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1492
Christopher Columbus
An Italian explorer sailing for Spain who believed that Asia (India) could be reached by sailing west from Europe. His first voyage was in 1492, wherein he discovered North America (Caribbean islands) and named it the West Indies. He will make four voyages to the new world without fully realizing what he had discovered. -
1518
Middle Passage
Middle Passage, the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. It was a trading triangle that took goods (weapons, food, etc) which spread out from from Europe to Africa, Africans to work as slaves in the Americas and West Indies. -
Jamestown Colony
Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement started in the United states, located near the town now called Williamsburg Virginia. The colony was a private venture, financed and organized. by the Virginia Company of London, it was founded by Christopher Newport who led the finding of the Colony and settlement area. -
Plymouth Colony
During the reign of King James 1 I, a group of approximately 100 people, English men and women now known as Pilgrims, were sent to America on the Mayflower, it took them two months to get there, it landed in present day Massachusetts. Late Decembers, they anchored at Plymouth Rock, most settlers died during this winter. -
New England Colony
The New England Colony, was made out of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, they were the first discovered states, of the united states. -
Massachusetts Bay Colony
A colony settled by a 1000 Puritan refugees, from England under Gov. John Winthrop, -
Middle Colony
King Charles II gave territory between, New England and Virginia, in 1680 the kind gave William Penn, 45,000 miles of the Delaware river, that then became the Penn Colony. Most people came to the Penn Colony from Europe because of their fertile lands, most emigrants paid their way to the Colonies. -
Southern Colony
The Southern Colony was from Virginia to Florida, they had a lot of plantation workers and owners, they mainly produced corn and cotton. The Southern Colony split South Carolina and North Carolina, in 1729. -
Great Awakening
The Great Awakening was a religious revival in the British American Colonies, part of a religious ferment that swept all over, Western Europe. It represented a reaction against the increasing, secularization of society and against the corporate, and materialistic nature. -
French and Indian War
Also known as the Seven Years' War, a struggle between Britain and France, when France's expansion into the Ohio River valley brought repeated conflict with the claims of the British colonies, a series of battles led to the official British to war with France. -
Stamp act
first British parliamentary attempt to raise revenue through direct taxation(papers, newspapers, etc) it was a main effect towards the Pontiac’s War, also led too the frontier settlements added new defense burdens resulting from Great Britain’s victory. -
Boston Massacre
There was an attempt to recoup the considerable treasure expended in the defense of its North American colonies during the French and Indian War, the British Parliament enacted strict provisions for the collection of revenue duties in the colonies. -
Boston Tea Party
Something happened where 342 chests of tea belonging to the British were thrown from ships into Boston Harbor by American patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians. They were protesting the tax, and tea, they raised such a storm they dropped the act raising the taxes. -
Battles of Lexington and Concord
British and American, marking the beginning of the American Revolution. Acting on orders from London to suppress the rebellious colonists. -
American Revolutionary War
American Revolution, also called United States War of Independence or American Revolutionary War, North American Colonies won their right to independence, and went to then become The United States of America, The war followed more than a decade of growing estrangement between the British crown and a segment of its North American colonies that was caused by British attempts to assert greater control over colonial affairs. -
Bill of Rights
Drafted chiefly by George Mason, besides being axioms of government, the guarantees in the Bill of Rights have binding legal force, it is controlled by the Acts of Congress in conflict with them may be voided by the U.S. Supreme Court. -
Declaration of Independence
This announced that on July 4th, 1776 that America was leaving the British, and they did break away from British now it is celebrated every year as The 4th of July. -
Valley Forge
In the American Revolution, Pennsylvania encampment grounds of the Continental Army under General George Washington, following the American failures at the nearby battles of Brandywine and Germantown, Washington led 11,000 regulars, going on to fight the war Washington, soon won the war, and gained Independence. -
Battle of Yorktown
American force and its French allies at the Battle of Yorktown on October 19, 1781, it was more then just a win at the time, it was showing how strong America was getting during all this time if fighting, it was the last biggest battle that America had to face, they went in and fought through hard times. -
Article of Confederation
It was a convention that drew up the Constitution of the United States, they produced radical political movements. -
Constitutional Convention
It was the convention that drew up the Constitution of the United States, mainly based off their money problems at the time, which produced radical political movements, they demanded a stronger government to run the country. -
Industrial Revolution
The transition from an agricultural to an Industrial Economy, and begun in Britain during the mid-18th century, but the American colonies lagged far behind the mother country in part because the abundance of land and scarcity of labor in the New World. -
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Territory had been the object of Old World interest for many years before 1803, France had control over the river and title to most of the Mississippi valley, Jefferson was the one who bought it in the end. -
Lewis and Clark Expedition
led by Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lieut. William Clark, to explore the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific Northwest, U.S. Pres. Thomas Jefferson sent a secret message to Congress asking for $2,500, The proposed trip took on added significance on May 2, when the United States agreed to the Louisiana Purchase. -
War of 1812
