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1770s: Declaration of Independence (1776)
The centrality of the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the developments of the 1770s is self-evident. From the Boston Tea Party to the shot heard round the world, Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware, and the Valley Forge winter, the American Revolution’s pursuit of liberty was made meaningful by the founding document of the great American experiment in democracy. -
1780s: Constitution of the United States of America (1787)
With the war won, independence secured, and the Articles of Confederation proving inadequate, the Founding Fathers laid down the law by which the new country would be governed in the elegantly crafted Constitution, which, depending upon one’s perspective, was meant to either evolve to meet changing circumstances or to be strictly interpreted to adhere to the Founders’ “original intent.” -
1790s: Whiskey Rebellion (1794)
As the new country began finding its feet, U.S. Pres. George Washington sent troops to western Pennsylvania in 1794 to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, an uprising by citizens who refused to pay a liquor tax that had been imposed by Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton to raise money for the national debt and to assert the power of the national government. -
1800s: Louisiana Purchase (1803)
The Louisiana Territory, the huge swath of land (more than 800,000 square miles) that made up the western Mississippi basin, passed from French colonial rule to Spanish colonial rule and then back to the French before U.S. Pres. Thomas Jefferson pried it away from Napoleon in 1803 for a final price of some $27 million. Out of it were carved—in their entirety—the states of Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Oklahoma along with most of Kansas Colorado. -
1810s: Battle of New Orleans (1815)
On January 8, 1815, a ragtag army under the command of Andrew Jackson decisively defeated British forces in the Battle of New Orleans, even though the War of 1812 had actually already ended. News of the Treaty of Ghent (December 24, 1814) had yet to reach the combatants. The American victory made a national figure of future president Jackson and contributed to the widespread perception that the U.S. had won the war,. -
1860s: Battle of Gettysburg
In July 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, in the small Pennsylvania crossroads town of Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee’s invading Army of Northern Virginia sustained a defeat so devastating that it sealed the fate of the Confederacy and its “peculiar institution.” Within two years the war was over, and before the end of the decade the South was temporarily transformed by Reconstruction. -
1870s: Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876)
While the country celebrated its anniversary at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, on June 25, 1876, the 7th Cavalry under the command of Col. George Armstrong Custer was vanquished by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors led by Sitting Bull in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Although it was a major victory for the Northern Plains people against U.S. expansionism, the battle marked the beginning of the end of Native American sovereignty over the West. -
1890s: Plessy v. Ferguson
With the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the enactment of Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation in the South. In its 7–1 decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in May 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court gave constitutional sanction to laws designed to achieve racial segregation by means of separate and supposedly equal public facilities and services for African Americans and whites, thus providing a controlling judicial precedent that would endure until the 1950s. -
1960s: Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)
At the center of the widespread social and political upheaval of the 1960s were the civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, the emergence of youth-oriented counterculture, and the establishment and reactionary elements that pushed back against change. The April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the most prominent civil rights leader, revealed the tragic, violent consequences that could result from a country’s political polarization. -
2000s: September 11 Attacks
Although terrorist attacks had been directed at the United States at the end of the 20th century, a new sense of vulnerability was introduced into American life on September 11, 2001, when Islamist terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the Pennsylvania countryside, resulting in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people.