
Pendleton Act
Congress passed the Pendleton Act, a law establishing a nonpartisan Civil Service Commission to fill federal jobs by examination. The Pendleton Act dealt a major blow to the “spoils system” and sought to ensure that government positions were filled by trained, professional employees. Initially, civil service applied to only 10 percent of such jobs. By the 1910s, Congress extended the act to cover most federal positions; cities and states across the country enacted similar laws. -
Sherman Antitrust Act
Though it proved difficult to enforce and was soon weakened by the Supreme Court, the Sherman Antitrust Act was the first federal attempt to forbid any “combination” or “conspiracy in restraint of trade.” It required the federal government to investigate companies engaged in anticompetitive practices. The act that forbade anticompetitive business activities, requiring the federal government to investigate trusts and any companies operating in violation of the act. -
Williams v. Mississippi
An 1898 Supreme Court ruling that allowed states to impose poll taxes and literacy tests. By 1908, every southern state had adopted such measures to suppress voting by African Americans and some poor whites. Across the South, voter turnout plunged, from above 70 percent to 34 percent or even lower. Not only blacks but also many poor whites ceased to vote. -
Theodore Roosevelt sworn into office
On September 14, 1901, only six months after William McKinley won his second face-off, the president was shot as he attended the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. He died eight days later. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was sworn into office. The new president, who called for vigorous reform, represented a major shift for the Republicans. -
Square Deal
Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 campaign platform, calling for regulation of corporations and protection of consumers and the environment. That year, calling for every American to get what he called a Square Deal, a corporate regulation and consumer and environmental protection, Roosevelt handily defeated Democratic candidate Alton B. Parker. Now president in his own right, Roosevelt stepped up his attack on trusts. -
Roosevelt Corollary
The assertion by President Roosevelt that the United States would act as a “policeman” in the Caribbean and intervene in the affairs of nations that were guilty of “wrongdoing or impotence” in order to protect U.S. interests in Latin America. Instead of guaranteeing that the United States would protect its neighbors from Europe it asserted the United States’s right to regulate Caribbean affairs. For decades the United States intervened in Caribbean and Central American nations’ affairs. -
Pure Food and Drug Act
In 1906, journalist Upton Sinclair exposed some of the most extreme forms of labor exploitation in his novel The Jungle, which described conditions in Chicago meatpacking plants. What caught the nation’s attention were his descriptions of rotten meat and filthy packing conditions. Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and created the federal Food and Drug Administration to oversee compliance with the new law and to regulate the food and drug industries to ensure safety. -
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
An organization founded in 1909 by leading African American reformers and white allies as a vehicle for advocating equal rights for African Americans, especially through the courts.The fledgling group found allies in African American churches and women’s clubs. It also cooperated with the National Urban League, a union of agencies that assisted black migrants in the North. Over the coming decades, these groups grew into a powerful force for racial justice. -
Election of 1912
Retirement did not sit comfortably with Theodore Roosevelt. Early in 1912, Roosevelt announced himself as a Republican candidate for president. With four candidates in the field, Taft, Roosevelt, Wilson, and Debs, the 1912 campaign generated intense excitement. Despite the intense campaign, Republicans’ division between Taft and Roosevelt made the result fairly easy to predict. Wilson won, though he received only 42 percent of the popular vote. -
Opening of the Panama Canal
A canal across the Isthmus of Panama connecting trade between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and opened in 1914, the canal gave U.S. naval vessels quick access to the Pacific and provided the United States with a commanding position in the Western Hemisphere.The project took eight years and cost thousands of lives among the workers who built it. -
Beginning of the Great Migration
With so many men in uniform, jobs in heavy industry opened for the first time to African Americans, accelerating the pace of black migration from South to North. During World War I, more than 400,000 African Americans moved to such cities as St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Detroit, in what became known as the Great Migration. The rewards were great, and taking war jobs could be a source of patriotic pride. -
Zimmermann Telegram
Intercepted dispatch in which German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann urged Mexico to join the Central Powers promising that if the United States entered the war, Germany would help Mexico recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The telegram outraged the American public and helped precipitate the move toward U.S. entry in the war. Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war. He argued that Germany had trampled on American rights and imperiled U.S. trade and citizens’ lives. -
Eighteenth Amendment
A decades-long push for national prohibition culminated with Congress’s passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1917. Ratified over the next two years by nearly every state and taking effect in January 1920, the amendment prohibited the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” anywhere in the United States. It was enforced by the federal government under the 1920 Volstead Act. Also called “prohibition,” the amendment was repealed in 1933. -
