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Oct 12, 1492
Columbus Lands in the Americas
On October 12, 1492, after a two-month voyage, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Bahamas he called San Salvador—though the people of the island called it Guamanian. From there, Columbus and his men traveled around the Caribbean for five months, taking particular interest in the islands of Juana (now Cuba) and Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti). -
Jamestown
Jamestown or Jamestown Fort, was the first permanent English settlement in the present territory of the United States. It was founded in 1607 on the banks of the James River on a peninsula, in the current county of James City, Virginia.
Pilgrims Land -
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French/ Indian War
American phase of a worldwide nine years’ war (1754–63) fought between France and Great Britain. (The more-complex European phase was the Seven Years’ War [1756–63].) It determined control of the vast colonial territory of North America. -
Lexington and Concord
Battles of Lexington and Concord, (April 19, 1775), initial skirmishes between British regulars and American provincials, marking the beginning of the American Revolution. -
Declaration of Independence
Declaration of Independence, in U.S. history, document that was approved by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, and that announced the separation of 13 North American British colonies from Great Britain. It explained why the Congress on July 2 “unanimously” by the votes of 12 colonies (with New York abstaining) had resolved that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be Free and Independent States.” -
Constitutional Convention
The Philadelphia Convention was held between May 14 and September 17, 1787, to solve the problems of the United States government, which had been operating in accordance with the Articles of Confederation after its independence from Great Britain. -
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Jefferson Presidency
Thomas Jefferson was an American Founding Father who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and later served as the third President of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Previously, he had been elected the second Vice President of the United States, serving under John Adams from 1797 to 1801. -
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase (1803) was a land deal between the United States and France, in which the U.S. acquired approximately 827,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million. -
Missouri compromise
The Missouri Compromise was an effort by Congress to defuse the sectional and
political rivalries triggered by the request of Missouri late in 1819 for admission as a state in which slavery would be permitted. At the time, the United States contained twenty-two states, evenly divided between slave and free. -
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Jackson Presidency
Andrew Jackson was an American soldier and statesman who
served as the seventh President of the United States from 1829 to 1837. Before being elected to the presidency, Jackson gained fame as a general in the United States Army and served in both houses of Congress. -
Indian Removal Act
The Indian Removal Act was signed by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830. The law authorized the president to negotiate with southern Native American tribes for their removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their lands. -
Dred Scott v Sanford
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, also known as the Dred Scott case or Dred Scott decision, was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on U.S. labor law and constitutional law. -
Lincoln Presidency
Abraham Lincoln assumed the presidency at the age of 52. Early in his career, he switched sides to become the first president Republican of the United States. During his presidency he claimed more prerogatives than any other previous president. In 1863, his Proclamation of Emancipation freed the slaves in the southern states, which led directly to the abolition of slavery in the United States. He laid the foundations of modern economics. -
Attack on fort sumter
The Battle of Fort Sumter was a bombing carried out between April 12 and 13, 1861, by the army of the Confederate States of America, with the intention of expelling the federal troops that occupied the fortification of Fort Sumter, located at the entrance to the bay of Charleston in South Carolina. -
Civil War
It was a war fought in the United States from 1861 to 1865. As a result of the historical controversy over slavery, the war broke out in April 1861, when the forces of the Confederate States of America attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, shortly after of President Abraham Lincoln taking office. -
Battle Of Bull Run
Also known as the First Battle of Manassas, it took place on July 21, 1861 and was the first major ground combat of the American Civil War. -
Battle of Shiloh
The major confrontation on the western stage of the American Civil War, held between April 6 and 7, 1862, southwest of Tennessee. The forces of the Confederate states, under the command of generals Albert Sidney Johnston and P. G. T. -
Second Battle of Bull Run
It took place between August 28 and August 30, 1862, during the Northern Virginia Campaign of the American Civil War. It was the culmination of an offensive campaign undertaken by the Northern Virginia Army of Confederate General Robert E. -
Battle of Antietam
The battle of Antietam was the first great armed confrontation of the American civil war that took place in northern territory. The battle took place on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, in Washington County, Maryland, United States, and in the vicinity of the Antietam stream. -
Emancipation Proclamation
When the American Civil War (1861-65) began, President Abraham Lincoln carefully framed the conflict as concerning the preservation of the Union rather than the abolition of slavery. -
Surrender at Appomattox (end of Civil War)
At Appomattox, Virginia, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders his 28,000 troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War.Forced to abandon the Confederate capital of Richmond, blocked from joining the surviving Confederate force in North Carolina, and harassed constantly by Union cavalry, Lee had no other option. -
Lincoln Assassinated
On the evening of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer, assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. Although he initially survived the shooting, the injuries received were of such severity that he died the next day, at 7:22. -
Thirteenth Amendment Ratified
The 13th amendment, which formally abolished slavery in the United States, passed the Senate on April 8, 1864, and the House on January 31, 1865. On February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln approved the Joint Resolution of Congress submitting the proposed amendment to the state legislatures. -
Rise of the Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan was a viciously racist white supremacist organization that first arose in the South after the end of the Civil War. Its members opposed the dismantling of slavery and sought to keep African Americans in a permanent state of subjugation to whites. -
Chinese Exclusion Act
The China Exclusion Act was a federal law of the United States signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, which prohibited all immigration of Chinese workers. -
Sherman Anti-Trust Act
It was the first step by the US federal government to limit monopolies. The act declared the trust illegal, considering it restrictive for international trade. -
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. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for blacks. -
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Spanish American War
The Spanish-American War was an 1898 conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.
