-
Oregon Dispute
The Oregon boundary dispute or the Oregon Question was a 19th-century territorial dispute over the political division of the Pacific Northwest of North America between several nations that had competing territorial and commercial aspirations over the region. -
Manifest Destiny
Manifest destiny was a widely held cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America. -
Annexation of Texas
The Texas annexation was the 1845 annexation of the Republic of Texas into the United States of America. Texas was admitted to the Union as the 28th state on December 29, 1845. Through secret negotiations with the Houston administration, Tyler secured a treaty of annexation in April 1844. -
Wilmot Proviso
The Wilmot Proviso was an unsuccessful 1846 proposal in the United States Congress to ban slavery in territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican–American War. The conflict over the Wilmot Proviso was one of the major events leading to the American Civil War. -
Oregon Territory Treaty
The United States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Oregon on June 15, 1846, ending 28 years of joint occupancy of the Pacific Northwest. The treaty established the 49th parallel as the border between the two countries. -
Mormon trek ends
The end of the Mormon Pioneer Trail is generally considered to be at the mouth of Emigration Canyon, where This is the Place Monument is located. This is where the pioneers were first able to survey the valley which would be their new home. However, the advance party did not stop to camp at that site. They continued along the south side of Emigration Creek in a southwestern direction, and camped for the first time in the Salt Lake Valley on July 22. -
Seneca Falls Convention
The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women's rights convention in the United States. Held in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, the meeting launched the women's suffrage movement, which more than seven decades later ensured women the right to vote. -
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,
This treaty, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the war between the United States and Mexico. Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including parts of present-day Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, to the United States. -
California Gold Rush
The California Gold Rush was a gold rush that began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. -
Compromise of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850 that defused a political confrontation between slave and free states on the status of territories acquired in the Mexican–American War. -
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S. and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War". -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
It became law on May 30, 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, created two new territories, and allowed for popular sovereignty. It also produced a violent uprising known as “Bleeding Kansas,” as proslavery and antislavery activists flooded into the territories to sway the vote. -
Bleeding Kansas
Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War was a series of violent civil confrontations in Kansas Territory, and to a lesser extent in western Missouri, between 1854 and 1859. It emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas. -
Sumner—Brooks Affair
The Beating of Charles Sumner, or the Brooks–Sumner Affair, occurred on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate chamber, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, used a walking cane to attack Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts. -
Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott was an enslaved African-American man in the United States who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom and that of his wife, Harriet Robinson Scott, and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v.Sandford case of 1857,Scott claimed that he and his wife should be granted their freedom because they had lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years, where slavery was illegal and their laws said that slaveholders gave up their rights to slaves if they stayed for an extended period. -
John Brown’s Raid in Harper’s Ferry
Abolitionist John Brown leads a small group on a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to start an armed revolt of enslaved people and destroy the institution of slavery. One of Brown's sons was killed in the fighting. -
Lincoln elected
Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln won the president's nomination of 1860. -
South Carolina secedes
South Carolina became the first state to secede from the federal Union on December 20, 1860. The secession of South Carolina precipitated the outbreak of the American Civil War in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. -
Crittenden Compromise
The Crittenden Compromise was an unsuccessful proposal to permanently enshrine slavery in the United States Constitution, and thereby make it unconstitutional for future congresses to end slavery. It was introduced by United States Senator John J. Crittenden (Constitutional Unionist of Kentucky) on December 18, 1860. -
Fort Sumter
When President Abraham Lincoln announced plans to resupply the fort, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard bombarded Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, kicking off the Battle of Fort Sumter. After a 34-hour exchange of artillery fire, Anderson and 86 soldiers surrendered the fort on April 13 -