Wilson's Fourteen Points
Principles for a new world order proposed in 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson as a basis for peace negotiations at Versailles. Among them were open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, free trade, territorial integrity, arms reduction, national self-determination, and creation of the League of Nations, an international organization of nations to prevent future hostilities. Wilson’s Points embodied an important strand in progressivism. -
Treaty of Versailles
The 1919 treaty that ended World War I. The agreement redrew the map of the world, assigned Germany sole responsibility for the war, and saddled it with a debt of $33 billion in war damages. Its long-term impact around the globe, including the creation of British and French imperial “mandates”, was catastrophic. Wilson managed to influence the Treaty of Versailles in important ways. He intervened repeatedly to soften conditions imposed on Germany. -
Beginning of the Harlem Renaissance
A flourishing of African American artists, writers, intellectuals, and social leaders, centered in the neighborhood of Harlem, New York. Writers and artists championed black racial identity and pride.To millions of Americans, its most famous symbol was the musical form known as jazz. The Harlem Renaissance also generated political aspirations. The Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association led by Marcus Garvey, arose to mobilize workers and champion black nationalism. -
Scopes Trial
The trial of John Scopes, a biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating his state’s ban on teaching evolution. Tennessee’s legislature had outlawed the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and teaches instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The trial created a nationwide media frenzy and came to be seen as a showdown between urban and rural values. Scopes was found guilty. -
Collapse of the Stock Market / Beginning of the Great Depression
The depression’s precipitating event was a massive collapse of the stock market. Easy credit had fueled years of excessive stock speculation, which inflated the value of traded companies well beyond their actual worth. The nation had entered the Great Depression, the most severe economic downturn to that point in the nation’s history. Over the next four years, industrial production fell 37 percent.A precipitous drop in consumer spending deepened the crisis. -
Beginning of the Dust Bowl
Plains farmers faced both economic and environmental catastrophe during the depression. Between 1930 and 1939, a severe drought afflicted the semiarid parts of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arkansas, and Kansas. When the winds came, huge clouds of thick dust rolled over the land, turning the day into night. This disaster prompted a mass exodus.
The newly created Soil Conservation Service taught farmers to prevent soil erosion by tilling hillsides along the contours of the land. -
The 1932 Election
As a presidential election approached and the economic crisis intensified, most Americans believed that something new had to be tried. Born into a wealthy family, Roosevelt was a distant cousin to former president Theodore Roosevelt. In his 1932 campaign, Roosevelt pledged vigorous but vague action, arguing simply that “the country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” He won easily. Roosevelt would not take office until March 1933. -
Neutrality Act of 1935
As Hitler pushed his initiatives in Europe, isolationist sentiment ran strong among Americans. In 1934, Senator Gerald P. Nye, launched an investigation into the profits of munitions makers during that war. Its findings prompted Congress to pass a series of acts meant to keep the nation out of any overseas war. The Neutrality Act imposed an embargo on selling arms to warring countries and declared that Americans traveling on the ships of belligerent nations did so at their own risk. -
Social Security Act
The Social Security Act created an old-age pension system. It had three main provisions: old-age pensions for workers, a joint federal-state system of compensation for unemployed workers, and a program of payments to widowed mothers and the disabled. The Act was a milestone in the creation of an American welfare state. Never before had the federal government assumed so much responsibility for the well-being of so many citizens. It became one of the most popular government programs in history. -
Four Freedoms Speech
With the election settled, Roosevelt sought to persuade Congress to increase aid to Britain, whose survival he viewed as key to American security. In January 1941, Roosevelt delivered the State of the Union address, in what became one of his defining moments. In laying out “four essential human freedoms”, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt cast the war as a defense of democratic societies. -
Executive Order 8802
An order signed by President Roosevelt that prohibited “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin” and established the Fair Employment Practices Commission. It was signed to avoid a divisive protest on Washington. The resulting Fair Employment Practice Committee had few enforcement powers but set an important precedent for federal action. -
Attack on Pearl Harbor
The inevitable provocation came not from Germany but from Japan. A naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was attacked by Japanese bombers. More than 2,400 Americans were killed and destroyed or heavily damaged,eight battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers, and almost two hundred airplanes. Although the assault was devastating, it had the unintended consequence of uniting the American people.The following day, President Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. -
