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English colony at Jamestown Virginia
The first permanent English settlement in the Americas. English colonists set sail to establish a colony in the New World. With three ships, named Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed, under Captain Christopher Newport. After a particularly long voyage of five months. -
First Africans brought to North America
in 1619, traders brought the first African slaves to Jamestown, who were in North America at first generally treated as misstreated servants. Many of enslaved Africans won their freedom through fulfilling a work contract or for converting to Christianity -
Pilgrims land at Plymouth
The Mayflower arrived in Plymouth Harbor in 1620, after first stopping near today's Provincetown. According to oral tradition, Plymouth Rock was the site where William Bradford and other Pilgrims first set foot on land. Bradford was the governor of Plymouth Colony -
Salem Witch Trials
a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft, The trials resulted in the executions of 20 people, most of them women. 12 other women had previously been executed. hearings in 1692 were conducted in several towns. the supernatural was considered part of everyday life; many people believed that Satan was present and active on Earth.The executions at Salem were not the first of their kind in the American colonies, Peasants used a kind of witchcraft to invoke particular -
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French and Indian War
worldwide Seven Years' War. The war was fought between the colonies of British America and New France, with both sides supported by military units from their parent countries of Great Britain and France, as well as Native American allies. At the start of the war, the French North American colonies had a population of roughly 60,000 European settlers, compared with 2 million in the British North American colonies. The outnumbered French particularly depended on the Indians. -
Boston Massacre
a street fight that occurred on March 5, 1770, between a "patriot" mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks, and a squad of British soldiers. Several colonists were killed and this led to a campaign by speech-writers to rouse the ire of the citizenry. -
Boston Tea Party
"the Destruction of the Tea in Boston") was a political protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, -
The Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence is the statement adopted by the Continental Congress meeting at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies,[2] then at war with Great Britain, regarded themselves as thirteen newly independent sovereign states, and no longer a part of the British Empire. Instead they formed a new nation—the United States of America. John Adams was a leader in pushing for independence -
Revolutionary War Ends (Treaty of Paris)
revolutionary war and recognized American independence. The Continental Congress named a five-member commission to negotiate a treaty–John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, and Henry Laurens. Laurens, however, was captured by a British warship and held in the Tower of London until the end of the war -
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Shays Rebellion
the name given to a series of protests in 1786 and 1787 by American farmers against state and local enforcement of tax collections and judgments for debt. -
Constitution Ratified
New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document, and it was subsequently agreed that government under the U.S. Constitution would begin on March 4, 1789. In June, Virginia ratified the Constitution, followed by New York in July. -
Whiskey Rebellion
The so-called "whiskey tax" was the first tax imposed on a domestic product by the newly formed federal government. It became law in 1791, and was intended to generate revenue to help reduce the national debt. Although the tax applied to all distilled spirits, whiskey was by far the most popular distilled beverage in the 18th-century U.S. Because of this, the excise became widely known as a "whiskey tax" -
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Lewis & Clark Expedition
the first American expedition to cross what is now the western portion of the United States, departing in May 1804, from near St. Louis on the Mississippi River, making their way westward through the continental divide to the Pacific coast -
War of 1812
a military conflict, lasting for two and a half years, fought by the United States of America against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, its North American colonies, and its Native American allies. -
Missouri Compromise
an effort by Congress to defuse the sectional and political rivalries triggered by the request of Missouri late in 1819 for admission as a state in which slavery would be permitted -
Trail of Tears
as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the "Trail of Tears," because of its devastating effects. -
Texan Indepence
The struggle for the independence of Texas took place over many years, although the actual war that achieved independence from Mexico was relatively brief. In the 1820s, Stephen Austin won the Mexican government's approval to bring American families into the sparsely settled Texas region. -
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Mexican American War (Treaty of Guadalupa Hildelgo)
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (Tratado de Guadalupe Hidalgo in Spanish), officially entitled the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement between the United States of America and the Mexican Republi -
Gold Rush in California
a period in American History which began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. -
Compromise of 1850
a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850, which defused a four-year political confrontation between slave and free states regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War -
Kansas Nebraska Act
created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, -
Abraham Lincoln elected President
Lincoln was elected the 16th -
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Civil War
a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 to determine the survival of the Union or independence for the Confederacy. Among the 34 states in January 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy, often simply called the South, grew to include eleven states, and although they claimed thirteen states and additional western territories, the Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by a f -
Transcontinental Railroad completed
a golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, signaling the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States -
Reconstruction Ends
With the compromise, the Republicans had quietly given up their fight for racial equality and blacks' rights in the south. In 1877, Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the south, and the bayonet-backed Republican governments collapsed, thereby ending Reconstruction.
