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1492
Columbus lands in the Americas
In 1942, Columbus discovered North America. He sailed for Spain and claim the land for that country. -
Jamestown
This settlement was founded by England. The leader was John Smith, who was looking for gold. He did not find gold but later, planted tobacco. -
Pilgrims Land
The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Massachusetts. They were from England and wanted to have religious freedom. They were led by John Winthrop. -
French/ Indian War
This was a war between England and France. England defeated the French and took control of French Canada -
Lexington and Concord
These were the first two battles of the American Revolution. They were fought in Massachusetts -
Declaration of independence
Mostly written by Thomas Jefferson, this document listed complaints by the colonist against England. It describes the need for rights and served to "divorce" England -
Constitutional Convection
Delegates meet in Philidelphia to draw up a new constitution to replace the articles of the Confederation Compromises were reached and the constitution was ratified. -
Jefferson Presidency
Jefferson has been elected as president of The United States and wanted to extend the hand of peace to his opponents. Jefferson planned to wage a peaceful revolution to restore what he saw as the republic did against the strong- government policies of federalism. He believed that a simple government is best suited the needs of a republic. Jefferson also tried to shrink the government and cut cost wherever possible. He reduced the size of the army, halted a planned expansion of the navy. -
Louisiana purchase
The Louisiana Purchase brought into the U.S about 828 million square miles of territory from France, doubling the size of the old republic. At the time as the 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 . all of 15 states were eventually created from the land deal, which is considered one of the most important achievements of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. -
Jefferson Re-elected
The United States presidential election of 1804 pitted incumbent Democratic-Republican President Thomas Jefferson against Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Jefferson easily defeated Pinckney in the first presidential election conducted following the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. -
Steam Boat
The first successful steamboat was the Clermont, which was built by American inventor Robert Fulton in 1807. systems and, eventually, moved to France to work on canals. It was in France that he met Robert Livingston -
Missouri compromise
Congress passes the Missouri Compromise, a bill that resolves the first serious political clash between slavery and antislavery interests .in December 1819 with no prohibition on its practice of slavery, Congress remained on the issue of Missouri. it was reached on March 3, 1820, a bill granting Missouri as a slave state under the condition that slavery was forever prohibited in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36th parallel, which runs along the southern border of Missouri -
Telegraph
Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse (1791-1872) and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. -
Indian Removal Act
After both political and military demand on removing Native American Indians from the southern states of America in 1829, President Andrew Jackson signed this into law on May 28, 1830. Although it only gave the right to negotiate for their withdrawal from areas to the east of the Mississippi River and that relocation was supposed to be voluntary, all of the pressure was there to make this all but inevitable. All the tribal leaders agreed after Jackson’s landslide election victory in 1832. -
Dredd Scott v Sanford
the Supreme Court ruled that Americans of African descent, whether free or slave, were not American citizens and could not sue in federal court. The Court also ruled that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery in the U.S. territories. Finally, the Court declared that the rights of slaveowners were constitutionally protected by the Fifth Amendment because slaves were known as property. -
Lincoln Presidency
Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates, Democrat John C. Breckinridge, John Bell, and Stephen Douglas. -
Attack on Fort Sumter
Early in the morning of April 12, 1861, Confederate guns around the harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter. At 2:30 pm on April 13th, Major Robert Anderson, garrison commander, surrendered the fort and was evacuated the next day. The Union would not recapture Fort Sumter for nearly four years. This attack would be the beginning of the civil war. -
Emancipation Proclamation
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation 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. Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. -
Surrender at Appomattox ( end of civil war )
General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Lee had abandoned the Confederate capital of Richmond and the city of Petersburg, his goal was the remnants of his beleaguered troops, meet Confederate reinforcements in North Carolina and resume fighting. But the resulting Battle of Appomattox Court House, which lasted only a few hours, effectively brought the four-year Civil War to an end. -
Lincoln Assassinated
