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The Library of Congress is founded in Washington
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The US House of Representatives votes for Jefferson as president
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The British parliament passes the first Factory Act, limiting a child's working day in a factory to twelve hours
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William Cobbett launches a weekly newspaper, The Political Register
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Lewis and Clark make their way through the Rockies and reach the Pacific
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Lewis and Clark get back to St Louis with a wealth of information about the unopened west of the continent
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Robert Fulton launches a steamboat, the Clermont, on New York's Hudson river
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American warships win a victory over the British on Lake Erie
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US lawyer Francis Scott Key writes The Star-Spangled Banner
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John McAdam builds the first macadamized road
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Republican candidate James Monroe wins the US presidential election
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Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein
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US president James Monroe warns European nations against interfering in America
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The Republican party in the USA splits into National Republicans and Democratic Republicans
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John Quincy Adams wins the US presidential election
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Adult white males now have the vote in almost all the states of the USA
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Andrew Jackson, elected president of the USA, introduces the era known as Jacksonian democracy
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Samuel Francis Smith's patriotic hymn America is sung for the first time on July 4 in Boston
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The USA suffers the first of several cholera epidemics
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The first long-distance US railway carries its first passengers
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Martin van Buren wins the US presidential election on the Democratic ticket
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US inventor Samuel Morse gives the first public demonstration, in Philadelphia, of his electric telegraph
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Five American Indian tribes are forcibly escorted to a new Indian Territory west of the Mississippi in the process that becomes known as the Great Removal
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The Great Migration across the north American continent to the Pacific establishes the Oregon Trail
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The Young Men's Christian Association is founded in London by British drapery assistant George Williams
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Samuel Morse and his assistant Alfred Vail complete the first telegraph line
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Escaped slave Frederick Douglass publishes the first of three volumes of his autobiography
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Gold is found on the property of John Sutter and news of it launches the first gold rush
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The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels, is published in Paris with the ringing slogan: 'Workers of the world, unite!'
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The US Congress passes the Compromise of 1850, designed to defuse the growing crisis over slavery
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An anti-slavery movement adopts a resonant name, calling itself the Republican party
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The controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act passes into law, enabling citizens of these territories to decide whether or not to allow slavery
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Democrat candidate James Buchanan wins the US presidential election
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Abraham Lincoln comes to national prominence through his debates on slavery with Stephen Douglas
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Lincoln becomes the Republican presidential candidate
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Republican contender Abraham Lincoln is elected US president with only 39% of the popular vote and no electoral votes in eleven southern states
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Seven southern states, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, agree to form the Confederate States of America
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A two-day engagement at Shiloh is the first Civil War battle to bring massive casualties, with more than 23,000 dead, wounded or missing
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The Homestead Act grants 160 acres in the west of the USA to any family farming them for five years
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President Lincoln, in honouring the Union dead at Gettysburg, captures in three minutes the essence of American democracy
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President Lincoln is re-elected for a second term
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The southern states pass new Black Codes, designed to limit the freedom granted to African-Americans by the victorious north
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The Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution assures equal rights as citizens to all born or naturalized in the USA
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The US Congress passes Reconstruction Acts, dividing the defeated South into military districts and insisting on elections by universal male suffrage
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Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant wins the US presidential election
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The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution makes it illegal to deny the right to vote on racial grounds
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Civil War veterans in the USA establish the National Rifle Association to promote marksmanship
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The US Congress establishes Yellowstone as the world's first national park
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Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes defeats Democrat Samuel J. Tilden in a US presidential election