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Jamestown
-Was the first successful permanent English settlement in what would become the United States.
-It was located on Jamestown Island, in Virginia, about 30 miles (47 kilometers) up the James River from the Atlantic coast. The original fort site was surrounded by a triangular palisade with three bulwarks. -
Virginia House of Burgesses
-Its first order of business was to set a minimum price for the sale of tobacco. Although the first session was cut short because of an outbreak of malaria, the House of Burgesses soon became a symbol of representative government.
-The House of Burgesses, which met at first only once a year, could make laws, which could be vetoed by the governor or the directors of the Virginia Company. -
Mayflower Compact
-Was the first written framework of government established in what is now the United States. The compact was drafted to prevent dissent amongst Puritans and non-separatist Pilgrims who had landed at Plymouth a few days earlier.
-The Mayflower carried not only the Pilgrims but a few other settlers as well. -
Plymouth Rock
-Pilgrim Memorial State Park is one of the most heavily visited parks in the state parks system. Nearly one million people a year come from all over the world to visit "The Rock" and the town where in 1620 Europeans first made a home in New England. This simple glacial erratic boulder on the shore of Plymouth Harbor has become a world famous symbol of the courage and faith of the men and women who founded the first New England colony. -
Toleration Act
-The Maryland Toleration Act did not bring complete religious freedom, as is so often assumed, and as a reading of this document will quickly prove. Nor did it come about because of a profound humanistic conviction on the part of Lord Baltimore, the Maryland proprietor. The act was a pragmatic solution to a serious problem. The Catholics in originally Catholic Maryland had become a minority of the population although still powerful politically. -
Bacon's Rebellion
-Bacon's Rebellion was probably one of the most confusing yet intriguing chapters in Jamestown's history. For many years, historians considered the Virginia Rebellion of 1676 to be the first stirring of revolutionary sentiment in America, which culminated in the American Revolution almost exactly one hundred years later. However, in the past few decades, based on findings from a more distant viewpoint, historians have come to understand Bacon's Rebellion as a power struggle between two stubborn, -
Glorious Revolution
-Replaced the reigning king, James II, with the joint monarchy of his protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. It was the keystone of the Whig (those opposed to a Catholic succession) history of Britain.
According to the Whig account, the events of the revolution were bloodless and the revolution settlement established the supremacy of parliament over the crown, setting Britain on the path towards constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. -
English Bill of Rights
-An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown -
Salem Witch Trials
- From June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft.
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John Peter Zenger
No country values free expression more highly than does the United States, and no case in American history stands as a greater landmark on the road to protection for freedom of the press than the trial of a German immigrant printer named John Peter Zenger. -
French and Indian War
The Seven Years' War (called the French and Indian War in the colonies) lasted from 1756 to 1763, forming a chapter in the imperial struggle between Britain and France called the Second Hundred Years' War. During 1754 and 1755, the French defeated in quick succession the young George Washington, Gen. Edward Braddock, and Braddock's successor, Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts. -
Proclamation of 1763
In 1763, at ethe end of the French and Indian War, the British issued a proclamation,mainly intended to conciliate the Indians by checking the encroachment of settlers on their lands. In the centuries since the proclamation, it has become one of the cornerstones of Native American law in the United States and Canada. -
Quartering Act
The Quartering Act of 1765 required the colonies to house British soldiers in barracks provided by the colonies. If the barracks were too small to house all the soldiers, then localities were to accommodate the soldiers in local inns, livery stables, ale houses, victualling houses, and the houses of sellers of wine. -
Stamp Act
The new tax was imposed on all American colonists and required them to pay a tax on every piece of printed paper they used. Ship's papers, legal documents, licenses, newspapers, other publications, and even playing cards were taxed. The money collected by the Stamp Act was to be used to help pay the costs of defending and protecting the American frontier near the Appalachian Mountains. -
Declatory Act
It stated that the British Parliament’s taxing authority was the same in America as in Great Britain. Parliament had directly taxed the colonies for revenue in the Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765). Parliament mollified the recalcitrant colonists by repealing the distasteful Stamp Act, but it actually hardened its principle in the Declaratory Act by asserting its complete authority to make binding laws on the American colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” -
Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre was the killing of five colonists by British regulars. It was the culmination of tensions in the American colonies that had been growing since Royal troops first appeared in Massachusetts in October 1768 to enforce the heavy tax burden imposed by the Townshend Acts. -
Tea Act
The Tea Act of 1773 was one of several measures imposed on the American colonists by the heavily indebted British government in the decade leading up to the American Revolutionary War (1775-83). The act's main purpose was not to raise revenue from the colonies but to bail out the floundering East India Company, a key actor in the British economy. The British government granted the company a monopoly on the importation and sale of tea in the colonies. -
Boston Tea Party
took place when a group of Massachusetts Patriots, protesting the monopoly on American tea importation recently granted by Parliament to the East India Company, seized 342 chests of tea in a midnight raid on three tea ships and threw them into the harbor. -
1st Continental Congress
In response to the British Parliament's enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convenes at Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia. Fifty-six delegates from all the colonies except Georgia drafted a declaration of rights and grievances and elected Virginian Peyton Randolph as the first president of Congress. Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay were among the delegates. -
2nd Continental Congress
The delegates of the 13 colonies gathered in Philadelphia to discuss their next steps. -
Declaration of Independence
Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence is at once the nation's most cherished symbol of liberty and Jefferson's most enduring monument. Here, in exalted and unforgettable phrases, Jefferson expressed the convictions in the minds and hearts of the American people. The political philosophy of the Declaration was not new; its ideals of individual liberty had already been expressed by John Locke and the Continental philosophers. -
Treaty of Paris
The American War for Independence (1775-83) was actually a world conflict, involving not only the United States and Great Britain but also France, Spain, and the Netherlands. The peace process brought a vaguely formed, newly born United States into the arena of international diplomacy, playing against the largest, most sophisticated, and most established powers on earth.
