-
Jamestown
Jamestown, Virginia was established on May 13, 1607. 100 English colonists arrive along the west bank of the James River in Virginia to found Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. The servere winter from 1609 to 1610 was referred to "starving time". Jamestown started becoming a demolishing city. -
John Rolfe and the Tobacco Crop in Jamestown
In 1612, John Rolfe cultivated the first tobacco at Jamestown, introducing a successful source of livelihood. The tobacco crops flourished and helped Jamestown's economic fall come back up. The nickname, "cash crop" was very appropiate for it. -
Headright System in Jamestown
The headright system, introduced in Virginia, gave each head of household the right to fifty acres of land for himself and fifty additional acres for each adult family member of servant that he brought to America. -
The Mayflower Compact
The Mayflower Compact was the first governing document of Plymouth Compact. The Mayflower Compact was based simultaneously upon a majoritarian model and the settlers' allegiance to the king. It was in essence a contract in which the settlers consented to follow the compact's rules and regulations for the sake of order and survival. -
Pilgrims & Puritans
Puritans were English Protestants in the late 16th century who wanted their church, the Anglican church, to follow the Calvinist model more closely and give up the remnants of Catholicism still present in Anglicanism. Pilgrims is a name commonly applied to early settlers of the Plymouth Colony in present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, United States. -
City upon A Hill
John Winthrop created the "city upon a hill" sceanario, to create an ideal society for the Puritans. -
The Half-Way Covenant
The Half-Way Covenant was a form of partial church membership created by New England in 1662. It was promoted in particular by the Reverend Solomon Stoddard, who felt that the people of the English colonies were drifting away from their original religious purpose. -
Bacon's Rebellion
Bacon's Rebellion was an armed rebellion in 1676 by Virginia settlers led by young Nathaniel Bacon against the rule of Governor William Berkeley. -
The Great Awakening
The First Great Awakening was a Christian revitalization movement that swept Protestant Europe and British America, and especially the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American religion. It resulted from powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of deep personal revelation of their need of salvation by Jesus Christ. -
Procalmation of 1763
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued October 7, 1763, by King George III following Great Britain's acquisition of French territory in North America after the end of the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War, in which it forbade settlers from settling past a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains. -
The Revolutionary War
The Revolutionary War, in the United States, began as a war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies, but gradually grew into a world war between Britain on one side and the newly formed United States, France, Netherlands, Spain, and Mysore on the other. The French fought alongside the United States, against Britain, from 1778. French money, munitions, soldiers and naval forces proved essential to America's victory over the Crown, but France gained little except large debts -
Declaration of Independence
A document adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. The document announced that the thriteen colonies then at war with Great Britain, regarded themselves as independent states, and no longer a part of the British Empire. Instead they formed a union that would become a new nation; the United States of America. :-) -
Articles Of Confederation
The Aritcles of Confederation was an agreement among the 13 founding states that established the United States of America as a confederation of sovereign states and served as its first constitution. The Aritcles gave power to the states versus a central government, which would cause many issues; like states trying to gain power over other states, and with foreign affairs would be difficult to fight with if the states are separated. -
Land Ordinance of 1785
The Ordinance was signed in 1784 by Thomas Jefferson, calling for Congress to take action. It divided the land west of the Appilachian mountains, east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio river into territories. -
US Constitution
The Constitution strengthened the federal government by dividing it in three sperarate branches. Federalists, like George Washington, supported it while anti-federalists opposed it. -
Bill of Rights
Anti-Federalists who had opposed Constitutional ratification, these amendments guarantee a number of personal freedoms, limit the government's power in judicial and other proceedings, and reserve some powers to the states and the public. While originally the amendments applied only to the federal government, most of their provisions have since been applied to the states by way of the Fourteenth Amendment, a process known as incorporation. The Bill of Rights supported indiviual rights. -
Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney invented the famous cotton gin and interchangeable parts in a gun. The impact of the cotton gin, was that it made production of cotton very abundant. The interchangeable parts helped the Americans during war, when they can change the parts whenever they need to. -
Washington's Neutrality Proclamtion
The Proclamation of Neutrality was a formal announcement issued by George Washington April 22, 1793, declaring the nation neutral in the conflict between France and Great Britain. It threatened legal proceedings against any American providing assistance to any country at war. Washington wanted to avoid "entangling alliances" with other nations. -
Alien and Sedition Act
Signed into law by President John Adams in 1798, the Alien and Sedition Acts consisted of four laws passed by the Federalist-controlled Congress as America prepared for war with France. These acts increased the residency requirement for American citizenship from five to fourteen years, authorized the president to imprison or deport aliens considered "dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States" and restricted speech critical of the government. -
