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Aug 3, 1492
The Discovery of America by Columbus
Columbus led his three ships - the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria - out of the Spanish port of Palos on August 3, 1492. His objective was to sail west until he reached Asia (the Indies) where the riches of gold, pearls and spice awaited. -
The Settlement of Jamestown
The Jamestown settlement in the Colony of Virginia was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. William Kelso writes that Jamestown "is where the British Empire began". -
The French and Indian War
The French and Indian War (1754–63) comprised the North American theater of the worldwide Seven Years' War of 1756–63. It pitted the colonies of British America against those of New France. -
The Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party was a political protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1773. The demonstrators, some disguised as Native Americans, in defiance of the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company. -
The Battle of Lexington and Concord
The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. -
The Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence is the statement adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting at the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall) in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies, then at war with the Kingdom of Great Britain, regarded themselves as thirteen independent sovereign states, no longer under British rule. -
The Battle of Yorktown
The Battle of Yorktown ending on October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virginia, was a victory by American Continental Army led by General George Washington and French Army led by the Comte de Rochambeau over a British Army commanded by General Charles Cornwallis. The culmination of the Yorktown campaign proved to be the last major battle of the American Revolutionary War, as the surrender and capture of Cornwallis and his army prompted the British government to negotiate an end to the conflict. -
The Constitutional Convention
The Constitutional Convention (also known as the Philadelphia Convention, the Federal Convention, or the Grand Convention at Philadelphia) took place from May 25 to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. -
The invention of the cotton gin
In 1794, U.S.-born inventor Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber. -
The Alien and Sedition Acts
The Alien and Sedition Acts were four bills passed by the Federalist-dominated 5th United States Congress and signed into law by President John Adams in 1798. They made it harder for an immigrant to become a citizen (Naturalization Act), allowed the president to imprison and deport non-citizens who were deemed dangerous (Alien Friends Act) or who were from a hostile nation (Alien Enemy Act), and criminalized making false statements that were critical of the federal government (Sedition Act). -
The Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase (French: Vente de la Louisiane "Sale of Louisiana") was the acquisition of the Louisiana territory (828,000 square miles or 2.14 million km²) by the United States from France in 1803. The U.S. -
The War of 1812
The War of 1812 (1812–1815) was a conflict fought between the United States, the United Kingdom, and their respective allies. Historians in Britain often see it as a minor theater of the Napoleonic Wars; in the United States and Canada, it is seen as a war in its own right. -
The Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise is the title generally attached to the legislation passed by the 16th United States Congress on May 8, 1820. The measures provided for the admission of Maine as a state along with Missouri as a slave state, thus maintaining the balance of power between North and South. -
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 between incumbent President John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson, who won a plurality of the electoral college vote in the 1824 election. -
The Trail of Tears
The Trail of Tears was a series of forced removals of Native American nations from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to an area west of the Mississippi River that had been designated as Indian Territory. Started in 1830 and ended in 1850. -
The invention of the telegraph
The telegraph, became the first form of electrical telecommunications. In a matter of decades after their creation in the 1830s, electrical telegraph networks permitted people and commerce to transmit messages across both continents and oceans almost instantly, with widespread social and economic impacts. -
The Panic of 1837
The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices, and wages went down while unemployment went up. Pessimism abounded during the time. On May 10, 1837, banks in New York City suspended specie payments, meaning that they would no longer redeem commercial paper in specie at full face value. Despite a brief recovery in 1838. Banks collapsed, businesses failed, prices declined, and thousands of workers lost their jobs. -
The Mexican-American War
The Mexican–American War, also known as the Mexican War and in Mexico the American intervention in Mexico, was an armed conflict between the United States of America and Mexico from 1846 to 1848. It followed in the wake of the 1845 American annexation of the independent Republic of Texas, which Mexico still considered its northeastern province and a part of its territory after its de facto secession in the 1836 Texas Revolution a decade earlier. -
The Compromise of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850, which defused a four-year political confrontation between slave and free states on the status of territories acquired during the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). -
The Firing on Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter is a sea fort in Charleston, South Carolina.
The First Battle of Fort Sumter began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery fired on the Union garrison. These were the first shots of the war. The fort had been cut off from its supply line and surrendered the next day. -
The Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation, or Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. It changed the federal legal status of more than 3 million enslaved people in the designated areas of the South from slave to free. -
The Organization of Standard Oil Trust
The Standard Oil Trust was formed in 1863 by John D. Rockefeller. He built up the company through 1868 to become the largest oil refinery firm in the world. 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. -
13th, 14th, 15th Amendments
The Reconstruction Amendments are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, adopted between 1865 and 1870, the five years immediately following the Civil War. -
Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse
The Surrender of Appomattox Court House, occurred in the parlor of the house owned by Wilmer McLean on the afternoon of April 9th. On April 12th, a formal ceremony marked the disbandment of the Army of Northern Virginia with the parole of its nearly 28,000 remaining officers and men, free to return home with their horses and officers with their side arms. This event triggered a series of subsequent surrenders across the South signaling the end of the four year long war. -
Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was assassinated by well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, while attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. Shot in the head as he watched the play, Lincoln died the following day at 7:22 a.m., in the Petersen House opposite the theater. He was the first American president to be assassinated; his funeral and burial marked an extended period of national mourning. -
Andrew Johnson’s Impeachment
On February 24, 1868 three days after Johnson's dismissal of Stanton, the House of Representatives voted 126 to 47 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. -
The Pullman and Homestead Strikes
Homestead strike, a bitterly fought labor dispute. On June 29, 1892, workers belonging to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck the Carnegie Steel Company at Homestead, Pa. to protest a proposed wage cut. -
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 United States intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. -
The invention of the electric light, telephone, and airplane
This marked the start of the 19th century with the light bulb making in door lighting easier then ever, The telephone making communications around the world quick and The airplane almost ready to make travel take hours where it used to be days to months. -
Theodore Roosevelt becomes president
The presidency of Theodore Roosevelt began on September 14, 1901, when he became the 26th President of the United States and ended on March 4, 1909.