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Thomas Jefferson is born in Shadwell, Virginia (later Albemarle County)
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Thomas Jefferson begins studying at the College of William & Mary.
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Jefferson, now 25 years old, is elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses.
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Jefferson arrives in Philadelphia to replace his cousin as a Virginia delegate to the Second Continental Congress.
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Jefferson, along with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and two others, is assigned to the committee charged with drafting what will become the Declaration of Independence.
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Jefferson leaves the Congress and returns to Virginia to take a seat as a representative in the Virginia House of Delegates.
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Jefferson is elected the second governor of Virginia.
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Jefferson moves to New York, the nation's temporary capital, to take up his job as the United States' first secretary of state.
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As the runner-up in the presidential election, Jefferson becomes John Adams' vice president.
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Jefferson feels the acts to be unconscionable violations of basic rights, and works with Madison to author, in secret, a pair of protests, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions.
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Jefferson purchases the 800,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory from French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte for $15 Million, or roughly 4 cents an acre, effectively doubling the size of the United States overnight.
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Jefferson charters the Lewis and Clark expedition to survey the new Louisiana Territory.
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Jefferson's embargo act halts all trade between the United States and Great Britain.
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Thomas Jefferson passes the Embargo Act to cancel all foreign connections.
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Thomas Jefferson dies in his bed in Monticello, on the same day as John Adams, fifty years to the day after the publication of the Declaration of Independence.
