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Oct 12, 1492
Columbus discovers America
Sailing on The Nina The Pinta The Santa Maria, Columbus makes first land fall on this date -
Jan 1, 1497
Cabot explores America
Employed by King Henry VII, Cabot explored north america for the british. -
Period: Aug 10, 1519 to Sep 6, 1522
Magellan circumnavigates the world
King Charles approved Magellan's plan and granted him generous funds on March 22, 1518. With money from the king, the explorer was able to obtain five ships (possibly naos) called the Trinidad, the San Antonio, the Concepcion, the Victoria, and the Santiago. In September 1519, he set sail with 270 men. -
Jamestown was founded
In June of 1606, King James I granted a charter to a group of London entrepreneurs, the Virginia Company, to establish a satellite English settlement in the Chesapeake region of North America. By December, 104 settlers sailed from London instructed to settle Virginia, find gold, and seek a water route to the Orient. -
First African workers come to Virginia
20 or so Africans that were stolen off a Spanish ship by the Dutch and then traded for food. It is unclear as to whether the 20 Africans were considered slaves or indentured servants but either way they were forced to work without pay. -
Bacons rebellion July 30, 1676
Bacon attracted a large following who, like him, wanted to kill or drive out every Indian in Virginia. Bacon's Rebellion demonstrated that poor whites and poor blacks could be united in a cause. This was a great fear of the ruling class -- what would prevent the poor from uniting to fight them? This fear hastened the transition to racial slavery. -
Slavery importation increased
Rice cultivation is introduced into Carolina. Slave importation increases dramatically. -
Boston massacre
The Boston Massacre was the killing of five colonists by British regulars. As a result of the trial, six soldiers were acquitted on the grounds of self-defense, but two were found guilty of murder because of the overpowering proof that they fired into the crowd. -
Boston tea party December 16, 1773
In 1773, Britain's East India Company was sitting on large stocks of tea that it could not sell in England. It was on the verge of bankruptcy. In an effort to save it, the government passed the Tea Act of 1773, which gave the company the right to export its merchandise directly to the colonies without paying any of the regular taxes that were imposed on the colonial merchants, who had traditionally served as the middlemen in such transaction. In response colonists boarded the ships and dumped t -
Lexington and concord
The first shots starting the revolution were fired at Lexington, Massachusetts. Ready to fight at a moment's notice, minutemen began fighting early in the American Revolution. Their efforts at Lexington and Concord inspired many patriots to take up arms against Britain -
Declaration of independence
The colonists declared independence from England. It was drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776. But even after the initial battles in the Revolutionary War broke out, few colonists desired complete independence from Great Britain, and those who did--like John Adams-- were considered radical -
Cornwallis surrenders and colonies win war
Oct 19, 1781: British General Charles Cornwallis formally surrenders 8,000 British soldiers and seamen to a French and American force at Yorktown, Virginia, bringing the American Revolution to a close. -
Shays rebellion
The farmers in western Massachusetts organized their resistance in ways similar to the American Revolutionary struggle. They called special meetings of the people to protest conditions and agree on a coordinated protest. This led the rebels to close courts by force in the fall of 1786 and to liberate imprisoned debtors from jail. Soon events flared into a full-scale revolt when the resistors came under the leadership of Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army -
Constitution is ratified and accepted
Beginning on December 7, five states--Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut--ratified it in quick succession. However, other states, especially Massachusetts, opposed the document, as it failed to reserve non-delegated powers to the states and lacked constitutional protection of basic political rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press. In February 1788, a compromise was reached under which Massachusetts and other states would agree to ratify the document -
Washington becomes president
On April 30, 1789, George Washington, standing on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York, took his oath of office as the first President of the United States. "As the first of every thing, in our situation will serve to establish a Precedent," he wrote James Madison, "it is devoutly wished on my part, that these precedents may be fixed on true principles." -
Bill of rights ratified
On September 25, 1789, the First Congress of the United States therefore proposed to the state legislatures 12 amendments to the Constitution that met arguments most frequently advanced against it. The first two proposed amendments, which concerned the number of constituents for each Representative and the compensation of Congressmen, were not ratified. Articles 3 to 12, however, ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, constitute the first 10 amendments of the Constitution, known as -
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Rise of consumerism
International trade expanded, the American economy grew, and some became affluent. -
Capital moves to Washington DC
The United States Capital officially moved from New York City to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The capital remained in Philadelphia until 1800 when it permanently settled in Washington, D.C. -
Lewis and Clark expedition
On February 28, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson won approval from Congress for a visionary project, an endeavor that would become one of America’s greatest stories of adventure. This expedition returned in 1806 -
Louisiana perchance
In this transaction with France, the United States purchased 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million. For roughly 4 cents an acre, the United States doubled its size, expanding the nation westward. -
Slave importation banned
As 1808 approached, the issue of the slave trade once again appeared in Congress for consideration. In December 1805, a bill was introduced to the Senate prohibiting the importation of slaves to take effect in 1808, however, in April it was decided to postpone discussion of the issue until a later date. -
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Seminal wars
The United States Army invaded Spanish Florida and fought against the Seminole and their African American allies. Collectively, these battles came to be known as the First Seminole War. -
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Manifest destiny
Expansion westward seemed perfectly natural to many Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Like the Massachusetts Puritans who hoped to build a "city upon a hill, "courageous pioneers believed that America had a divine obligation to stretch the boundaries of their noble republic to the Pacific Ocean. At the heart of manifest destiny was the pervasive belief in American cultural and racial superiority. Native Americans had long been perceived as inferior, and efforts to "civilize" them had been -
Missouri compromise
The issue was resolved by a two-part compromise. First, Missouri gained admission to the Union as a slave state, with a provision that portions of the Louisiana Territory lying north of 36' 30' north latitude would be free. (This limitation was later overturned by the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and by the 1857 Dred Scott case, 19 How. 393 ) Second, Maine was simultaneously admitted to statehood, which enabled the Senate to maintain the balance between slave and free state representation -- twelve -
