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Jan 1, 1215
Magna Carta
The Magna Carta was written to curb the king and make him govern by the old english laws. It demonstrated that the power of the king could be limited by a written grant. -
Jamestown Settled
Jamestown was the first successful English settlement on the mainland of North America. The Virginia Company explorers from Great Britain landed on Jamestown island to establish the Virgina English Colony on the banks of the James river. -
Mayflower Compact
The Mayflower Compact, signed by 41 English colonists on the ship Mayflower 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. -
Petition of Rights
The Petition of Right is a major English constitutional document that sets out specific liberties of the subject that the king is prohibited from infringing. The Petition contains restrictions on non-Parliamentary taxation, forced billeting of soldiers, imprisonment without cause, and restricts the use of martial law. -
English Bill of Rights
The English Bill of Rights limited the power of the English sovereign, and was written as an act of Parliament. The Bill of Rights asserted that Englishmen had certain inalienable civil and political rights. -
Albany Plan of Union
The Albany Plan of Union was a plan to place the British North American colonie sunder a more centralized government. It was the first important plan to concieve of the colonies as a collective whole united under one government. -
Stamp Act
The Stamp Act was passed by the British Parliament. The new tax was imposed on all American colonists and required them to pay a tax on every piece of printed paper they used. -
Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre was a street fight between a patriot mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks, and a squad of British soldiers. The riot began when about 50 citizens attacked a British sentinel. -
Boston Tea Party
A group of Massachusetts Patriots protesting the monopoly on American tea. They seized 342 chests of tea into the harbor. -
First Continental Congress
Representatives from each of the 13 colonies except Georgia met in Philadelphia in reaction to the Coercive Acts in response of new taxes. -
Intolerable Acts
The Intolerable Acts were laws that were punishments that King George III put on the colonies. He did this to the Colonists because he wanted to punish them for dumping tea into the harbor at the Boston Tea Party. -
Second Continental Congress
The Second Continental Congress was the formal means by which the American colonial governments coordinated their resistance to British rule during the first two years of the American Revolution. The Congress balanced the interests of the different colonies and also established itself as the official colonial liaison with Great Britain. -
American Revolution
The American Revolution was a political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America. -
Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Continental Congress which announced that the 13 American colonies, then at war with Great Britain, regarded themselves as independent states, and no longer a part of the British Empire. -
Articles of Confederation
The Articles of Confederation established functions of the national government of the United States after it declared independence from Great Britain. It established a weak central government that mostly prevented the individual states from conducting their own foreign diplomacy. -
Shay's Rebellion
Shays' Rebellion was an armed uprising that took place in central and western Massachusetts. It was precipitated by several factors: financial difficulties brought about by a post-war economic depression, a credit squeeze caused by a lack of hard currency, and fiscally harsh government policies instituted in 1785 to solve the state's debt problems. -
Philadelphia Convention
The Philadelphis Convention was a meeting to discuss the governments problem United States of America had after having independence from Great Britain. -
Connecticut Compromise
The Connecticut Compromise was an agreement that large and small states reached during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that in part defined the legislative structure and representation that each state would have under the United States Constitution. -
Constitution Convention
The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia met between May and June of 1787 to address the problems of the weak central government that existed under the Articles of Confederation. The United States Constitution that emerged from the convention established a federal government with more specific powers, including those related to conducting relations with foreign governments.