Executive Order 9066
Early in 1942, President Roosevelt responded to anti-Japanese sentiment by issuing Executive Order 9066, which authorized the War Department to force Japanese Americans from their homes and hold them in relocation camps for the duration of the war. Army officials gave families only a few days to dispose of their property. Businesses that had taken a lifetime to build were liquidated overnight. The War Relocation Authority moved the internees to hastily built camps in desolate areas. -
D-Day
The promised invasion of France finally came on D-Day. The largest armada ever assembled moved across the English Channel under the command of General Eisenhower. Soldiers suffered terrible casualties storming the beaches of Normandy. June 6, 1944, the date of the Allied invasion of northern France. The largest amphibious assault in world history, the invasion opened a second front against the Germans and moved the Allies closer to victory in Europe. -
Yalta Conference
A meeting in Yalta of President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in February 1945, in which the leaders discussed the treatment of Germany, the status of Poland, and Russian entry into the war against Japan. Roosevelt focused on maintaining Allied unity and securing a Soviet commitment to enter the war against Japan. The Three agreed to establish an international body to replace the League of Nations. The new organization is now known as the United Nations. -
Beginning of the Baby Boom
The surge in the American birthrate between 1945 and 1965, which peaked in 1957 with 4.3 million births.This increase was largely the result of the renewed confidence and security that followed the economic hardships and uncertainties of the Great Depression and World War II.The lives of Americans born in the “ baby boom” between World War II and the early 1960s track the evolution of consumption and advertising. -
Truman Doctrine
London informed Washington that it could no longer afford to support the anticommunists in the Greek civil war. Truman worried that a communist victory in Greece would lead to Soviet domination of the eastern Mediterranean. He announced a commitment to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” First applied to Greece and Turkey, it became the justification for U.S. intervention into several countries during the Cold War. -
Marshall Plan
Secretary of State Marshall came up with a proposal of a massive infusion of American capital to rebuild the European economy. Marshall laid out a challenge to the nations of Europe: work out a comprehensive recovery program, and U.S. aid would finance it. The US contributed $13 billion to a highly successful recovery effort. Markets for American goods grew stronger and fostered economic interdependence between Europe and the United States. The Plan also intensified Cold War tensions. -
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
In April 1949, the United States secured the NATO, the country’s first peacetime military alliance outside the Western hemisphere. Under the NATO treaty, twelve nations, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States, agreed that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” -
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
Supreme Court ruling of 1954 that overturned the “separate but equal” precedent established in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The Court declared that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal and thus violated the Fourteenth Amendment. It happened because of a case involving Linda Brown, a young black student in Topeka, Kansas, who had been forced to attend a segregated school far from her family home rather than a nearby white elementary school. -
Eisenhower Doctrine
In early 1957, concerned about Soviet presence in the region, the president delivered a “Special Message to the Congress on the Situation in the Middle East.” The document outlined a policy that came to be known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, which stated that American forces would assist any nation in the region that required aid “against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.” -
Election of 1960
Kennedy’s Republican opponent in the 1960 presidential election was Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon. The great innovation of the 1960 campaign was a series of four nationally televised debates. Despite Kennedy’s success in the debates, he won the narrowest of electoral victories. Kennedy attracted Catholics, African Americans, and the labor vote; his vice-presidential running mate, Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, helped bring in white southern Democrats. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
In a televised address, Kennedy revealed that U.S. reconnaissance planes had spotted Soviet-built bases for intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, easily capable of striking the United States. Some of those weapons had already been installed. After a week of tense negotiations, both sides made concessions: Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba, and Khrushchev promised to dismantle the missile bases. The Cuban missile crisis proved the closest the Cold War came to a nuclear exchange. -
March on Washington
Officially named the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a quarter of a million people marched to the Lincoln Memorial to demand that Congress end Jim Crow racial discrimination and launch a major jobs program to bring needed employment to black communities. Martin Luther King Jr. was its public face. It was King’s dramatic “I Have a Dream” speech that captured the nation’s imagination. 250,000 blacks and whites marching together marked the high point of the civil rights movement. -
