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The Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the Second Continental Congress, states the reasons the British colonies of North America sought independence in July of 1776. -
Louisiana Purchase
The United States purchased approximately 828,000,000 square miles of territory from France, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. What was known as Louisiana Territory stretched from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Canadian border in the north. 15 states were eventually created from the land deal, which is considered one of the most important achievements of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency -
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War of 1812
In the War of 1812, the United States took on the greatest naval power in the world, Great Britain, in a conflict that would have a huge impact on the young country’s future. Causes of the war included British attempts to restrict U.S. trade, the Royal Navy’s impressment of American seamen and America’s desire to expand its territory. The ratification of the Treaty of Ghent ended the war. The U.S. celebrated the War of 1812 as a “second war of independence,” beginning an era of national pride. -
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Mexican/American War
The Mexican-American War marked the first U.S. armed conflict chiefly fought on foreign soil. It pitted a politically divided and militarily unprepared Mexico against the expansionist-minded administration of U.S. President James K. Polk, who believed the United States had a “manifest destiny” to spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Mexico had lost about one-third of its territory, including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. -
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Spanish-American War
The Spanish-American War was a 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. -
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WWI
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28th, 1914, triggered a chain of events that resulted in World War 1.The two sides were known as the Allies and the Central Powers. The Allies were the victors, as the entry of the United States into the war added an additional weight of men and materiel the Central Powers could not hope to match. The war resulted in a dramatically changed geo-political landscape, including the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires. -
Panama Canal
The United States commenced building a canal across a 50-mile stretch of the Panama isthmus in 1904. The project was helped by the elimination of disease-carrying mosquitoes, while chief engineer John Stevens devised innovative techniques and spurred the crucial redesign from a sea-level to a lock canal. Opened in 1914, oversight of the world-famous Panama Canal was transferred from the U.S. to Panama in 1999. -
Zimmerman Telegram
British codebreakers intercepted an encrypted message from Zimmermann intended for Heinrich von Eckardt, the German ambassador to Mexico. It said that if the neutral United States entered the war on the side of the Allies, he was to approach Mexico’s president with an offer to forge a secret wartime alliance. Germany would support an attack on the U.S. to get TX, NM, and AZ back. President Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. The US sided with the Allies. -
The Kellogg-Briand Pact
The Kellogg-Briand Pact was an agreement to outlaw war signed on August 27, 1928. The pact was one of many international efforts to prevent another World War, but it had little effect in stopping the rising militarism of the 1930s or preventing World War II. -
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Great Depression
The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world. It began after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and employment. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed. -
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WWII
When Germany attacked Poland in September 1939, Britain and France aligned against Germany. Japan relied upon imported resources and needed more land for its population, so they began occupying territory in the Chinese region of Manchuria. Japan and China were officially at war. Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941. This action brought the United States into World War II. Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Germany, performed a genocide of people he considered inferior. -
United Nations
The United Nations has 193 member states that vowed to create an international postwar peacekeeping organization -
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and World Trade Organization
Completed the Uruguay Round of the GATT negotiations and created the WTO to reduce tariffs, settle trade disputes and enforce rules. First worldwide multilateral free trade agreement.GATT ended when it was replaced by the more robust World Trade Organization. -
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Cold War
After WWII, a war of ideas and nonviolent actions between the Soviet Union and the United States began.
-atomic weapons “arms race.”
-Russia sent first man to the moon, then US
-Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides
-Reagan sends military aid to anticommunist governments around the world
-Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned
-Berlin Wall finally destroyed
-By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart
-The Cold War was over -
Truman Doctrine
This was the American foreign policy that was developed after WWII. It was based on the belief that communism must be ‘contained’, and that the USA would intervene in any situation where it appeared the communism was spreading. -
Berlin Blockade
The Berlin Blockade was an attempt by the Soviet Union to limit the ability of France, Great Britain and the United States to travel to their sectors of Berlin, which lay within Russian-occupied East Germany. The blockade was the first major clash of the Cold War and foreshadowed future conflict over the city of Berlin. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, channeled over $13 billion to finance the economic recovery of Europe between 1948 and 1951. The Marshall Plan successfully sparked economic recovery, meeting its objective of ‘restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole.’ The plan is named for Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who announced it in a commencement speech at Harvard University in 1947. -
Rio Treaty, Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance
The Rio Treaty was an agreement binding the republics of the Western Hemisphere together in a mutual defense system and provided for mutual assistance if an act of aggression threatened the peace of the Western Hemisphere. An act of aggression against one member state was considered an act against all the signatory states, which were obligated to provide assistance and aid. The treaty was used many times during the cold war, notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis. -
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European countries. -
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Korean War
The Korean War began when 75,000 soldiers poured from the northern Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the southern pro-Western Republic of Korea. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. In July 1953, the Korean War came to an end. The Korean peninsula is still divided today. -
Taiwan Straits
