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Jun 15, 1215
Magna Carta
The Magna Carta document is adopted in England, guaranteeing liberties to the English people, and proclaiming basic rights and procedures which later become the foundation stone of modern democracy.SIgned by King John -
Jamestown Settled
Jamestown is founded in Virginia by the colonists of the London Company. By the end of the year, starvation and disease reduce the original 105 settlers to just 32 survivors. Capt. John Smith is captured by Native American Chief Powhatan and saved from death by the chief's daughter, Pocahontas. private company -
Mayflower Compact
101 colonist land in Massachusetts. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the 41 men, establishing a form of local government in which the colonists agree to abide by majority rule and to cooperate for the general good of the colony. The Compact sets the precedent for other colonies as they set up governments. -
Petition of Right
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 -
English Bill of Rights
A British Law, passed by the Parliament of Great Britain in 1689 that declared the rights and liberties of the people. It had a massive influence on the colonies in North America and the Constitution of the United States. -
Albany Plan of Union
A plan to create a unified government for the Thirteen Colonies, suggested by Benjamin Franklin, then a senior leader and a delegate from Pennsylvania, at the Albany Congress on in Albany, New York. -
Stamp Act
The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first internal tax levied directly on American colonists by the British government. The act, which imposed a tax on all paper documents in the colonies, came at a time when the British Empire was deep in debt from the Seven Years’ War and looking to its North American colonies as a revenue source. -
Boston 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 Townsend Acts. -
Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party was a political protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, on December 16, 1773. A group of colonist The demonstrators, some disguised as Native Americans, in defiance of the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company. -
Intolerable Acts
The Intolerable Acts were the series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea party. They were meant to punish the Massachusetts colonists for their defiance in throwing a large tea shipment into Boston harbor. -
First Continental Congress
The First Continental Congress was a meeting of delegates from twelve of the Thirteen Colonies that met on September 5 to October 26, 1774 at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, early in the American Revolution. -
American Revolution Begins
The American Revolution (1775-83) is also known as the American Revolutionary War and the U.S. War of Independence. The conflict arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain’s 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crownAmericna -
Second Continental Congress
The Second Continental Congress was a convention of delegates from the Thirteen Colonies that started meeting in the summer of 1775, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that, soon after warfare, declared the American Revolutionary War had begun. -
Declaration Of Independence
Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence is a document from the colonies to England requesting to be a free country. -
Articles of Confederation
The original constitution of the US, ratified in 1781, which was replaced by the US Constitution in 1789. -
Shay's Rebellion
Shays' Rebellion is the name given to a series of protests in 1786 and 1787 by American farmers against state and local enforcement of tax collections and judgments for debt. -
Constitution Convention
at the Annapolis Convention, delegates from five states called for a Constitutional Convention in order to discuss possible improvements to the Articles of Confederation. The Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia. -
Connecticut Compromise
It 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. -
Philadelphia Convention
It took place from May 25 to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although the Convention was intended to revise the Articles of Confederation, the intention from the outset of many of its proponents, chief among them James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, was to create a new government rather than fix the existing one.