Homestead Act
The Homestead Act, enacted during the Civil War in 1862, provided that any adult citizen, or intended citizen, who had never borne arms against the U.S. government could claim 160 acres of surveyed government land. Claimants were required to “improve” the plot by building a dwelling and cultivating the land. -
Emancipation Proclamation
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." -
Copperheads
In the 1860s, the Copperheads, also known as Peace Democrats, were a faction of Democrats in the Union who opposed the American Civil War and wanted an immediate peace settlement with the Confederates. -
Battle of Vicksburg
The Siege of Vicksburg (May 18, 1863-July 4, 1863) was a decisive Union victory during the American Civil War that divided the confederacy and cemented the reputation of Union General Ulysses S. Grant. -
Battle of Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, by Union and Confederate forces during the American Civil War. -
Sherman’s March to the Sea
The purpose of Sherman's March to the Sea was to frighten Georgia's civilian population into abandoning the Confederate cause. Sherman's soldiers did not destroy any of the towns in their path, but they stole food and livestock and burned the houses and barns of people who tried to fight back. -
Transcontinental Railroad Act
The Pacific Railway Act, which became law on July 1, 1862, offered government incentives to assist “men of talent, men of character, men who are willing to invest” in developing the nation's first transcontinental rail line. -
Indian Massacre at Sand Creek
On November 29, 1864, roughly 700 federal troops attacked a village of 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho on Sand Creek in Colorado. An unprovoked attack on men, women, and children, the massacre at Sand Creek marked a turning point in the relationship between American Indian tribes and the Federal Government. -
Colorado
On November 29, 1864, roughly 700 federal troops attacked a village of 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho on Sand Creek in Colorado. An unprovoked attack on men, women, and children, the massacre at Sand Creek marked a turning point in the relationship between American Indian tribes and the Federal Government. -
Freedmen’s Bureau
The Freedmen's Bureau, formally known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was established in 1865 by Congress to help millions of former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. -
Black Codes
Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War. -
Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse
In Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrenders his 28,000 Confederate troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. -
Reconstruction Acts (military)
The Reconstruction Acts, or Military Reconstruction Acts, were four statutes passed during the Reconstruction Era by the 40th United States Congress addressing requirement for Southern States to be readmitted to the Union. -
Andrew Johnson Impeached
Johnson became the first American president to be impeached on March 2–3, 1868, when the House formally adopted the articles of impeachment and forwarded them to the United States Senate for adjudication. The trial in the Senate began three days later, with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding. -
Knights of Labor Founded
Knights of Labor, officially Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, was an American labor federation active in the late 19th century, especially the 1880s. It operated in the United States as well in Canada, and had chapters also in Great Britain and Australia. Its most important leader was Terence V. Powderly. -
Standard Oil Founded
Standard Oil Company was incorporated in Ohio in 1870, but the company's origins date to 1863, when John D. Rockefeller joined Maurice B. Clark and Samuel Andrews in a Cleveland, Ohio, oil-refining business. -
Tweed Ring Exposed
Tweed was convicted for stealing an amount estimated by an aldermen's committee in 1877 at between $25 million and $45 million from New York City taxpayers from political corruption, but later estimates ranged as high as $200 million. Unable to make bail, he escaped from jail once but was returned to custody. -
Ku Klux Klan Act
Also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, Third Enforcement Act, Third Ku Klux Klan Act, Civil Rights Act of 1871, or Force Act of 1871, is an Act of the United States Congress which empowered the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white supremacy organizations. -
Credit Mobilier Exposed
Crédit Mobilier Scandal, in U.S. history, illegal manipulation of contracts by a construction and finance company associated with the building of the Union Pacific Railroad (1865–69); the incident established Crédit Mobilier of America as a symbol of post-Civil War corruption. -
Rutherford B. Hayes Elected
Hayes left Congress to run for governor of Ohio and was elected to two consecutive terms, from 1868 to 1872. He served half of a third two-year term from 1876 to 1877 before being sworn in as President. In 1876, the Electoral College made Hayes president in one of the most contentious elections in U.S. history. -
Battle of Little Big Horn
On June 25, 1876, Native American forces led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeat the U.S. Army troops of General George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn near southern Montana's Little Bighorn River. At mid-day, Custer's 600 men entered the Little Bighorn Valley. -
