-
Founding of Jamestown
Jamestown was found by Captain John Smith. The Virginia Company sent three ships of settlers to the New World in December 1607. They set up the first colony in America. They named it Virginia. These settlers named their new settlement Jamestown in honor of the English King James. -
The House of Burgesses
Assembly of elected representatives of English colonist of North America; established by the Virginia Company to encourage English craftsmen to settel in North America, and make conditions in the colonies bareable for inhabitants. -
Founding of Plymouth Colony and Mayflower Compact
First governing document of the Plymouth Colony; written by separatist who wanted religious freedom. -
Founding of Massachusetts Bay
One group of Puritans was granted a corporate charter for the Massachusetts Bay colony(1629).Unlike other such contracts, which provided the framework for establishing colonies in America, this one did not require stockholders to hold their meetings in England. -
Pequot War (1634-1638)
This was a war between the Pequot tribe and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and their allies. The main reasons for the war were the efforts to control fur trade resulting in incidents, and attacks. -
King Philip's War (1675-1678)
Armed conflict between Native Americans of New England and English colonist, and their allies. The main leader of the Native American side was Metacomet; as a result of his ignorence he was killed, and beheaded. His head was placed on a stick, and left to rot. -
Bacon's Rebellion (1676)
This was a rebellion in Virginia lead by a farmer named Nathaniel Bacon. Thousand of poor whites, blacks and indentured servants rose to rebel. The cause of the rebelion was the unwillingness of the Native Americans to leave their land. -
Salem Witch Trials (Feburary 1692- May 1693)
These were a series of trials and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft. Over 200 people were accused of witchcraft, and more than 20 killed. -
French and Indian War (1754–1763)
The French and Indian War was a struggle over who would control the Ohio River frontier in The New world. The French and their Indian Allies fought and British (including American colonists) and their Indian /Allies. The British won and closed the Ohio Valley to further Am expansion in that area. -
Quartering Act (March 24, 1765)
This act required colonist to provide food and living quarters for British soldiers stationed in the colonies. -
Stamp Act (1765)
The act required revenue stamps be placed on most printed paper. By this came protest, a youn lawyer (Patrick Henry) expressed that taxation without representation goes against English law. The outcome of such protest was the Stamp Act Congress, who elected representatives to approve taxes. -
Boston Massacre (March 5, 1770)
The guards fired into the crowd killing five people and injuring others. The soldiers were put on trial, defended by John Adams they were acqitted. -
Tea Act (May 10,1773)
Act to reduce the surplus of tea the financially troubled British East India Company had. The principal was to reduce the price of tea, in order to lessen smuggleing of Dutch tea, and raise profit for the British East India Company. -
Boston Tea Party (December 16,1773)
The colonist refused to buy British tea because of the principal behind the Tea Act even though it made the tea cheaper. On December 16th colonist sent a message to Parliament by disguising themselves as Native Americans, and dumped 342 chest of tea into the harbor. -
Intolerable Acts (1774)
In England the Boston Tea Party angered the king, Lord North, and Parliament. As a concequence the British govornment enacted a series of punitive acts (the Coercive Act, Quartering Act, Boston Port Act, and the Quebec Act). -
Lexington and Concord
A battalion of British troops under Lieutenant-Colonel Smith was sent from Boston to seize arms and munitions collected by colonists at Concord. At Lexington, Concord, and on the way back to Boston they were opposed by local colonist militia units that considerably outnumbered them (3,500 to 800 overall).The colonists first opened fire on the column at Lexington, on the road to Concord, leading to a general engagement. -
Declaration of Independence
The Texas Declaration of Independence was the formal declaration of independence of the Republic of Texas from Mexico in the Texas Revolution. -
Constitutional Convention
Took place in 1787 to address problems in governing the United States under the Articles of Confederation. The result of the convention was the
forming of the Constitution. -
Judiciary Act
The United States Judiciary Act of 1789 (ch. 20, 1 Stat. 73) was a landmark statute adopted on September 24, 1789 in the first session of the First United States Congress establishing the U.S. federal judiciary. -
Second Great Awakening
The Second Great Awakening was a period of religious revival in the United States between 1790 and the 1840s. It followed the First Great Awakening of colonial America. Characteristics of the Second Great Awakening include widespread conversions, increased church activity, social activism, and the emergence of new Christian denominations. The period is considered to have ended with the American Civil War, though its legacy continues to this day. -
Whiskey Rebellion
a tax protest in the United States beginning in 1791, during thepresidency of George Washington. -
XYZ Affair
The XYZ Affair was a political and diplomatic episode in 1797 and 1798, during the administration of John Adams, that Americans interpreted as an insult from France. -
Alien and Sedition Acts
four bills passed in 1798 by the Federalists in the 5th United States Congress in the aftermath of the French Revolution and during an undeclared naval war with Britain and France, later known as the Quasi-War.
Midnight Judges- represented an effort to solve an issue in the U.S. Supreme -
Revolution of 1800
The Revolution of 1800 was monumental in the development of the United States as a nation. It proved to other nations that the republican experiment began by the revolutionary seed of independence could not only thrive, but succeed. -
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition by the United States of America in 1803 of 828,000 square miles of France’s claim to the territory of Louisiana. -
Marbury v. Madison
landmark case in United States law. It formed the basis for the exercise of judicial review in the United States under Article III of the Constitution. -
Embargo Act
a general embargo enacted by the United States Congress against Great Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars.The embargo was imposed in response to violations of U.S. neutrality, in which American merchantmen and their cargo were seized as contraband of war by the belligerent European navies. -
War of 1812
A conflict between the US and the UK (1812-14) -
Election of 1824
The 1824 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION marked the final collapse of the Republican-Federalist political framework. For the first time no candidate ran as a Federalist, while five significant candidates competed as Democratic-Republicans. Clearly, no party system functioned in 1824. -
Election of 1828
The Election of 1824 had left supporters of Andrew Jackson bitterly disappointed. He had garnered the most electoral votes, but had been denied the presidency by the House of Representatives. -
Indian Removal Act
The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830. The act authorized him to negotiate with the Indians in the Southern United States for their removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their homelands. -
Nullification Crisis
a sectional crisis during the presidency of Andrew Jackson created by South Carolina's 1832 Ordinance of Nullification. This ordinance declared by the power of the State that the federal Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and therefore null and void within the sovereign boundaries of South Carolina. -
Texas Independence
Texas received liberty from Mexico after the war -
Mexican-American War (1846-1848)
war between the United States and Mexico (April 1846–February 1848) stemming from the United States’ annexation of Texas in 1845 and from a dispute over whether Texas ended at the Nueces River (Mexican claim) or the Rio Grande (U.S. claim). The war—in which U.S. forces were consistently victorious—resulted in the United States’ acquisition of more than 500,000 square miles (1,300,000 square km) of Mexican territory extending westward from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean. -
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was a peace treaty that ended the Mexican-American War (1846 to 1848.) The treaty got its name from the location of the signing in Mexico. -
Dawes Act
A federal law intended to turn Native Americans into farmers and landowners by providing cooperating families with 160 acres of reservation land for farming or 320 acres for grazing. In the eyes of supporters, this law would “civilize” the Indians by weaning them from their nomadic life, by treating them as individuals rather than as members of their tribes, and by readying them for citizenship. -
Wounded Knee Massacre
Wounded Knee, located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, was the site of two conflicts between North American Indians and representatives of the U.S. government. An 1890 massacre left some 150 Native Americans dead, in what was the final clash between federal troops and the Sioux. -
Spanish - American War
Spanish-American War was a brief war that the United States waged against Spain in 1898. Actual hostilities in the war lasted less than four months, from April 25 to August 12, 1898. Most of the fighting occurred in or near the Spanish colonial possessions of Cuba and the Philippines, nearly halfway around the world from each other. -
Founding of NAACP
DuBois believed in the ability of the Talented Tenth intellectual black elites, to advance the cause for all blacks. He was instrumental in the establishment of the NAACP -
Harlem Renaissance
The rebirth of African-American culture. Led by poets, authors,etc that provided African-American intellectuals who continued to oppose racial segregation and suppression -
First Red Scare
Paranoia regarding the threat of Bolsheviks to the US. Many people were charged with crimes, deported, or executed because of their political beliefs. -
Red Summer
The Red Summer of 1919 refers to a series of race riots took place between May and October of that year. Although riots occurred in more than thirty cities throughout the United States, the bloodiest events were in Chicago, Washington D.C. and Elaine, Ark. -
Election of 1932
The presidential election of 1932 produced one of the most dramatic political reversals in American history, as the nation went from Republican party dominance to Democratic party dominance. The shift would have enormous long-term implications, as Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal program that transformed the role of the federal government in the everyday life of the nation and eventually reoriented American foreign policy from isolation to involvement. -
New Deal
The New Deal was a comprehensive series of social and economic programs enacted during the Great Depression by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration that have become part of our everyday lives today. -
Attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
On August 6, 1945, the United States used a massive, atomic weapon against Hiroshima, Japan. This atomic bomb, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, flattened the city, killing tens of thousands of civilians. While Japan was still trying to comprehend this devastation three days later, the United States struck again, this time, on Nagasaki. -
Truman Doctrine
A major part of the doctrine was the policy of containment. The Truman Doctrine was developed in 1950 ,which assumed the Soviet Union was trying to spread its power across the whole world, decided that the US should stop this and advocated a more active, military, policy of containment, fully abandoning previous US doctrines like Isolationism. -
Creation of NATO 1949
The alignment of nearly every European nation into one of the two opposing camps formalized the political division of the European continent that had taken place since World War II. This alignment provided the framework for the military standoff that continued throughout the Cold War. -
Fall of China to Communism (1949)
NATO is formed China falls to Communist forces -
Korean War (1950-1953)
World War II divided Korea into a Communist, northern half and an American-occupied southern half, divided at the 38th parallel. The Korean War (1950-1953) began when the North Korean Communist army crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded non-Communist South Korea. As Kim Il-sung's North Korean army, armed with Soviet tanks, quickly overran South Korea, the United States came to South Korea's aid. -
Election of 1952
The election of 1952 took place against the backdrop of the stalemate in the Korean War, which had been running since 1950 without any conclusion. President Harry S. Truman had been specifically exempted from the terms of the 22nd Amendment, but he chose not to run again. -
Election of 1816
The election campaign of 1816 itself was highly one-sided. The early opposition of the Federalists to the War of 1812 had, for all practical purposes, destroyed the party. The war ended with the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans. As a result, those who opposed the war were discredited. Monroe went on to win an overwhelming victory.
