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1492
Columbus, sailing for Spain, makes first voyage of discovery.
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1497
John Cabot explores Newfoundland.
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1503
First Africans are brought to the Americas.
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1513
Juan Ponce de Leon explores Florida.
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Period: 1517 to
Protestant Reformation spurs religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants.
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1519
Hernan Cortes begins the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.
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1531
Francisco Pizarro subdues the Incas of Peru.
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1541
Jacques Cartier, sailing for France, explores the St. Lawrence River.
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1561
St. Augustine, the first European colony in present day America, is founded.
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Period: to
Raleigh's Roanoke Island venture.
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The English defeat the Spanish Armada.
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Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English colony, is established.
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Samuel de Champlain founds Quebec.
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Pocahontas marries John Rolfe.
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First Africans arrive in English America.
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First Africans arrive at Jamestown.
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Plymouth colony is founded; Pilgrims agree to the Mayflower Compact.
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Indian uprising in Virginia.
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Massachusetts Bay Colony is founded.
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Settlement of Maryland begins.
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Harvard College is established.
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Pequot War.
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Period: to
English Civil War.
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Restoration of the English monarchy.
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Restoration of the Stuart monarchy - King Charles The Second.
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Puritans initiate the "Half-Way Covenant."
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Virginia enacts law declaring that children of slave women are slaves.
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The French explore the Mississippi River valley from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
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Period: to
King Philip's War.
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Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia.
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Pope leads rebellion in New Mexico.
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Pennsylvania is established.
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Dominion of New England is established.
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Glorious Revolution.
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Royal Charter for Massachusetts is established.
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Salem witchcraft trials.
-
Period: to
Great Awakening.
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Georgia is founded.
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John Peter Zenger is tried for seditious libel.
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Stono Uprising.
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George Whitefield preaches his first sermon in America, in Philadelphia.
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Jonathan Edward preaches "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
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Albany Congress adopts Plan of Union.
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Period: to
French and Indian War.
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Pontiac's Rebellion.
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Parliament passes the Revenue (Sugar) Act.
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Parliament repeals the Stamp Act and passes the Declaratory Act.
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Parliament levies the Townshend duties.
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Boston Massacre.
-
Colonists stage the Boston Tea Party.
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Parliament passes the Coercive Acts; colonists hold First Continental Congress.
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Battles of Lexington and Concord.
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Colonists hold Second Continental Congress.
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Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" is published; Declaration of Independence is signed.
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General Washington's troops cross the Delaware River; Battle of Trenton.
-
Period: to
Washington's troops winter at Morristown, New Jersey.
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Battle of Saratoga; General Burgoyne surrenders.
-
Period: to
Washington's troops winter at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
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Americans and French form an alliance.
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Battles of Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse.
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General Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown, Virginia.
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Articles of Confederation are ratified.
-
Articles of Confederation take effect.
-
Treaty of Paris is signed.
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General Washington puts an end to the Newburgh Conspiracy.
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Treaty of Fort Stanwix forces the Iroquois to give up land in New York and Pennsylvania.
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Land Ordinance outlines a plan for surveying and selling government lands.
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Virginia adopts the Statute of Religious Freedom.
-
Delegates call for a constitutional convention.
-
Period: to
Shay's Rebellion.
-
The Constitutional Convention is held in Philadelphia.
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Northwest Ordinance outlines a detailed plan for organizing western territories.
-
Period: to
The Federalist Papers are published.
-
Confederation government is phased out.
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French Revolution begins.
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President George Washington is inaugurated.
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Rhode Island becomes the last state to ratify the Constitution.
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Bill of Rights is ratified.
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Bank of the United States is created.
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Slave revolt in Santo Domingo (Haiti).
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Washington issues a proclamation of neutrality.
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Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin.
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Jay's Treaty is negotiated with England.
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Whiskey Rebellion.
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Philadelphia-Lancaster Turnpike is completed.
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By the Treaty of Greenville, the United States purchases western lands from Native Americans.
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Pinckney's Treaty is negotiated with Spain.
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Wilderness Road opens.
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President Washington delivers his farewell address.
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XYZ affair.
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Alien and Sedition Acts are passed.
-
Gabriel conspiracy in Richmond, VA.
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Thomas Jefferson is elected president.
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Louisiana Purchase.
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Marbury v. Madison.
-
Period: to
Lewis and Clark expedition.
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Chesapeake affair.
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Embargo Act is passed.
-
Clermont, the first successful steamboat, sails to Albany.
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Participation in the international slave trade is outlawed.
-
International slave trade is outlawed.
