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The Navigation Acts (1651, 1660) were acts of Parliament intended to promote the self-sufficiency of the British Empire by restricting colonial trade to England and decreasing dependence on foreign imported goods.
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In American history, salutary neglect was the British Crown policy of avoiding strict enforcement of parliamentary laws, especially trade laws, as long as British colonies remained loyal to the government of, and contributed to the economic growth of their parent country, England, in the 18th century.
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Molasses Act, (1733), in American colonial history, a British law that imposed a tax on molasses, sugar, and rum imported from non-British foreign colonies into the North American colonies.
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The French and Indian War began in 1754 and ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The war provided Great Britain enormous territorial gains in North America, but disputes over subsequent frontier policy and paying the war's expenses led to colonial discontent, and ultimately to the American Revolution.
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Industrial Revolution, in modern history, the process of change from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing. These technological changes introduced novel ways of working and living and fundamentally transformed society.
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The Sugar Act 1764, also known as the American Revenue Act 1764 or the American Duties Act, was a revenue-raising act passed by the Parliament of Great Britain on 5 April 1764.
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The Currency Act or Paper Bills of Credit Act is one of several Acts of the Parliament of Great Britain that regulated paper money issued by the colonies of British America. The Acts sought to protect British merchants and creditors from being paid in depreciated colonial currency.
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On March 22, 1765, the British Parliament passed the “Stamp Act” to help pay for British troops stationed in the colonies during the Seven Years' War. The act required the colonists to pay a tax, represented by a stamp, on various forms of papers, documents, and playing cards.
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Declaratory Act, (1766), declaration by the British Parliament that accompanied the repeal of the Stamp Act. It stated that the British Parliament's taxing authority was the same in America as in Great Britain.
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To help pay the expenses involved in governing the American colonies, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which initiated taxes on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea.
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The Boston Massacre was a confrontation in Boston on March 5, 1770, in which a group of nine British soldiers shot five people out of a crowd of three or four hundred who were abusing them verbally and throwing various missiles.
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Committees of correspondence were emergency provisional governments set up in the 13 American colonies in response to British policies leading up to the Revolutionary War (also known as the American Revolution).
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Quebec Act, act of the British Parliament in 1774 that vested the government of Quebec in a governor and council and preserved the French Civil Code, the seigneurial system of land tenure, and the Roman Catholic Church.
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The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was an agreement among the 13 original states of the United States of America that served as its first frame of government. It was approved after much debate by the Second Continental Congress on November 15, 1777, and sent to the states for ratification.
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The Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris by representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States of America on September 3, 1783, officially ended the American Revolutionary War and overall state of conflict between the two countries.
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The Land Ordinance of 1785 was passed by the U.S. Congress under the Articles of Confederation. It laid out the process by which lands west of the Appalachian Mountains were to be surveyed and sold. The method of creating townships and sections within townships was used for all U.S. land after 1785.
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Shays' Rebellion was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts and Worcester in response to a debt crisis among the citizenry and in opposition to the state government's increased efforts to collect taxes both on individuals and their trades. The fight took place mostly in and around Springfield during 1786 and 1787.
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The Anti-Federalists opposed the ratification of the 1787 U.S. Constitution because they feared that the new national government would be too powerful and thus threaten individual liberties, given the absence of a bill of rights.
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The Great Compromise—also known as the Connecticut Compromise or the Sherman Compromise—was an agreement made between large and small U.S. states that partly defined the representation each state would have in the legislature under the United States Constitution. This compromise occurred in the year 1787.
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The Three-fifths Compromise held that three of every five slaves would count as “population” for the purposes of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. Who opposed it? Northern states, where very few slaves resided.
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Also known as the Ordinance of 1787, the Northwest Ordinance established a government for the Northwest Territory, outlined the process for admitting a new state to the Union, and guaranteed that newly created states would be equal to the original thirteen states.
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The Federalist Party was a traditionalist conservative party that was the first political party in the United States. Under Alexander Hamilton, it dominated the national government from 1789 to 1801
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A two-party system is a political party system in which two major political parties consistently dominate the political landscape
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President Washington signed the bill into law in February 1791. The Bank of the United States, now commonly referred to as the first Bank of the United States, opened for business in Philadelphia on December 12, 1791, with a twenty-year charter.
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The Bill of Rights is the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution. It spells out Americans' rights in relation to their government. It guarantees civil rights and liberties to the individual—like freedom of speech, press, and religion
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The Democratic-Republican Party also referred to as the Jeffersonian Republican Party and known at the time as the Republican Party and occasional other names was an American political party founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the early 1790s that championed republicanism, agrarianism, political equality, and expansionism.
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A cotton gin—meaning "cotton engine"—is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation
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The National Road was the first major improved highway in the United States built by the federal government. Built between 1811 and 1837, the 620-mile road connected the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and was a main transport path to the West for thousands of settlers.
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The Tariff of 1816 was the first protective tariff implemented by the government. Its aim was to make American and foreign manufactured goods comparable in price and therefore persuade Americans to buy American products. America was a new nation, free from the yoke of the British in the Revolutionary War.
