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Period: 1492 to 1492
The Discovery of America by Columbus 1492
Columbus led his three ships - the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria -
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The Settlement of Jamestown
In 1607, 104 English men and boys arrived in North America to start a settlement. -
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The French and Indian War
It pitted the colonies of British America against those of New France. Both sides were supported by military units from their parent countries, as well as by American Indian allies. -
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The Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party was a political and mercantile protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1773. -
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The Battle of Lexington and Concord
The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. -
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The Declaration of Independence
Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the 13 American colonies severed their political connections to Great Britain -
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The Battle of Yorktown
1781, General George Washington, commanding a force of 17,000 French and Continental troops, begins the siege known as the Battle of Yorktown against British General Lord Charles Cornwallis and a contingent of 9,000 British troops at Yorktown, Virginia, in the most important battle of the Revolutionary War. -
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The Constitutional Convention
The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia met between May and September of 1787 to address the problems of the weak central government that existed under the Articles of Confederation. -
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The invention of the cotton gin
In 1794, U.S.-born inventor Eli Whitney (1765-1825) patented the cotton gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber. -
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The Alien and Sedition Acts
A series of laws known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by the Federalist Congress in 1798 and signed into law by President Adams. These laws included new powers to deport foreigners as well as making it harder for new immigrants to vote. -
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The Louisiana Purchase
It was a land deal between the United States and France, in which the U.S. acquired approximately 827,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million. -
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The War of 1812
The War of 1812 was a conflict fought between the United States, the United Kingdom, and their respective allies from June 1812 to February 1815. Historians in Britain often see it as a minor theatre of the Napoleonic Wars; in the United States and Canada, it is seen as a war in its own right. -
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The Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise was an effort by Congress to defuse the sectional and political rivalries triggered by the request of Missouri late in 1819 for admission as a state in which slavery would be permitted. At the time, the United States contained twenty-two states, evenly divided between slave and free. -
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Andrew Jackson’s Election
The United States presidential election of 1828 was the 11th quadrennial presidential election, held from Friday, October 31, to Tuesday, December 2, 1828. It featured a re-match of the 1824 election, as President John Quincy Adams of the National Republican Party faced Andrew Jackson of the nascent Democratic Party. -
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The Trail of Tears
The Trail of Tears was a series of forced relocations of Native American peoples from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States, to areas to the west that had been designated as Indian Territory. -
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The invention of the telegraph
Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse (1791-1872) and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. -
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The Mexican-American War
The Mexican–American War, also known in the United States as the Mexican War and in Mexico as the American intervention in Mexico, was an armed conflict between the United States of America and the United Mexican States from 1846 to 1848. -
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Seneca Falls Convention
The Seneca Falls Convention was the first woman's rights convention. It advertised itself as "a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman". Held in Seneca Falls, New York, it spanned two days over July 19–20, 1848. -
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The Compromise of 1850
Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished. Furthermore, California entered the Union as a free state and a territorial government was created in Utah. -
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The Firing on Fort Sumter
The Battle of Fort Sumter was the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina by the Confederate States Army, and the return gunfire and subsequent surrender by the United States Army, that started the American Civil War. -
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The Emancipation Proclamation
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free. -
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The Organization of Standard Oil Trust
The Standard Oil Trust was formed in 1863 by John D. Rockefeller. ... In 1870, the company was renamed Standard Oil Company, after which Rockefeller decided to buy up all the other competition and form them into one large company. The company faced legal issues in 1890 following passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act. -
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Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse
In retreat from the Union army’s Appomattox campaign, which began in March 1865, the Army of Northern Virginia, stumbled westward through the Virginia countryside stripped of food and supplies. At one point, Union cavalry forces under General Philip Sheridan had outrun Lee’s troops, blocking their retreat and taking approximately 6,000 prisoners at Sayler’s Creek. -
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Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination
Abraham Lincoln was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through the American Civil War—its bloodiest war and perhaps its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis -
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3th, 14th, 15th Amendments
The 13th (1865), 14th (1868), and 15th Amendments (1870) were the first amendments made to the U.S.constitution in 60 years. Known collectively as the Civil War Amendments, they were designed to ensure the equality for recently emancipated slaves. -
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Andrew Johnson’s Impeachment
On February 24, 1868 three days after Johnson's Dismissal of Stanton, the House of Representatives voted 126 to 47 (with 17 members not voting) in favor of a resolution to impeach the President for high crimes and misdemeanors. ... One week later, the House adopted eleven articles of impeachment against the President. -
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The completion of the transcontinental railroad
On May 10, 1869, a golden spike was driven at Promontory, Utah, signaling the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. The transcontinental railroad had long been a dream for people living in the American West. -
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The invention of the electric light, telephone, and airplane
Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in the United States in 1876, and the first public telephone services were operating within a few years. …date back to 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and made the first wire transmission of intelligible speech. -
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The Pullman and Homestead Strikes
The Homestead strike, also known as the Homestead Steel strike, Pinkerton rebellion, or Homestead massacre, was an industrial lockout and strike which began on June 30, 1892, culminating in a battle between strikers and private security agents on July 6, 1892. -
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The Spanish-American War
The Spanish–American War was fought between the United States and Spain in 1898. Hostilities began in the aftermath of the internal explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in Cuba, leading to U.S. intervention in the Cuban War of Independence -
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Theodore Roosevelt becomes president
he presidency of Theodore Roosevelt began on September 14, 1901, when he became the 26th President of the United States upon the assassination and death of President William McKinley, and ended on March 4, 1909.