Conflict fought between the United States and Great Britain over British violations of U.S. maritime rights. It ended with the exchange of ratification of the Treaty of Ghent. -
Missouri Compromise
U.S. history, measure worked out between the North and the South and passed by the U.S. Congress that allowed for admission of Missouri, it was marked as the beginning of the prolonged sectional conflict over the extension of slavery that led to the American Civil War. -
Election of 1824
American presidential election held in 1824, in which John Quincy Adams was elected by the House of Representatives after Andrew Jackson won the most popular and electoral votes but failed to receive a majority. -
Indian Removal Act
First major legislative departure from the U.S. policy of officially respecting the legal and political rights of the American Indians, Indian tribes unsettled western prairie land in exchange for their desirable territories within state borders, the rapid settlement of land east of the Mississippi River made it clear by the mid-1820s that the white man would not tolerate the presence of even peaceful Indians there. -
Battle of the Alamo
The Battle of the Alamo during Texas’ war for independence from Mexico, a group of Texan volunteer soldiers had occupied the Alamo, a Mexican force numbering in the thousands and led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna began a siege of the fort. -
Mexican-American war
Mexican-American War, also called Mexican War, Spanish Guerra de 1848, between the United States and Mexico, stemming from the United States’ annexation of Texas, of Mexican territory extending westward from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean. -
Underground Railroad / Harriet Tubman
A system existing in the Northern states before the Civil War by which escaped slaves from the South were secretly helped by sympathetic Northerners, in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Acts, to reach places of safety in the North or in Canada. Though neither underground nor a railroad, it was thus named because its activities had to be carried out in secret, thus creating the underground railroads by creating rails along the old slave roads. -
Compromise of 1850
in U.S. history, a series of measures proposed by the “great compromiser,” Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, and passed by the U.S. Congress in an effort to settle several outstanding slavery issues and to avert the threat of dissolution of the Union. -
California Gold Rush
Rapid income fortune seekers in California that came after the gold was found by Sutter’s Mill, 300,000 people came to the area during the Gold Rush. John Sutter was having a water-powered sawmill built along the American River in Coloma, California, James W. Marshall, found flakes of gold, in 1848. -
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe, published an abolitionist novel, it had a wide popularity, particularly among white readers in the North, by vividly dramatizing the experience of slavery. -
Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott decision, formally Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court, that a slave (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States, the Missouri Compromise which had declared free all territories west of Missouri and north. -
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Lincoln-Douglas debates, series of seven debates between the Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas and Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln, where he gave one of the best speeches to this day still remembered to this day, they were going neck to neck about the "Missouri compromise," fighting for all slaves rights. -
Bleeding Kansas
small civil war in the United States, fought between pro-slavery and antislavery advocates for control of the new territory of Kansas, as Kansas was in between all the non-slavery and pro-slavery states causing a battle in the state of Kansas, fighting for slaves rights. -
Fort Sumter
South Carolina seceded from the Union. Five days later, 68 federal troops stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, withdrew to Fort Sumter, an island in Charleston Harbor. -
Confederate States of America
Confederate States of America, also called Confederacy, in the American Civil War, the government of 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union, carrying on all the affairs of a separate government and conducting a major war until defeated in the spring of 1865. -
Emancipation Proclamation
Emancipation Proclamation, edict issued by U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, that freed the slaves of the Confederate states in rebellion against the Union. North had been primarily concerned merely with stopping the extension of slavery into western territories that would eventually achieve statehood within the Union. -
Gettysburg Address
Gettysburg Address, world-famous speech delivered by U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln at the dedication, of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of one of the decisive battles of the American Civil War. -
Battle of Gettysburg
Major engagement in the American Civil War, that was a crushing Southern defeat, After defeating the Union forces of Gen. Joseph Hooker at Chancellorsville, Virginia, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee decided to invade the North in hopes of further discouraging the enemy. -
Appomattox
Battle of Appomattox Court House, one of the final battles of the American Civil War. After a week-long flight westward from Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee briefly engaged Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant before surrendering to the Union at Appomattox Court House. This signaled the beginning of the end of the protracted Civil War. -
Manifest Destiny
in U.S. history, the supposed inevitability of the continued territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States, Oregon Country, Texas, New Mexico, and California. The purchase of Alaska after the Civil War briefly revived the concept of Manifest Destiny. -
Civil War
American Civil War, also called War Between the States, four-year war between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America, the secession of the Southern states (in chronological order, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina) -
Abolitionist
Abolitionism, also called abolition movement, in western Europe and the Americas, the movement chiefly responsible for creating the emotional climate necessary for ending the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery.