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XYZ Affair (No specific date)
The XYZ Affair was, in fact, a diplomatic incident between France and America in the late 18th century that led to an undeclared war at sea. After some members of Congress asked to see the diplomats’ reports regarding what had transpired in France, Adams handed them over with the names of the French agents replaced with the letters X, Y and Z; thus the name XYZ Affair. -
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition of the louisiana territory by the U.S. from France in 1803. -
Adams - Onis Treaty (Florida Purchase Treaty)
Spanish minister Do Luis de Onis and U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams sign the Florida Purchase Treaty, in which Spain agrees to cede the remainder of its old province of Florida to the United States. -
Missouri Compromise
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. -
Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine was a U.S. foreign policy regarding domination of the American continent in 1823. It stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention. -
Cotton Gin Invented
In 1794, U.S.-born inventor Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber. By the mid-19th century, cotton had become America’s leading export. -
Indian Removal Act
Andrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called “Indian removal.” As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida–campaigns that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to white farmers. -
Trail of Tears
The Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present day Ohlahoma. -
The Battle of the Alamo
The Battle of the Alamo was a picotal event in the Texas Revolution. Following a 13 day siege, Mexican troops under President General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna launched an assaoult on the Alamo Mission near San Antonio de Bexar, killing all og the Texian defenders. -
Texas Claims Independence
The formal declaration of independence of the Republic of Texas from mexico in the Texas Revolution. -
Mexican - American War (1846-1848)
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. When the dust cleared, Mexico had lost about one-third of its territory, including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. -
Agreement of the 49th parallel
Representatives of Great Britain and the United States sign the Oregon Treaty, which settles a long-standing dispute with Britain over who controlled the Oregon territory. The treaty established the 49th parallel from the Rocky Mountains to the Strait of Georgia as the boundary between the United States and British Canada. The United States gained formal control over the future states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. -
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The treaty added an additional 525,000 square miles to United States territory, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexica, Utah and Wyoming. -
Gadsden purchase
An agreement between the United States and Mexico, finalized in 1854, in which the United States agreed to pay Mexico $10 million for a 29,670 square mile portion of Mexico that later became part of Arizona and New Mexico. Gadsden’s Purchase provided the land necessary for a southern transcontinental railroad and attempted to resolve conflicts that lingered after the Mexican-American War. -
Kansas - Nebraska Act
1854 bill that mandated “popular sovereignty”–allowing settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders. Proposed by Stephen A. Douglas–Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in the influential Lincoln-Douglas debates–the bill overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of latitude as the boundary between slave and free territory. -
California Becomes a State
Mexico had reluctantly ceded California and much of its northern territory to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. When the Mexican diplomats signed the treaty, they pictured California as a region of sleepy mission towns with a tiny population of about 7,300-not a devastating loss to the Mexican empire.