Spain’s brutally repressive measures to halt the rebellion were graphically portrayed for the U.S. public by several sensational newspapers, and American sympathy for the Cuban rebels rose. -
T. Roosevelt Presidency
He expanded the powers of the presidency and of the federal government in support of the public interest in conflicts between big business and labor and steered the nation toward an active role in world politics, particularly in Europe and Asia. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1906 for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), and he secured the route and began construction of the Panama Canal (1904–14). -
Panic of 1907
Also known as the bread of the bankers of 1907, it was a financial crisis that took place in the United States when the New York Stock Exchange fell about 51% of its peak the previous year. -
Wilson Presidency
Woodrow Wilson, a leader of the Progressive Movement, was the 28th President of the United States (1913-1921). After a policy of neutrality at the outbreak of World War I, Wilson led America into war in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” -
WW1 Begins
Convinced that Austria-Hungary was readying for war, the Serbian government ordered the Serbian army to mobilize, and appealed to Russia for assistance. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers quickly collapsed.
Within a week, Russia, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Serbia had lined up against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and World War I had begun. -
Panama Canal
Following the deliberations of the U.S. Isthmian Canal Commission and a push from President Theodore Roosevelt, the U.S. purchased the French assets in the canal zone for $40 million in 1902. When a proposed treaty over rights to build in what was then a Colombian territory was rejected, the U.S. threw its military weight behind a Panamanian independence movement, eventually negotiating a deal with the new government in 1903 that gave them rights in perpetuity to the canal zone. -
Wilson’s 14 points
The Fourteen Points were a series of proposals made by the American President Woodrow Wilson to create new moral objectives defensible morally for the Triple Entente, which could serve as a basis for peace negotiations with the Central Empires. -
WW1 Ends
Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among its diverse population, reached an armistice on November 4. Facing dwindling resources on the battlefield, discontent on the home front and the surrender of its allies, Germany was finally forced to seek an armistice on November 11, 1918, ending World War I. -
Eighteenth Amendment
The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, together with the Volstead Act that defined the concept of "intoxicating liquor" in the United States, established the dry law in the country. It was ratified in January 1919. -
Treaty of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles became a peace treaty that was signed in the city of Versailles in the end of the First World War and more than fifty countries. The first World War. -
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in some ways ushered in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. -
Prohibition
The ratification of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution–which banned the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors–ushered in a period in American history known as Prohibition. -
Nineteenth Amendment
The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote, a right known as women's suffrage, and was ratified on August 18, 1920, ending almost a century of protest. -
Gitlow V. New York
Gitlow v. New York, case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 8, 1925, that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protection of free speech, which states that the federal “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech,” applied also to state governments. -
Scopes Trial
Highly publicized trial (known as the “Monkey Trial”) of a Dayton, Tennessee, high-school teacher, John T. Scopes, charged with violating state law by teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. -
Wall Street Crash of 1929
It was the most devastating fall in the stock market in the history of the stock market in the United States, taking into account the global reach and the long duration of its aftermath and that led to the 1929 Crisis also known as The Great Depression. -
Roosevelt 1st Election
In the 1932 presidential election, Roosevelt defeated Republican President Herbert Hoover in a landslide. Roosevelt took office while the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in the country's history. During the first 100 days of the 73rd United States Congress, Roosevelt spearheaded unprecedented federal legislation and issued a profusion of executive orders that instituted the New Deal. -
CCC
President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, with an executive order on April 5, 1933. The CCC was part of his New Deal legislation, combating high unemployment during the Great Depression by putting hundreds of thousands of young men to work on environmental conservation projects. -
Social Security Act
On August 14, 1935, the Social Security Act established a system of old-age benefits for workers, benefits for victims of industrial accidents, unemployment insurance, aid for dependent mothers and children, the blind, and the physically handicapped. -
FDR Court Packing Scandal
The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 was a legislative initiative proposed by the President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt to add more judges to the Supreme Court of the United States. -
Black Monday
In finance, it is called black Monday to Monday, October 19, 1987, when stock markets around the world collapsed in a very short time interval. The fall began in Hong Kong, spread westward through international time zones, reached Europe and, finally, the United States.