Bland—Allison Act
Its first significant success was the enactment of the Bland-Allison Act in 1878, which restored the silver dollar as legal tender and required the U.S. Treasury to purchase each month between $2,000,000 and $4,000,000 worth of silver and coin it into dollars. -
Tuskegee Institute (Booker T. Washington)
In 1881 Washington was selected to head a newly established normal school for African Americans at Tuskegee, an institution with two small converted buildings, no equipment, and very little money. Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute became a monument to his life's work. -
Chinese Exclusion Act
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers. -
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism refers to various theories that emerged in Western Europe and North America in the 1870s that applied biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics, and politics. -
American Federation of Labor
The founding of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) by several unions of skilled workers in 1886 marked the beginning of a continuous large-scale labour movement in the United States. Its member groups comprised national trade or craft unions that organized local unions and negotiated wages, hours, and working -
Dawes Severalty Act
Dawes General Allotment Act, also called Dawes Severalty Act, (February 8, 1887), U.S. law providing for the distribution of Indian reservation land among individual Native Americans, with the aim of creating responsible farmers in the white man's image. It was sponsored in several sessions of Congress by Sen. -
Hull House (Jane Addams)
In 1889, Addams and Starr founded Hull House in Chicago's poor, industrial west side, the first settlement house in the United States. The goal was for educated women to share all kinds of knowledge, from basic skills to arts and literature with poorer people in the neighborhood. -
How the Other Half Lives (Jacob Riis)
How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) is an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. -
Sherman Anti-Trust Act,
Approved July 2, 1890, The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was the first Federal act that outlawed monopolistic business practices. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was the first measure passed by the U.S. Congress to prohibit trusts. Several states had passed similar laws, but they were limited to intrastate businesses. -
Battle of Wounded Knee
The Wounded Knee Massacre, also known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, was a massacre of nearly three hundred Lakota people by soldiers of the United States Army. -
Populist Party Organized
A social movement that turned political with Farmers' Alliances. A revolt by farmers in the South and Midwest against the Democratic and Republican Parties for ignoring their interests and difficulties. -
Homestead Steel Strike
The Homestead strike, also known as the Homestead steel strike, Homestead massacre, or Battle of Homestead was an industrial lockout and strike which began on July 1, 1892, culminating in a battle between strikers and private security agents on July 6, 1892. The battle was a pivotal event in U.S. labor history. -
Pullman Strike
Pullman Strike, (May 11, 1894-July 20, 1894), in U.S. history, widespread railroad strike and boycott that severely disrupted rail traffic in the Midwest of the United States in June–July 1894. The federal government's response to the unrest marked the first time that an injunction was used to break a strike. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. As a result, restrictive Jim Crow legislation and separate public accommodations based on race became commonplace. -
Yellow Journalism
Yellow journalism and the yellow press are American terms for journalism and associated newspapers that present little or no legitimate, well-researched news while instead using eye-catching headlines for increased sales. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. -
Teller Amendment
The Teller Amendment was an amendment to a joint resolution of the United States Congress, enacted on April 20, 1898, in reply to President William McKinley's War Message. It placed a condition on the United States military's presence in Cuba. -
Spanish American War
The Spanish–American War was an armed conflict between Spain and the United States in 1898. Hostilities began in the aftermath of the internal explosion of USS Maine in Havana Harbor in Cuba, leading to U.S. intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. -
Open Door Policy in China
The Open Door Policy is a term in foreign affairs initially used to refer to the policy established in the late 19th century and the early 20th century that would allow for a system of trade in China open to all countries equally. -
Big Stick Diplomacy
Big stick ideology, big stick diplomacy, or big stick policy refers to President Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy: "speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." -
Platt Amendment
On March 2, 1901, the Platt Amendment was passed as part of the 1901 Army Appropriations Bill. It stipulated seven conditions for the withdrawal of United States troops remaining in Cuba at the end of the Spanish–American War, and an eighth condition that Cuba sign a treaty accepting these seven conditions. -
Theodore Roosevelt becomes president