A murderous attack on Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C Shot in the head by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln died the next morning. The assassination occurred only days after the surrender at Appomattox Court House who had ended the American Civil War. Lincoln’s death plunged much of the country into despair, and the search for Booth and his accomplices was the largest manhunt in American history to that date. -
Thirteenth Amendment Ratified
The necessary number of states ratified The 13th amendment to the United States Constitution provides that Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. -
Telephone
A year later Bell moved to the United States, where he taught speech to deaf students. While in the U.S. Bell invented and/or improved a number of electrical technologies. He is best remembered as the inventor of the telephone (1876). Learn more about Bell's most famous invention, the telephone. -
Typewriter
The first typewriter to be commercially successful was invented in 1878 by Americans Christopher Latham Sholes, Frank Haven Hall, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, although Sholes soon disowned the machine and refused to use, or even to recommend it. -
Chinese Exlusion Act
he 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. Building on the 1875 Page Act, which banned Chinese women from immigrating to the United States, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first law implemented to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating. -
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. -
Radio Invention
Tesla died in 1943 and six months after his death the US Supreme Court ruled that all of Marconi's radio patents were invalid and awarded the patents for radio to Tesla. -
Plessy v Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court issued in 1896. It upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality – a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". -
Spanish American War
On April 25, 1898 the United States declared war on Spain following the sinking of the Battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. As a result Spain lost its control over the remains of its overseas empire -- Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines Islands, Guam, and other islands. -
Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt confronted the bitter struggle between management and labor head-on and became known as the great “trust buster” for his strenuous efforts to break up industrial combinations under the Sherman Antitrust Act. He was also a dedicated conservationist, setting aside some 200 million acres for national forests, reserves and wildlife refuges during his presidency. In the foreign policy arena. -
Panama Canal
Building the Panama Canal, 1903–1914. President Theodore Roosevelt oversaw the realization of a long-term United States goal—a trans-isthmian canal. Throughout the 1800s, American and British leaders and businessmen wanted to ship goods quickly and cheaply between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. -
Airplane Invention
Wilbur and Orville Wright were American inventors and pioneers of aviation. In 1903 the Wright brothers achieved the first powered, sustained and controlled airplane flight; they surpassed their own milestone two years later when they built and flew the first fully practical airplane. -
Wilson Presidency
Wilson served as the president of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and as governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913, before winning the 1912 presidential election. He oversaw the passage of progressive legislative policies unparalleled until the New Deal in 1933. He led the United States during World War I. He was one of the key leaders at the Paris Peace Conference, where he championed a new League of Nations, but he was unable to win Senate approval for U.S. participation in the League. -
Beginning of WWI
The first world war began in August 1914. It was directly triggered by the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, on 28th June 1914 by Bosnian revolutionary, Gavrilo Princip. -
The Great Migration Begins
the Great Migration, a mass relocation of 6 million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the North and West, starting in 1915. -
Wilson's 14 Points
In this January 8, 1918, address to Congress, President Woodrow Wilson proposed a 14-point program for world peace. These points were later taken as the basis for peace negotiations at the end of the war. Some of Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points were successful in that they were largely implemented after WWI. They did not really succeed, though, because they did not prevent WWII from occurring. -
Ending of WWI
World War One ended at 11am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in 1918. Germany signed an armistice (an agreement for peace and no more fighting) that had been prepared by Britain and France. At the start of 1918, Germany was in a strong position and expected to win the war -
Eighteenth Amendment
The Eighteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution established the prohibition of "intoxicating liquors" in the United States. The amendment was proposed by Congress on December 18, 1917, and was ratified by the requisite number of states on January 16, 1919. -
Treaty of Versailles
the most important of the peace treaties that brought World War I to an end. The Treaty ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919 in Versailles, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which had directly led to World War I. The other Central Powers on the German side of World War I signed separate treaties. -
