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The centrality of the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the developments of the 1770s is self-evident. From the Boston Tea Party to the shot heard round the world, Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware, and the Valley Forge winter, the American Revolution’s pursuit of liberty was made meaningful by the founding document of the great American experiment in democracy.
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With the war won, independence secured, and the Articles of Confederation proving inadequate, the Founding Fathers laid down the law by which the new country would be governed in the elegantly crafted Constitution, which, depending upon one’s perspective, was meant to either evolve to meet changing circumstances or to be strictly interpreted to adhere to the Founders’ “original intent.”
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George Washington sent troops to western Pennsylvania
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U.S. President Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from the french for 27 million dollars.
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On January 8th, 1815 an army under the command of Andrew Jackson defeated British forces even though the war of 1812 already ended.
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President James Monroe articulated a set of principles in 1823 that would eventually be called the Monroe Doctrine.
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despite the careful propagation of his image as a champion of popular democracy and as a man of the people, Andrew Jackson was much more likely to align himself with the influential not with the, with the creditor not with the debtor. Jacksonian democracy talked a good game for people on the street but delivered little.
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Signed on February 2, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought to a close the Mexican-American War (1846–48) and seemingly fulfilled the Manifest Destiny of the United States championed by Pres. James K. Polk by adding 525,000 square miles (1,360,000 square km) of formerly Mexican land to the U.S. territory.
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The 1850s were awash in harbingers of the American Civil War to come—from the Compromise of 1850, which temporarily forestalled North-South tensions, to John Brown’s Harpers Ferry Raid, which ramped them up. Arguably, though, by stoking abolitionist indignation in an increasingly polarized country, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision set the table for the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as president, which ultimately precipitated secession and war.
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In July 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, in the small Pennsylvania crossroads town of Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee’s invading Army of Northern Virginia sustained a defeat so devastating that it sealed the fate of the Confederacy and its “peculiar institution.” Within two years the war was over, and before the end of the decade the South was temporarily transformed by Reconstruction.
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While the country celebrated its anniversary at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, on June 25, 1876, the 7th Cavalry under the command of Col. George Armstrong Custer was vanquished by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors led by Sitting Bull in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Although it was a major victory for the Northern Plains people against U.S. expansionism, the battle marked the beginning of the end of Native American sovereignty over the West.
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The Wealth started concentrating practices of "robber barons" who oversaw the burst of industrial activity and welcomed growth and change.
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With the end of reconstruction in the 1870's the enactment of Jim Crow Laws enforced racial segregation in the south. In its 7-1 decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the Supreme Court Gave laws to achieve racial segregation.
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In 1902 U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt pursued the Progressive goal of curbing the enormous economic and political power of the giant corporate trusts by resurrecting the nearly defunct Sherman Antitrust Act to bring a lawsuit that led to the breakup of a huge railroad conglomerate, the Northern Securities Company (ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1904). Roosevelt pursued this policy of “trust-busting” by initiating suits against 43 other major corporations during the next seven years
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Many Americans including president Woodrow Wilson remain determined to avoid involvement. The sinking of the British ocean liner the Lusitania by the Germans prompted the U.S. to join the war.
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“The chief business of the American people is business,” U.S. Pres. Calvin Coolidge said in 1925. And with the American economy humming during the “Roaring Twenties” (the Jazz Age), peace and prosperity reigned in the United States…until it didn’t. The era came to a close in October 1929 when the stock market crashed, setting the stage for years of economic deprivation and calamity during the Great Depression.
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