Marbury vs. Madison
This case was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court formed the basis for the exercise of judicial review in the United States under Article III of the Constitution. The landmark decision helped define the boundary between the constitutionally separate executive and judicial branches of the American form of government. -
The Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase is territory in the western United States purchased from France in 1803 for $15 million; extends from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. -
Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise was passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States Congress, involving primarily the regulation of slavery in the western territories. It prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri. -
Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine was a statement to the rest of the world the the United States would not tolerate colonization in either North or South America. James Monroe did not want other nations to feel the oppression of colonization the way the U.S. did. After Theodore Roosevelt became president, and following the Venezuela Crisis of 1902–1903, Roosevelt added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904. -
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson was elected into office in the election of 1824. -
Tariff of Abominations
The major goal of the tariff was to protect industries in the North by putting a tax on them. The South, however, was harmed directly by having to pay higher prices on goods the region did not produce, and indirectly because reducing the exportation of British goods to the US made it difficult for the British to pay for the cotton they imported from the South. The reaction in the South, particularly in South Carolina, would lead to the Nullification Crisis that began in late 1832. -
The Indian Removal Act
The Indian Removal Act was a law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830. The act authorized him to negotiate with the Native Americans in the Southern United States for their removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their homelands. The Trail of Tears was the trail that the Indians had to take to expand westward, many died on the trail. -
Jackson and the Bank of the US
President Andrew Jackson announces that the government will no longer use the Second Bank of the United States, the country's national bank. He then used his executive power to remove all federal funds from the bank, in the final salvo of what is referred to as the "Bank War." -
Treaty of Guadalupe-Hildago
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic, is the peace treaty signed in Guadalupe Hidalgo between the U.S. and Mexico that ended the Mexican War. With the defeat of its army and the fall of the capital, Mexico entered into negotiations to end the war. The treaty called for the United States to pay $15 million to Mexico and pay off the claims of American citizens against Mexico up to $3.25 million. -
Seneca Falls Convention
The Seneca Falls Convention was an early and influential women's rights convention, the first to be organized by women in the Western world, in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1851, Stanton started working with Susan B. Anthony, a well-known abolitionist. In 1869, Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. They traveled all over the country and abroad, promoting woman's rights. -
Compromise of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five bills passed in the United States in September 1850, which defused a four-year confrontation between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican War. California's application for admission as a free state with its current boundaries was approved and a Southern proposal to split California at parallel 35 north to provide a Southern territory was not approved. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing white male settlers in those territories to determine through popular sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory. -
Dred Scott vs. Sandford
Dred Scott v. Sandford, was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court held that African Americans, whether slave or free, could not be American citizens and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court, and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States. Prior to Dred Scott, Democratic Party politicians had sought repeal of the Missouri Compromise. -
Lincoln and Republican policy
Lincoln stood by the Republican Party platform in 1860, which stated that slavery should not be allowed to expand into any more territories. Lincoln believed that the extension of slavery in the South, Mid-west, and Western lands would inhibit "free labor on free soil". In the 1850s, Lincoln was politically attacked as an abolitionist, but he did not consider himself one; he did not call for the immediate end of slavery everywhere in the U.S. until the proposed 13th Amendment. -
The Civil War
The cause for the civil war was mainly slavery. Sectionalism was growing and growing and then led to the devistating war. The strengths the North had were railroads, a large population, and industries. Their weaknesses were few trained soilders, traveling onto unknown territories, long distances to transport soilders and goods. The south's strengths were fighting on their own territory (mostly), believed in the cause because it was for their independence. The weaknesses were few transportation. -
Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, as a war measure during the American Civil War, to all segments of the Executive branch of the United States. It proclaimed the freedom of slaves in the ten states that were still in rebellion, therefore applying to 3.1 million of the 4 million slaves in the U.S. at the time. -
Manifest Destiny
In the United States in the 19th century, Manifest Destiny was the widely held belief that American settlers were destined to expand across the continent. Historians have for the most part agreed that there are three basic themes to Manifest Destiny: The special virtues of the American people and their institutions, America's mission to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America and an irresistible destiny direction to accomplish this essential duty