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century social and artistic explosion that resulted lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art. -
Prohibition
legal prevention of sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States under the terms of the Eighteenth Amendment. Although the temperance movement, which was widely supported, had succeeded in bringing about this. millions of Americans were willing to drink liquor illegally, which gave rise to bootlegging of which were capitalized upon by organized crime. As a result, the Prohibition era also is remembered as a period of violent turf battles between criminal gangs. -
Rise of the K.K.K
In the 1920s the middle of the decade, estimates for national membership in this secret organization ranged from three million to eight million Klansmen. And membership was not limited Americans donned the white robes of the Klan too. Doctors, lawyers and ministers became loyal supporters of the KKK. In Ohio alone their ranks surged to 300,000. Even northeastern states were not immune. The more members joined the more violent the KKK got against the African Americans including lynching them -
Nineteenth Amendment
The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. It was adopted on August 18, 1920. -
Gitlow v New York
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 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, that applied also to state governments. The decision was the first in which the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause required state and federal governments to be held to the same standards in regulating speech. -
Scopes Trial
In 1925, John Scopes was convicted and fined $100 for teaching evolution in his Dayton, Tenn., classroom. The first high trial concerning the teaching of evolution, the Scopes trial also represents a dramatic clash between traditional and modern values in America of the 1920s. -
The KKK Marches in Washington
Among the other terrible legacies of that period are its inaccurate white supremacist histories of everything from Christopher Columbus and U.S. Grant to Woodrow Wilson, and the astounding gap between black and white media family wealth— problems that we are still trying to transcend. -
Stock Market Crash
In October of 1929, the stock market failed and investors panicked.
This set off the Great Depression -
Roosevelt 1st Election
Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, was elected president. His program to create jobs and to help the nation through the depression was called the new deal. -
CCC
Civilian Conservation Corps was set up to create jobs for men to work on conservation projects. -
Social Security Act
This was a new program to set up retirement accounts to help those with disabilities, and the uneployed -
FDR Court Packing Scandal
Roosevelt wanted to add more judges to the supreme court to support his new deal legislation -
The Manhattan Project / Atomic Bomb
One of the most devastating weapons of war was built and used by Americans. Although Harry Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb on civilians in Japan is still debated today, its effect was immediate. The bomb ended WW2, the largest war the world has ever experienced, and the devastating effect of these bombs has made countries all over the world very hesitant to ever get involved in a world war again. -
The North Atlantic Treaty Is Signed
The signing of the North Atlantic Treaty meant that, after intervening twice in the previous 32 years to restore peace in Europe, the U.S. was finally committed to an international alliance in peacetime, focused on preventing war in the first place. -
Moonlanding
Apollo 11 was one of the greatest achievements of humanity. Americans were the first and only nation to have walked on the moon. -
The Birth Control Pill Is Approved
The birth control pill was one of the most significant achievements of the 20th century. Contraception wasn’t new: From ancient times, women have used methods of varying degrees of reliability to prevent getting pregnant. -
Assassination of Kennedy
By the fall of 1963, President John F. Kennedy and his political advisers were preparing for the next presidential campaign. Although he had not formally announced his candidacy, it was clear that President Kennedy was going to run and he seemed confident about his chances for re-election. -
Pocket Calculator
The hand-held pocket calculator was invented at Texas Instruments, Incorporated (TI) in 1966 by a development team which included Jerry D. Merryman, James H. Van Tassel and Jack St. Clair Kilby. In 1974 a basic patent for miniature electronic calculators has been issued to Texas Instruments Incorporated. -
Handheld Cell Phone
Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first publicized handheld mobile phone call on a prototype DynaTAC model on 3 April 1973. -
Vietnam War
the Second Indochina War, and in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America or simply the American War, was a conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, with U.S. involvement ending in 1973. -
California Passes Proposition 13
In June of 1978 the voters of California overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, limiting local property taxes and making it harder for communities to raise them in the future. This 20th-century tax revolt opened the floodgates to other anti-tax ballot measures at the state level and initiated a general shift in popular opinion. -
Death of Osama bin Laden
The USA employed almost every single weapon in its arsenal, the most powerful in the history of Earth, in locating him