The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt started on September 14, 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th President of the United States upon the assassination of President William McKinley, and ended on March 4, 1909. -
Ford Motor Company Founded
The Ford Motor Company, commonly known as Ford, is an American multinational automaker that has its main headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. It was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. -
Roosevelt Corollary to Monroe Doctrine
The Roosevelt Corollary of December 1904 stated that the United States would intervene as a last resort to ensure that other nations in the Western Hemisphere fulfilled their obligations to international creditors, and did not violate the rights of the United States or invite “foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.” -
Niagara Movement (W.E.B. Du Bois)
The Niagara Movement was organized to oppose racial segregation and disenfranchisement. It opposed what its members believed were policies of accommodation and conciliation promoted by African-American leaders such as Booker T. Washington. -
Pure Food and Drug Act
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 prohibited the sale of misbranded or adulterated food and drugs in interstate commerce and laid a foundation for the nation's first consumer protection agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). -
Meat Inspection Act
The Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 (FMIA) is an American law that makes it illegal to adulterate or misbrand meat and meat products being sold as food, and ensures that meat and meat products are slaughtered and processed under strictly regulated sanitary conditions. -
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
The Jungle is a 1906 novel by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair. The novel portrays the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities. -
NAACP formed
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey and Ida B. Wells. -
Dollar Diplomacy
Dollar Diplomacy, foreign policy created by U.S. Pres. William Howard Taft and his secretary of state, Philander C. Knox, to ensure the financial stability of a region while protecting and extending U.S. commercial and financial interests there. -
Bull Moose Party Formed
The Progressive Party (often referred to as the "Bull Moose Party") was a third party in the United States formed in 1912 by former president Theodore Roosevelt after he lost the presidential nomination of the Republican Party to his former protégé and conservative rival, incumbent president William Howard Taft. -
Clayton Anti-Trust Act
The Clayton Antitrust Act is a piece of legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in 1914. The act defines unethical business practices, such as price-fixing and monopolies, and upholds various rights of labor. -
Birth of a Nation by. D.W. Griffith
The Birth of a Nation is three hours of racist propaganda — starting with the Civil War and ending with the Ku Klux Klan riding in to save the South from black rule during the Reconstruction era. -
U.S. Neutrality Proclaimed
On April 22, 1793, President George Washington issued a Neutrality Proclamation to define the policy of the United States in response to the spreading war in Europe. -
Sussex Pledge
The Sussex Pledge was a promise made by Germany to the United States in 1916, during World War I before the latter entered the war. Early in 1915, Germany had instituted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, allowing armed merchant ships but not passenger ships to be torpedoed without warning. -
Keating-Owen Act
The Keating–Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 also known as Wick's Bill, was a short-lived statute enacted by the U.S. Congress that sought to address child labor by prohibiting the sale in interstate commerce of goods produced by factories that employed children under fourteen, mines that employed children younger than sixteen, and any facility where children under fourteen worked after 7:00 p.m. or before 6:00 a.m. or more than eight hours daily. -
Bolshevik Revolution
The United States responded to the Russian Revolution of 1917 by participating in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War with the Allies of World War I in support of the White movement. Before American forces withdrew from Archangel on June 7, 1919, 222 soldiers of its 5,000 man force were killed. -
US Declares war on Germany
On December 11, 1941, the United States Congress declared war upon Germany, hours after Germany declared war on the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan. The vote was 88–0 in the Senate and 393–0 in the House. -
Worldwide Influenza Epidemic
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide—about one-third of the planet's population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans. -
Wilson’s Fourteen Points
The Fourteen Points was a statement of principles for peace that was to be used for peace negotiations in order to end World War I. The principles were outlined in a January 8, 1918, speech on war aims and peace terms to the United States Congress by President Woodrow Wilson. -
League of Nations debated in US
The debate over U.S. entry into the League of Nations included foreign policy issues, such as collective security versus national sovereignty, idealism versus pragmatism, the responsibilities of powerful nations, the use of force to accomplish idealistic goals, and the idea of America.