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Leif Erikson first landed in Vinland in 1000 AD. He and the Norse Vikings explored that area about 500 years before Christopher Columbus's voyage.
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William's defeat of King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings marked the beginning of a new era in British history.
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The Magna Carta was a charter promising protection of church rights, protection for barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the crown.
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Columbus led his three ships - the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria - out of Palos on August 3. His goal was to sail until he reached Asia, where he hoed to find gold, pearls, and spices.
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In the summer of 1497, Cabot crossed the Atlantic and discovered North America. He was a citizen of Venice.
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The Protestant Reformation was the 16th-century religious, political, intellectual and cultural upheaval that splintered Catholic Europe, setting in place the structures and beliefs that would define the continent in the modern era.
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Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. It was considered the capital of Virginia for 83 years.
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The House of Burgesses was the first legislative assembly of elected representatives is North America.
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The pilgrims came two America on the Mayflower, the voyage taking over two months.
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The Puritans did not break with the Church of England, but instead sought to reform it.
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The immediate cause of the rebellion was Governor William Berkeley's recent refusal to retaliate for a series of Native American attacks on frontier settlements. In addition, many colonists wished to push westward to claim Indian frontier land, but they were denied permission by Gov. Berkeley.
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The Great Awakening was an evangelical and revitalization movement that swept Protestant Europe and British America, and especially the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American Protestantism.
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The Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe.
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The war pitted the colonies of British America against those of New France, with both sides supported by military units from their parent countries of Great Britain and France, as well as by Native American allies.
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The Proclamation of 1763 was issued October 7, 1763, by King George III. The proclamation forbade all settlement past a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains.
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The Stamp Act was an act of the British Parliament in 1756 that exacted revenue from the American colonies by imposing a stamp duty on newspapers and legal and commercial documents.
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The Townshend Acts were a series of acts passed — beginning in 1767 — by the Parliament of Great Britain relating to the British colonies in North America.
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The Boston Massacre was an incident in which British Army soldiers killed five male civilians and injured six others.
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The Boston Tea Party was a political protest against the British Tea Act. Several colonists dressed as Indians and destroyed tea from the East India Tea Company.
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A meeting of delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies.
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Salutary neglect is an American history term that refers to the unofficial, long-term seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Crown policy of avoiding strict enforcement of parliamentary laws meant to keep American colonies obedient to England.
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The Second Continental Congress was a convention of delegates from the Thirteen Colonies that started meeting in the summer of 1775, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that, soon after warfare, declared the American Revolutionary War had begun.
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The Declaration was adopted by the second Continental Congress meeting, announcing that the thirteen colonies regarded themselves as newly independent states, and were no longer under British rule.
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The Treaty of Paris was a treaty signed by King George III and America ending the Revolutionary War.