John F. Kennedy's assassination
In late November, the president traveled to Texas to meet with local leaders and raise campaign funds for 1964. On the way to a luncheon, Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline rode in an open car through the city’s downtown. As the motorcade passed under the windows of the Texas School Book Depository, a sniper inside fired shots that struck Kennedy in the head and neck. The young president died within the hour. A grim-faced Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as Kennedy’s successor. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
In June 1964, Congress approved the most far-reaching civil rights law since Reconstruction. A law that responded to demands of the civil rights movement by making discrimination illegal in employment, education, and public accommodations on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex. However, the Civil Rights Act did not remove the obstacles to black voting. So protesters went back into the streets. -
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
Resolution passed by Congress in 1964 in the wake of a naval confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin between the United States and North Vietnam. It gave the president virtually unlimited authority in conducting the Vietnam War. The Senate terminated the resolution in 1970 following outrage over the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. In the entire Congress, only two senators voted against his request. -
Economic Opportunity Act
The Economic Opportunity Act, passed by congress at Johnson’s urging, created a series of programs to help the poorest Americans in what LBJ named “the War on Poverty.” This legislation included several different initiatives. Overall it did more to provide services to the poor than to create jobs, which led to some critics. Nevertheless, for the first time since the New Deal the federal government had made reducing poverty a national priority. -
Operation Rolling Thunder begins
Johnson authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam that began in March 1965 and continued for three years. The vast aerial assault proved largely ineffectual. The North Vietnamese quickly rebuilt roads and bridges and moved munitions plants underground. Instead of demoralizing the North Vietnamese, Operation Rolling Thunder hardened their will to fight.The influx of American military power devastated Vietnam’s countryside, however. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was signed by LBJ, outlawed the literacy tests and other devices that prevented African Americans and other people of color from registering to vote, and authorized the attorney general to send federal examiners to register voters in any county where registration was less than 50 percent. Together with the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, which outlawed the poll tax in federal elections, the Voting Rights Act fulfilled a promise that had been denied for a century. -
American Indian Movement
Organization established to address the problems Indians faced in American cities. AIM organized Indians to end relocation and termination policies and to win greater control over their cultures and communities.They embraced the concept of Red Power, and they staged escalating protests to draw attention to indigenous issues. Although AIM’s tactics were upsetting to many, their protests attracted widespread mainstream coverage and spurred government action on tribal issues. -
Environmental Protection Agency
On the first day of 1970, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which created the Environmental Protection Agency. A Federal agency created to enforce environmental laws, conduct environmental research, and reduce human health and environmental risks from pollutants. -
Watergate Scandal
Break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. by men working for President Nixon’s reelection campaign. There was no clear evidence tying Watergate directly to the president, but he arranged hush money for the burglars and instructed the CIA to stop an FBI investigation into the affair. His actions amounted to obstruction of justice. Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign his office. Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president. -
Hostage Crisis
Crisis in which Iranian college students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage, and demanded that the deposed Shah, an undemocratic ruler installed with American backing in 1954, be returned to face trial in Iran. Carter refused, and the hostages were kept for 444 days. The hostage crisis paralyzed his presidency. Every night, humiliating pictures of blindfolded American hostages appeared on television. The hostages were released the day after Carter left office. -
Iran-Contra affair
Reagan administration scandal that involved the sale of arms to Iran in exchange for its efforts to secure the release of hostages held in Lebanon and the illegal redirection of the proceeds of those sales to the Nicaraguan Contras. Although Reagan praised the right-wing Contras as “freedom fighters,” reliable human rights groups accused them of attacking civilians and other abuses. Congress banned the CIA and all other government agencies from providing any military support to the Contras. -
Persian Gulf War
The 1991 war between Iraq and a U.S.led international coalition. This war was sparked by the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. A forty-day bombing campaign against Iraq followed by coalition troops storming into Kuwait brought a quick victory. Bush decided against occupying Iraq. Instead, he won passage of UN Resolution 687, which imposed economic sanctions against Iraq unless it allowed exhaustive weapons inspections, destroyed all biological and chemical arms, and abandoned any nuclear programs.