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Supreme Court issues Fletcher v. Peck decision.
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Battle of Tippecanoe.
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Charles Deslondes revolt in Louisiana.
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Hartford Convention.
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Battle of Horseshoe Bend.
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Treaty of Ghent.
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Construction of the National Road begins.
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Battle of New Orleans.
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American Colonization Society is founded.
-
Second Bank of the United States is established.
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First protective tariff goes into effect.
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Supreme Court issues McCulloch v. Maryland decision.
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Tallmadge Amendment.
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United States and Spain agree to the Transcontinental (Adams-Onis) Treaty.
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Missouri becomes a state.
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Florida becomes a territory.
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Mexico gains independence from Spain.
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Denmark Vesey conspiracy is discovered in Charleston, South Carolina.
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President Monroe enunciates the principles of the Monroe Doctrine.
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Supreme Court issues Gibbons v. Ogden decision.
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John Quincy Adams wins the presidential election by what some critics claim is a "corrupt bargain" with Henry Clay.
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Erie Canal opens.
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Ministers organize the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance.
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John C. Calhoun publishes the South Carolina Exposition and Protest.
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Andrew Jackson wins presidential election.
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"Tariff of Abominations" goes into effect.
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Congress passes the Indian Removal Act.
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Joseph Smith reveals the Book of Mormon.
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Andrew Jackson vetoes the Maysville Road Bill.
-
Period: to
Charles G. Finney begins preaching in upstate New York.
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Cyrus McCormick invents a mechanical reaper.
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Supreme Court issues Cherokee Nation v. Georgia decision.
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Nat Turner leads slave insurrection in Virginia.
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William Lloyd Garrison begins publication of The Liberator.
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Supreme Court issues Worcester v. Georgia decision.
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South Carolina issues ordinance of nullification.
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Andrew Jackson vetoes the Bank Recharter Bill.
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Congress passes Henry Clay's compromise tariff.
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American Anti-Slavery Society is founded.
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National Trades' Union is organized.
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Martin Van Buren is elected president.
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Transcendental Club holds its first meeting.
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Americans are defeated at the Alamo.
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John Deere invents the steel plow.
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Financial panic follows a drop in the price of cotton.
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Abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy is murdered.
-
Period: to
Eastern Indians are forced west on the Trail of Tears.
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William Henry Harrison, a Whig, is elected president.
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Abolitionists form the Liberty party.
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John Tyler becomes president.
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Americans and British agree to the Webster-Ashburton Treaty.
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Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issues Commonwealth v. Hunt decision.
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Rainbow, the first clipper ship, is launched.
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is published.
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United States annexes Texas.
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Mexican War begins.
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Elias Howe invents the sewing machine.
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Mormons, led by Brigham Young, undertake trek to Utah.
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Most members of the Donner party die en route to California.
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At the Seneca Falls Convention, women issue the Declaration of Sentiments.
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Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends the Mexican War.
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John Humphrey Noyes establishes the Oneida Community.
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Free-Soil party is organized.
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California gold rush begins.
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Sojourner Truth delivers her famous speech Ain’t I a Woman?.
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Plains Indians agree to the Fort Laramie Treaty.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published.
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With the Gadsden Purchase, the United States acquires thirty thousand square miles from Mexico.
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Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods is published.
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Congress passes the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
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The Republican party is founded.
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Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is published.
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Bessemer converter process allows steel to be made quickly and inexpensively.
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A pro-slavery mob sacks Lawrence, Kansas; John Brown stages the Pottawatomie Massacre in retaliation.
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Charles Sumner of Massachusetts is caned and seriously injured by a pro-slavery congressman in the U.S. Senate.
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U.S. Supreme Court issues the Dred Scott decision.
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Lecompton Constitution declares that slavery will be allowed in Kansas.
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Abraham Lincoln debates Stephen A. Douglas during the 1858 Illinois Senate race.
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Construction of New York’s Central Park begins.
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First oil well is struck in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
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Comstock Lode is discovered.
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Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published.
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John Brown and his followers stage raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to incite a massive slave insurrection.
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South Carolina secedes from the Union.
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Crittenden Compromise is proposed.
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Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated president.
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Fort Sumter falls to Confederate forces; Lincoln issues call to arms.
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First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas).
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The Trent affair commences when a Union warship stops a British ship on the high seas and takes two Confederate agents into custody.
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Congress passes the Morrill Land Grant Act.
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Congress guarantees the construction of a transcontinental railroad.
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Congress passes the Homestead Act.
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Congress passes the Homestead Act.
-
Period: to
Peninsular campaign.