The First Taiwan Strait Crisis was a brief armed conflict that took place between the governments of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China, which by then had fled and was based in Taiwan. We helped maintain peace in the Taiwan Straits and worked with China to maintain stability on Korean Peninsula. -
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Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War. Opposition to the war in the U.S. bitterly divided Americans, even after President Richard Nixon ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973. Communist forces ended the war by seizing control of South Vietnam and the country was eventually unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. -
Bay of Pigs
Fidel Castro drove his guerilla army into Havana and overthrew General Fulgencio Batista. Officials at the U.S. State Department and the CIA then attempted to push Castro from power by a full-scale invasion of Cuba by 1,400 American-trained Cubans who had fled their homes when Castro took over. However, the invasion did not go well: The invaders were badly outnumbered by Castro’s troops, and they surrendered after less than 24 hours of fighting. -
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Berlin Wall
The Communist government of East Germany began to build a barbed wire and concrete wall between East and West Berlin. The purpose of the wall was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens could cross the border whenever they pleased. -
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Cuban Missile Crisis
A confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict -
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Détente
Détente (release from tension)- period of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union
-President Richard M. Nixon and Leonid I. Brezhnev (secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party) signed seven agreements covering the prevention of accidental military clashes. With the election of Ronald Reagan, who emphasized military preparedness as the key to Soviet-American relations, détente as Nixon had envisioned it came to an end. -
SALT I
Amidst the Cold War, a series of treaties was issued under the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty to curtail the build-up of nuclear weapons. SALT I was the first of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. General secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, met with U.S. President Richard Nixon in November of 1969 to come up with a treaty that would contain the arms race. -
Camp David Accords
In 1974, the first of two Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreements providing for the return of portions of the Sinai to Egypt were signed, and in 1975 Sadat traveled to the United States to discuss his peace efforts and seek American aid and investment. Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords, laying the groundwork for a permanent peace agreement between Egypt and Israel after three decades of hostilities. -
SALT II
In late 1972, negotiations began for SALT II and continued for seven years. Finally on June 18, 1979, in Vienna, Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter signed the SALT II treaty. Since the two countries had developed different strategies, with the U.S.S.R. focusing on larger warheads and the U.S. concentrating on missiles with a greater accuracy, specifications of the previous treaties had to be changed. SALT II set more specific regulations on the different missiles. -
Caribbean Basin Initiative
The Caribbean Basin Initiative was a temporary United States program initiated by the 1983 Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act. The CBI came into effect on January 1, 1984, and aimed to provide several tariff and trade benefits to many Central American and Caribbean countries. The US won approval of the Caribbean Basin Initiative enhancement legislation to promote economic prosperity in Central America and the Caribbean. -
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Persian Gulf War
Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion and occupation of neighboring Kuwait. Saudi Arabia and Egypt called on the United States and other Western nations to intervene. Hussein defied United Nations Security Council demands to withdraw from Kuwait. The Persian Gulf War began with a massive U.S.-led air offensive known as Operation Desert Storm. U.S. President George H.W. Bush declared a cease-fire on February 28; by that time, most Iraqi forces in Kuwait had either surrendered or fled. -
Chemical Weapons Convention
Brought China into the Chemical Weapons Convention. The CWC is an arms control treaty that outlaws the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons and their precursors. -
NAFTA
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is an agreement among the United States, Canada, and Mexico designed to remove tariff barriers between the three countries. -
Framework Agreement
Reduced North Korean threat through deterrence and diplomacy Framework Agreement to freeze and dismantle North Korea's dangerous nuclear weapons fuel production and a moratorium on long-range missile testing in 1999. -
Trilateral Group
Strengthened cooperation with South Korea to move forward to engage North Korea. Jointly engaged in Four Party Talks and established Trilateral Group (the United States, Japan and South Korea) to coordinate North Korea policy which helped create the conditions for an eventual North-South dialogue. -
The Good Friday Agreement or Belfast Agreement
Northern Ireland: Helped broker the Good Friday Peace Accord, ending decades of bloodshed and empowering the people of Northern Ireland to determine their future. The Good Friday Agreement or Belfast Agreement was a major political development in the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s. Northern Ireland's present devolved system of government is based on the agreement. -
Cessation of Hostilities Agreement
Negotiated a final, comprehensive peace agreement between Eritrea and Ethiopia, signed on December 12, 2000. The agreement built upon the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement brokered by the U.S. and the Organization of African Unity in June 2000, and brought to an end what was at that time the largest conventional war on earth. -
9/11
Members associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon, and one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. 3,000 people were killed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. -
War on Terror
The War on Terror, also known as the Global War on Terrorism, is an international military campaign that was launched by the U.S. government after the September 11 attacks in the U.S. in 2001. The naming of the campaign uses a metaphor of war to refer to a variety of actions that do not constitute a specific war as traditionally defined. U.S. president George W. Bush first used the term "war on terrorism" and then "war on terror" a few days later in a formal speech to Congress. -
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Iraq War
The Iraq War conflict consisted of two phases. The first was a brief war in March–April 2003, in which a combined force of troops from the US and Great Britain invaded Iraq and rapidly defeated Iraqi military and paramilitary forces. It was followed by a longer second phase in which a U.S.-led occupation of Iraq was opposed by an insurgency. After violence began to decline in 2007, the United States gradually reduced its military presence, formally completing its withdrawal in December 2011.
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