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The Convention of 1818 set the boundary between the Missouri Territory in the United States and British North America (later Canada) at the forty-ninth parallel. Both agreements reflected the easing of diplomatic tensions that had led to the War of 1812 and marked the beginning of Anglo-American cooperation.
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Missouri applied for statehood on December 18, 1818. This created a problem because the Northern states refused to allow another slave state to join the Union. In 1819, Maine applied for statehood. Then a compromise developed: Maine could join as a free state to balance out Missouri joining as a slave state.
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The Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, also known as the Transcontinental Treaty, the Florida Purchase Treaty, or the Florida Treaty, was a treaty between the United States and Spain in 1819 that ceded Florida to the U.S. and defined the boundary between the U.S. and New Spain.
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The Monroe Doctrine was articulated in President James Monroe's seventh annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. The European powers, according to Monroe, were obligated to respect the Western Hemisphere as the United States' sphere of interest.
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This "System" consisted of three mutually reinforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other "internal improvements" to develop profitable markets for agriculture.
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The Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It was founded in 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party. Since the 1860s, its main political rival has been the Republican Party
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The Tariff of 1828, also called the Tariff of Abominations, raised rates substantially (to as much as 50 percent on manufactured goods) but for the first time also targeted items most frequently imported in the industrial states in New England.
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The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. A few tribes went peacefully, but many resisted the relocation policy.
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The Trail of Tears was a series of forced displacements of approximately 60,000 American Indians of the "Five Civilized Tribes" between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. Part of the Indian removal, the ethnic cleansing was gradual, occurring over a period of nearly two decades.
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The mechanical reaper was invented by Cyrus McCormick in 1831. This machine was used by farmers to harvest crops mechanically. For hundreds of years, farmers and field workers had to harvest crops by hand using a sickle or other methods, which was an arduous task at best.
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nullification crisis, in U.S. history, confrontation between the state of South Carolina and the federal government in 1832–33 over the former's attempt to declare null and void within the state the federal Tariffs of 1828 and 1832.
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The Whig Party was a political party that espoused traditionalist conservatism in the United States during the middle of the 19th century.
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The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that touched off a major depression, which lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices, and wages went down, westward expansion was stalled, unemployment went up, and pessimism abounded. The panic had both domestic and foreign origins.
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John Deere was a blacksmith who developed the first commercially successful, self-scouring steel plow in 1837 and founded the company that still bears his name. Deere was born in 1804 in Rutland, Vermont. After his father was lost at sea when he was four years old, Deere was raised solely by his mother.
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Martin Van Buren was an American lawyer and statesman who served as the 8th president of the United States from 1837 to 1841. A founder of the Democratic Party, he had previously served as the 9th governor of New York, the 10th United States secretary of state, and the 8th vice president of the United States
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The Know-Nothings were a nativist political party and movement in the United States in the mid-1850s. The party was officially known as the "Native American Party" prior to 1855 and thereafter, it was simply known as the "American Party"
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Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, is the idea that the United States is destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent.
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a former political party (1845–54) that opposed the extension of slavery into U.S. territories.
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In 1818, a U.S.-British agreement had established the border along the 49th parallel from Lake of the Woods in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west. The two nations also agreed to a joint occupation of Oregon territory for 10 years, an arrangement that was extended for an additional 10 years in 1827.
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Wilmot Proviso, in U.S. history, an important congressional proposal in the 1840s to prohibit the extension of slavery into the territories, a basic plank upon which the Republican Party was subsequently built
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The California Gold Rush was a gold rush that began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad.
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The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought an official end to the Mexican-American War (1846-48), was signed on February 2, 1848, at Guadalupe Hidalgo, a city to which the Mexican government had fled with the advance of U.S. forces.
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he Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was part of the Compromise of 1850. The act required that slaves be returned to their owners, even if they were in a free state. The act also made the federal government responsible for finding, returning, and trying escaped slaves.
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The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850 that defused a political confrontation between slave and free states on the status of territories acquired in the Mexican–American War
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The Republican Party, also referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with its main historic rival, the Democratic Party.
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The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 was a territorial organic act that created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. It was drafted by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas, passed by the 33rd United States Congress, and signed into law by President Franklin Pierce.
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The Northern Democratic Party was a leg of the Democratic Party during the 1860 presidential election, when the party split in two factions because of disagreements over slavery. They held two conventions before the election, in Charleston and Baltimore, where they established their platform.
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Southern Democrats, historically also known colloquially as Dixiecrats, are members of the U.S. Democratic Party who reside in the Southern United States. In the 19th century, Southern Democrats were people in the South who believed in Jacksonian democracy.
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Confederation refers to the process of federal union in which the British North American colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Province of Canada joined together to form the Dominion of Canada. The term Confederation also stands for 1 July 1867, the date of the creation of the Dominion.
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The origin of checks and balances, like separation of powers itself, is specifically credited to Montesquieu in the Enlightenment (in The Spirit of the Laws, 1748). Under this influence it was implemented in 1787 in the Constitution of the United States.