Spoils system
The term "spoils system" was used by Jackson's opponents to describe Jackson's policy of removing political opponents from federal offices and replacing them with party loyalists. Jackson's predecessors had removed federal officeholders on a limited scale, but not nearly as extensively as did President Jackson starting in 1829. To Jackson (and all presidents that followed him), partisan loyalty was a more important job-qualification than competence or merit. A merit-based civil service system wo -
Jackson elected president
More nearly than any of his predecessors, Andrew Jackson was elected by popular vote; as President he sought to act as the direct representative of the common man. -
Book of Mormons
The Book of Mormon is a sacred text of the Latter Day Saint movement that adherents believe contains writings of ancient prophets who lived on the American continent from approximately 2200 BC to AD 421. It was first published in March 1830 by Joseph Smith as The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi -
B and o railroad
Completed by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1830, Ellicott City Station in Historic Ellicott City, is the oldest surviving railroad station in America and the site of the original terminus of the first 13 miles of commercial track ever constructed in America. -
Nat turner slave rebellion
Turner and six of his men met in the woods to eat a dinner and make their plans. At 2:00 that morning, they set out to the Travis household, where they killed the entire family as they lay sleeping. They continued on, from house to house, killing all of the white people they encountered. Turner's force eventually consisted of more than 40 slaves, most on horseback. In the end, the rebels had stabbed, shot and clubbed at least 55 white people to death.In total, the state executed 55 people, banis -
Trail of tears
In 1838 and 1839, 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. The migrants faced hunger, disease, and exhaustion on the forced march. Over 4,000 out of 15,000 of the Cherokees died -
Morse sends first telegraph
Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse (1791-1872) and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. In 1844, Morse sent his first telegraph message, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland; by 1866, a telegraph line had been laid across the Atlantic Ocean from the U.S. to Europe. -
Erie canal constructed
The Erie Canal is famous in song and story. Proposed in 1808 and completed in 1825, the canal links the waters of Lake Erie in the west to the Hudson River in the east. An engineering marvel when it was built, some called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. -
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Underground railroad
interesting videoThe Underground Railroad, a vast network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to the North and to Canada, was not run by any single organization or person. Rather, it consisted of many individuals -- many whites but predominently black -- who knew only of the local efforts to aid fugitives and not of the overall operation. According to one estimate, the South lost 100,000 slaves between 1810 and 1850. -
Hawthorn’s Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter is an 1850 romantic work of fiction in a historical setting, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is considered to be his magnum opus. Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an adulterous affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. The Scarlet Letter has been adapted to numerous films, plays and operas and remains frequently referenced in modern popular cult -
Moby dick
Moby-Dick was published in 1851 during a productive time in American literature, which also saw the appearance of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Moby-Dick has been classified as American Romanticism. It was first published by Richard Bentley in London on October 18, 1851, in an expurgated three-volume edition titled The Whale. -
Uncle Toms Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin was initially released in serial format in the National Era, a weekly newspaper, from June 5, 1851-April 1, 1852. As a young wife and mother living in Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe met former and fugitive enslaved people. Cincinnati, then the western frontier of the United States, was an ethnically and culturally vibrant city. On the Ohio River across from Kentucky, a slave state, the city exposed Stowe to the public face of slavery. -
Bleeding Kansas
Nebraska was so far north that its future as a free state was never in question. But Kansas was next to the slave state of Missouri. In an era that would come to be known as "Bleeding Kansas," the territory would become a battleground over the slavery question. -
Lincoln is elected
By the time of Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded, and the Confederate States of America had been formally established, with Jefferson Davis as its elected president. -
Salem witch trials
The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft—the Devil's magic—and 20 were executed. -
Emancipation Proclamation
After the Union's victory at Antietam, Lincoln issued a preliminary decree stating that, unless the rebellious states returned to the Union by January 1, freedom would be granted to slaves within those states. The decree also left room for a plan of compensated emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves in the United States. Rather, it declared free only those slaves living in states not under Union control. -
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Reconstruction
The Union victory in the Civil War in 1865 may have given some 4 million slaves their freedom, but the process of rebuilding the South during the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) introduced a new set of significant challenges. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces–including the Ku Klux Klan–would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South. -
Battle of Gettysburg
Confederate forces converged on the town from west and north, driving Union defenders back through the streets to Cemetery Hill. During the night, reinforcements arrived for both sides. Gen. Robert E. Lee concentrated his full strength against Maj. Gen. George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac at the crossroads county seat of Gettysburg. -
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Jim Crow Laws
Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. A Black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a White male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a Black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a White woman, because he risked being accused of rape. -
Lee Surrenders to Grant
After four years of Civil War, approximately 630,000 deaths and over 1 million casualties, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, at the home The terms agreed to by General Lee and Grant and accepted by the Federal Government would become the model used for all the other surrenders which shortly followed. The surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia allowed the Federal Government to redistribute forces and bring incre -
Lincoln Assassinated
John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War. The search for John Wilkes Booth was one of the largest manhunts in history, with 10,000 federal troops, detectives and police tracking down the assassin.
