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In 1607, the Virginia Company, holding 104 English men, sailed from Great Britain to America. They formed the first English settlement in America. They named it Jamestown after the King James I. -
In 1619, a Dutch ship sold 20 African slaves to Jamestown. This marks the arrival of slaves in American, and will last for hundreds of years. -
A group of 100 pilgrims aboard the Mayflower sailed from England to the New World. They arrived the Plymouth, now Massachusetts, and established the first government document in America called the Mayflower Compact. -
Peter Minuit buys Manhattan Island for the Dutch from Mana-hat-a Indians for goods worth $24. The island is renamed New Amsterdam -
John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley founded the town of Boston. Winthrop was elected Governor before the colony set out from England and continued to govern for fifteen of the colony's first twenty years. -
Charles I granted Lard Baltimore territory north of the Potomac River, which would become Maryland. It became a haven for Roman Catholics to escape England. -
English seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York. -
Bacon's Rebellion was an armed rebellion held by Virginia settlers that took place led by Nathaniel Bacon; against Colonial Governor William Berkeley after Berkeley refused Bacon's request to drive Native American Indians out of Virginia. -
King William’s War was between France and England for supremacy in North America. The main goal was the control of all the fur trade. King William's War was the first of the French and Indian Wars. It took place in North America in 1689. -
A series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, 19 of whom were executed by hanging (14 women and five men). -
The British Queen Anne established the royal colony of New Jersey by combining the American provinces of East Jersey and West Jersey. -
This war was fought between British colonists of South Carolina on one side and a number of Native American tribes on the other side led by the Yamasee tribe. The Native Americans destroyed a number of settlements and killed a large number of colonists. -
The British parliament passed the Iron Act in 1750. This act eliminated the taxes paid by Britain on the iron imported from its American colonies. It also said that the American colonies should not use iron for production and export it in raw form to Britain. -
This war was fought between British colonies in North America and the French colonies as well as their allies. -
The British Parliament passed the Sugar Act in 1764. It provided for a strongly enforced tax on sugar, molasses, and other products imported into the American colonies from non-British Caribbean sources. -
The British parliament wanted to collect this money from the colonists. So it imposed a new tax through the Stamp Act. The Act said that if anyone wanted to print any material in North American colonies, they should do so on the embossed papers imported from London. -
In 1770, a group of protestors gathered around 8 British soldiers. They hurled abuse at the soldiers and threatened them with clubs and stones. The soldiers opened fire and killed three people, with another two later dying of wounds. This became known as the incident of the Boston Massacre. -
In 1773, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act. This Act didn’t impose any new taxes but it granted complete monopoly over the tea trade in the Americas to the British East India Company. -
After the British Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, the Sons of Liberty strongly protested against the Act. As part of their protests, they boarded British ships carrying tea in December 1773 and destroyed the shipment by throwing the tea chests into the harbor. This became known as the Boston Tea Party. -
The document announced the separation of 13 North American British colonies from Great Britain. It was the last of a series of steps that led the colonies to final separation from Great Britain. -
Thomas Jefferson defeated incumbent president John Adams to become the first U.S. President to be inaugurated in Washington, D.C. -
In this transaction with France, signed on April 30, 1803, the United States purchased 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million. For roughly 4 cents an acre, the United States doubled its size, expanding the nation westward. -
Following the United States doubling its territory with the Louisiana Purchase, an expedition was launched to explore the new land. President Thomas Jefferson commissioned private secretary Meriwether Lewis and military captain William Clark to lead a team of 33 men on a ‘Corps of Discovery’. Setting out from St. Louis, Mo., the expedition to explore the West and find a route to the Pacific Ocean lasted more than two years. -
On September 14, 1814, U.S. soldiers at Baltimore's Fort McHenry raised a huge American flag to celebrate a crucial victory over British forces during the War of 1812. The sight of those “broad stripes and bright stars” inspired Francis Scott Key to write a song that eventually became the United States national anthem. -
A treaty with Spain is agreed that cedes Florida to the United States to resolve previous border disputes between the two countries. -
In an effort to maintain the balance between free and slave states, Maine was admitted as a free state so that Missouri could be admitted as a slave state; except for Missouri, slavery was prohibited in the Louisiana Purchase lands north of latitude 36°30'. -
In his annual address to Congress, President Monroe declared that the American continents were henceforth off-limits for further colonization by European powers. It warned that any outside intervention in the Americas would be regarded as a potentially hostile act. The doctrine forms the basic approach of American foreign policy during the 19th and 20th centuries. -
President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the forced removal of Native Americans living in the eastern part of the country to lands west of the Mississippi River. By the late 1830s, the Jackson administration had relocated nearly 50,000 Native Americans. The Cherokee were among the tribes to unsuccessfully challenge the legality of the act. -
Enslaved African-American preacher, Nat Turner, led the most significant slave uprising in American history. He and his band of around 80 followers launched a bloody, day-long rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. The militia quells the rebellion, and Turner is eventually hanged. As a consequence, Virginia instituted much stricter slave laws. -
U.S. annexes Texas.
The Republic of Texas was annexed into the United States, making it the 28th state of the Union. The Republic of Texas had previously declared independence from Mexico following a revolt by rebel settlers. The decision to accept Texas was controversial due to it being a slave state.