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Jamestown
On May 14, 1607, a group of roughly 100 members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River. -
Virginia Hosue of Burgesses
The first legislature anywhere in the English colonies in America was in Virginia. This was the House of Burgesses, and it first met on July 30, 1619, at a church in Jamestown. Its first order of business was to set a minimum price for the sale of tobacco. -
Plymouth Rock
The first piece of Plymouth Rock in the collection is 4”x2” and was chipped from the rock in 1830 by a descendant of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony. -
Mayflower compact
The Mayflower Compact, signed by 41 English colonists on the ship Mayflower on November 11, 1620, 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. -
Toleration act
The Toleration Act, it was believed, was a way of providing protection for Catholics while at the same time representing a nod in the direction of the English government, which in 1649 and for a dozen years thereafter was firmly under the control of the English Puritans. -
Bacons Rebellion
In the summer and fall of 1676, Bacon and his supporters rose up and plundered the elite’s estates and slaughtered nearby Indians. Bacon’s Declaration challenged the economic and political privileges of the governor’s circle of favorites, while announcing the principle of the consent of the people. Bacon’s death and the arrival of a British fleet quelled this rebellion, but Virginia’s planters long remembered the spectacle of white and black acting together to challenge authority. -
English Bill of Rights
The Bill of Rights (a short title[1]) is an act of the Parliament of England, whose title is An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown. It is often called the English Bill of Rights. -
Glorious Revolution
English Revolution: the revolution against James II; there was little armed resistance to William and Mary in England although battles were fought in Scotland and Ireland -
Salem witch trials
There were the ordinary stresses of 17th-century life in Massachusetts Bay Colony. A strong belief in the devil, factions among Salem Village fanatics and rivalry with nearby Salem Town, a recent small pox epidemic and the threat of attack by warring tribes created a fertile ground for fear and suspicion. Soon prisons were filled with more than 150 men and women from towns surrounding Salem. Their names had been "cried out" by tormented young girls as the cause of their pain. All would await tri -
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. In the early 1750s, France's expansion into the Ohio River valley repeatedly brought it into conflict with the claims of the British colonies, especially Virginia. During 1754 and 1755, the French defeated in quick succession the young George Washington, Gen. Edward Braddock, and Braddock's su -
Proclomation 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. -
Treaty of paris
The Treaty of Paris, also known as the Treaty of 1763, was signed on 10 February 1763 by the kingdoms of Great Britain, France and Spain, with Portugal in agreement, after Britain's victory over France and Spain during the Seven Years' War. -
Stamp act
The Stamp Act was passed by the British Parliament on March 22, 1765. 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 (10,000 troops were to be stationed on the -
Quartering act
This act passed a law saying that american colonist had to feed and house the soldiers serving in north america. -
Declatory Act
declaration by the British Parliament that accompanied the repeal of the Stamp Act. It stated that the British Parliament’s taxing authority was the same in America as in Great Britain. -
Bosten massacre
The Boston Massacre was the killing of five colonists by British regulars on March 5, 1770. 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. -
Bosten Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, 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
The First Continental Congress was held on September 5, 1774, and lasted until October 26, 1774. It was held because the colonists were very upset about the Intolerable Acts and the taxes. -
2nd Continental Congress
After the Battles of Lexington and Concord, a Second Continental Congress met. Colonists were still thinking about the two battles. The Congress met on May 10, 1776, in the State House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is now called Indepence Hall. This second Congress had a few delegates that hadn't been at The First Continental Congress. Some of those new and returning delegates included Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the new president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock. The -
Decloration 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. What Jefferson -
John peter Zinger
John Peter Zenger, the printer whose prosecution helped establish the principles of press freedom and jury nullification, came to America in his early teens. His father died during the family's voyage to America, and the younger Zenger worked for several years as an indentured servant for printer William Bradford before opening his own print shop in 1726.