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Battle of Shiloh.
Some events have 3 parts to them. Since I can only do a time span or one specific date, I just did a separate event for each part of this event. I'm not going to write this paragraph explanation thing again so just keep in mind that if there is a 3 part event it will be split up into separate events which you will find in my timeline as you go through it. ALSO, some of the dates for these battles are just 2 days long so I am just going to do the day it began and not make a time span on it. -
Battle of Second Bull Run.
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Battle of Antietam.
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Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation.
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Period: to
Siege of Vicksburg.
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Battles of Gettysburg and Chattanooga.
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Lincoln refuses to sign the Wade-Davis Bill.
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Sand Creek Massacre.
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Thirteenth Amendment is ratified.
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Congress sets up the Freedmen's Bureau.
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Robert E. Lee surrenders at Appomattox Court House.
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Lincoln is assassinated.
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Congress passes the Civil Rights Act.
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Ku Klux Klan is organized.
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Congress passes the Military Reconstruction Act.
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Congress passes the Tenure of Office Act.
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Fourteenth Amendment is ratified.
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Congress impeaches President Andrew Johnson; the Senate fails to convict him.
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First transcontinental railroad is completed at Promontory, Utah.
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Joseph Glidden invents barbed wire.
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Alexander Graham Bell patents his telephone.
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Thomas A. Edison makes the first successful incandescent lightbulb.
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Battle of Little Bighorn.
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Compromise of 1877 ends Reconstruction.
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Great Railroad Strike.
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With the Compromise of 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes becomes president and Reconstruction comes to an end.
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Rutherford B. Hayes is inaugurated president.
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Supreme Court issues Munn v. Illinois decision.
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President James A. Garfield is assassinated.
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John D. Rockefeller organizes the Standard Oil Trust.
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Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act.
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Congress passes the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.
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In the Haymarket incident, a bomb set off at a Chicago labor rally kills and wounds police officers.
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American Federation of Labor is organized.
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Surrender of Geronimo marks the end of the Indian wars.
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Supreme Court issues Wabash, St. Louis, and Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois decision.
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Congress passes the Severalty Act.
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Interstate Commerce Commission is created.
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Otis Elevator Company installs the first electric elevator.
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Hull-House, a settlement house, opens in Chicago.
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Mississippi Plan resegregates public facilities by race.
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Battle of Wounded Knee.
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Congress passes the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and the McKinley Tariff.
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Basketball is invented.
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Homestead Strike.
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Ellis Island, a federal center for processing immigrants, opens.
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People’s party drafts its Omaha platform.
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Frederick J. Turner’s “frontier thesis”.
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Economic depression affects a substantial proportion of the population.
-
Pullman Strike.
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Republic of Hawaii is proclaimed.
-
Cuban insurrection breaks out against Spanish rule.
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Booker T. Washington delivers his Atlanta Compromise speech.
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Supreme Court issues Plessy v. Ferguson decision.
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U.S. battleship Maine explodes in Havana Harbor.
-
War of 1898.
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United States annexes Hawaii.
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U.S. Senate ratifies the Treaty of Paris, ending the War of 1898.
-
Period: to
Filipino insurgents resist U.S. domination.
-
Baseball’s National League is formed.
-
Army Yellow Fever Commission confirms the cause of yellow fever.
-
International alliance quells the Boxer Rebellion.
-
J. Pierpont Morgan creates the U.S. Steel Corporation.
-
Theodore Roosevelt attempts to arbitrate the coal strike.
-
Justice Department breaks up Northern Securities Company.
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Panamanians revolt against Colombia.
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Congress passes the Elkins Act.
-
Wright Brothers fly the first airplane.
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Ford Motor Company is founded.
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Russo-Japanese War.
-
First movie house opens.
-
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is published.
-
Congress passes the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.
-
Great White Fleet circumnavigates the globe in a demonstration of America’s rise to world-power status.
-
Supreme Court issues Muller v. Oregon decision.
-
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is created.
-
William Taft is inaugurated president.
-
Congress passes the Mann-Elkins Act.
-
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded.
-
Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire.
-
Congress passes the Federal Reserve Act.
-
Panama Canal opens.
-
Congress passes the Clayton Anti-Trust Act.
-
United States intervenes in Mexico.
-
World War I begins in Europe.
-
British liner Lusitania, with Americans aboard, is torpedoed without warning by a German submarine.
-
Louis Brandeis is nominated to fill a seat on the Supreme Court.
-
Congress passes the National Defense Act.
-
Marcus Garvey brings to New York the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
-
Zimmermann telegram reveals that Germany is attempting to incite Mexico to enter the war against the United States.
-
United States enters the Great War.
-
Woodrow Wilson delivers his Fourteen Points speech.
-
Representatives of warring nations sign armistice.
-
U.S. attorney general launches Red Scare.
-
Supreme Court issues Schenck v. United States decision.
-
Race riots break out in Chicago.
-
Treaty of Versailles is presented to the Germans.
-
Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women’s suffrage, is ratified.
-
Prohibition begins.
-
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise is published.
-
Albert Einstein receives the Nobel Prize in physics.
-
Congress passes the Emergency Immigration Act.
-
Representatives of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan attend the Washington Naval Conference.
-
Joint resolution of Congress officially ends the war among the United States, Germany, and Austria-Hungary.
-
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is published.
-
First radio commercial is aired.
-
United States begins sending observers to the League of Nations.
-
Benito Mussolini comes to power in Italy.
-
President Warren G. Harding dies in office.
-
Congress passes the Immigration Act.
-
Scopes “monkey trial” tests the teaching of evolution in Tennessee public schools.
-
Charles Lindbergh Jr. makes first solo transatlantic flight.
-
Herbert Hoover is elected president.
-
More than sixty nations sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact pledging not to go to war with one another, except in matters of self-defense.
-
Stock market crashes.
-
Congress passes the Hawley-Smoot Tariff.
-
Congress sets up the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
-
Congress passes the Glass-Steagall Act.
-
Congress passes the Beer-Wine Revenue Act.
-
Adolf Hitler becomes a chancellor of Germany.
-
Bonus Expeditionary Force converges on Washington to demand payment of bonuses promised to war veterans.
-
Congress establishes the Civilian Conservation Corps.
-
Congress passes the Beer-Wine Revenue Act.
-
Congress passes the Emergency Banking Relief Act.
-
Congress creates the Tennessee Valley Authority.
-
Congress establishes the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
-
Congress creates the Civil Works Administration.
-
President Roosevelt creates the Works Progress Administration.
-
Congress passes the Wagner Act.
-
Social Security goes into effect.
-
Panay incident.
-
Hitler forces the Anschluss (union) of Austria and Germany.
-
John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is published.
-
Soviet Union agrees to a nonaggression pact with Germany.
-
German troops invade Poland.
-
Richard Wright’s Native Son is published.
-
Battle of Britain.
-
Germany, Italy, and Japan sign the Tripartite Pact.
-
Japanese launch surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
-
Battle of Midway.
-
Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff meet at Casablanca.
-
Roosevelt and Churchill meet Stalin, in Tehran
-
Roosevelt and Churchill meet Stalin, in Tehran.
-
Allied forces land on Sicily.
-
Congress passes the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill of Rights).
-
Congress passes the Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill of Rights).
-
D-day.
-
Fifty nations at war with the Axis Powers sign the United Nations Charter.
-
Yalta Conference.
-
Franklin Delano Roosevelt dies; Hitler commits suicide.
-
V-E day.
-
Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
-
Japanese surrender.
-
Congress passes the Taft-Hartley Labor Act.
-
National Security Council (NSC) is established.
-
Israel is proclaimed an independent nation.
-
Truman issues an executive order ending segregation in the U.S. armed forces.
-
Allied forces begin airlifting supplies to West Berlin.
-
Truman defeats Dewey in the presidential election.
-
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is created.
-
China “falls” to communism.
-
United States and other UN members go to war in Korea.
-
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is published.
-
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are executed.
-
Armistice is reached in Korea.
-
Supreme Court issues ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
-
Period: to
Army-McCarthy hearings are televised.
-
Geneva Accords adopted.
-
Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott begins.
-
In Suez War, Israel, Britain, and France attack Egypt.
-
Hungarian revolt against the Warsaw Pact is quickly suppressed.
-
Federal troops ordered to protect students attempting to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
-
Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1.
-
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is published.
-
Baby boom peaks.
-
Students in Greensboro, North Carolina, stage a sit-in to demand service at a “whites-only” lunch counter.
-
U-2 incident reveals that the United States is flying spy planes over the Soviet Union.
-
Bay of Pigs fiasco.
-
Soviets erect the Berlin Wall.
-
Cuban missile crisis.
-
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
-
John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
-
Congress passes the Civil Rights Act.
-
Congress passes the Tonkin Gulf resolution.
-
Malcolm X is assassinated by a rival group of black Muslims.
-
Riots break out in the African American community of Watts, California.
-
Viet Cong stages the Tet offensive.
-
Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated.
-
Robert Kennedy is assassinated.
