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Aug 3, 1492
The Discovery of America by Columbus
The explorer Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain: in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502. He was determined to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia, but he never did. Instead, he accidentally stumbled upon the Americas. Though he did not really “discover” the New World–millions of people already lived there–his journeys marked the beginning of centuries of trans-Atlantic conquest and colonization. if he was never determined we would've never been found. -
The Settlement of Jamestown
On May 14, 1607, a group of roughly 100 members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded settlement in North America on the banks of the James River. brought Jamestown to the brink of failure before the arrival of a new group of settlers and supplies in 1610.Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, was founded in 1607.Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America.Many of its colonists died during the first few difficult years -
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The French and Indian War
Also known as the Seven Years’ War, this New World conflict marked another chapter in the long imperial 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 declaration of war in 1756. -
The Boston Tea Party
This famed act of American colonial defiance served as a protest against taxation. Seeking to boost the troubled East India Company, British Parliament adjusted import duties with the passage of the Tea Act in 1773.On the night of December 16, 1773, Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty boarded three ships in the Boston harbor and threw 342 chests of tea overboard.The Boston Tea Party was not the first act of harmless rebellion.Hancock wanted to do something about the new taxes that Parliament. -
The Battle of Lexington and Concord
The Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought on April 19, 1775. On the night of April 18 hundreds of British troops marched from Boston to nearby Concord in order to seize an arms cache. A confrontation on the Lexington town green started off the fighting, and soon the British were hastily retreating under intense fire. Many more battles followed, and in 1783 the colonists formally won their independence.The significance of these battles was they were the1st battles of the Revolutionary War. -
The Declaration of Independence
When armed conflict between bands of American colonists&British soldiers began in April 1775,In mid-June 1776, a five-man committee was tasked with drafting a formal statement of the colonies’ intentions. The Congress formally adopted the DI written largely by Jefferson in Philadelphia on July 4, a date now celebrated as the birth of American independence.it signifies the birth of a nation,instructs free citizens&provides hope for all people who want to be free. -
The Battle of Yorktown
September 28, Washington had completely encircled Cornwallis and Yorktown with the combined forces of Continental and French troops. After three weeks of non-stop bombardment, both day and night, from cannon and artillery, Cornwallis surrendered to Washington in the field at Yorktown on October 17, 1781, effectively ending the War for Independence. It is considered the last major land battle of the American Revolutionary War -
The Constitutional Convention
In May delegates representing every state except Rhode Island convened at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House for the Constitutional Convention. The building, which is now known as Independence Hall, had earlier seen the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the signing of the Articles of Confederation.Revolutionary War hero George Washington, a delegate from Virginia, was elected convention president. this certain hall was helpful because very important decisions were made here -
The Alien and Sedition Acts
The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by Congress in 1798,preparation for an anticipated war with France The subsequent Sedition Act banned the publishing of scandalous or malicious writings against the government.The acts were designed by Federalists to limit the power of the opposition Republican Party, but enforcement ended after Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1800.What it did: lengthened citizenship residence requirements from 5 to14 years old;as a result it weaken republicans -
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. By the mid-19th century, cotton had become America’s leading export. Despite its success, the gin made little money for Whitney due to patent-infringement issues. -
The Louisiana Purchase
With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the United States purchased approximately 828,000,000 square miles of territory from France, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. What was known as Louisiana Territory stretched from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Canadian border in the north. -
The Missouri Compromise
In the years leading up to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, tensions began to rise between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions within the U.S. Congress and across the country.Congress orchestrated a two-part compromise, granting Missouri’s request but also admitting Maine as a free state. It also passed an amendment that drew an imaginary line across the former Louisiana Territory, establishing a boundary between free and slaves -
The War of 1812
n the War of 1812, the United States took on the greatest naval power in the world, Great Britain, in a conflict that would have an immense impact on the young country’s future. Causes of the war included British attempts to restrict U.S. trade, the Royal Navy’s impressment of American seamen and America’s desire to expand its territory. The United States suffered many costly defeats at the hands of British, Canadian and Native American troops over the course of the War of 1812 -
Andrew Jackson’s Election
After narrowly losing to John Quincy Adams in the contentious 1824 presidential election, Jackson returned four years later to win redemption, soundly defeating Adams and becoming the nation’s seventh president (1829-1837). As America’s political party system developed, Jackson became the leader of the new Democratic Party. -
The Firing on Fort SumterFort
Fort Sumter is an island fortification located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Originally constructed in 1829 as a coastal garrison, Fort Sumter is most famous for being the site of the first shots of the Civil War. U.S. Major Robert Anderson occupied the unfinished fort in December 1860 following South Carolina’s secession from the Union, initiating a standoff with the state’s militia forces. -
The Trail of Tears
At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida–land.Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians’ land, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk thousands of miles to a specially designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River. This difficult and sometimes deadly journey is known as the Trail of Tears. -
The Panic of 1837
The early 1830s was a time of expansion and prosperity. Much of the growth in these years had been fueled by the widespread construction of new railroads and canals. Millions of acres of public lands were sold by the government, mostly to speculators. Their hope was to purchase well-located parcels that would increase in value as the railroads and canals brought settlers and traffic into their areas. -
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The Mexican-American War
The Mexican-American War marked the first U.S. armed conflict chiefly fought on foreign soil. It pitted a politically divided and militarily unprepared Mexico against the expansionist-minded administration of U.S. President James K. Polk, who believed the United States had a “manifest destiny” to spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. -
The invention of the electric light, telephone, and airplane
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), the Scottish-born American scientist best known as the inventor of the telephone, worked at a school for the deaf while attempting to invent a machine that would transmit sound by electricity. Bell was granted the first official patent for his telephone in March 1876, though he would later face years of legal challenges to his claim that he was its sole inventor, resulting in one of history’s longest patent battles. -
The Compromise of 1850
Divisions over slavery in territory gained in the Mexican-American. War were resolved in the Compromise of 1850. It consisted of laws admitting California as a free state, creating Utah and New Mexico territories with the question of slavery in each to be determined by popular sovereignty, settling a Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute in the former’s favor, ending the slave trade in Washington,D.C.,and making it easier for southerners to recover fugitive slaves. -
The Emancipation Proclamation
When the American Civil War began, President Abraham Lincoln carefully framed the conflict as concerning the preservation of the Union rather than the abolition of slavery. Although he personally found the practice of slavery abhorrent, he knew that neither Northerners nor the residents of the border slave states would support abolition. But by mid-1862, as thousands of slaves fled to join the invading Northern armies, Lincoln was convinced that abolition had become a sound military strategy. -
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. -
Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination
On the evening of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer, assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War. -
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13th, 14th, 15th Amendments
The13th,14th,and15th Amendments were made to ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves.The 13thAmendment banned slavery&all involuntary servitude,except in the case of punishment for a crime.The 14thAmendment defined a citizen as any person born in or naturalized in the US overturning DredScottSandford Supreme Court ruling stating that Blacks weren't eligible for citizenship.The 15thAmendment prohibited govts from denyingU.S.citizens the right to vote based on race,color,or past servitude. -
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. -
Andrew Johnson’s Impeachment
The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson occurred in 1868, when the United States House of Representatives resolved to impeach President Andrew Johnson, adopting eleven articles of impeachment detailing his high crimes and misdemeanors, in accordance with Article Two of the United States Constitution. The House's primary charge against Johnson was with violation of the Tenure of Office Act, passed by Congress the previous year. -
The Pullman and Homestead Strikes
The Homestead strike, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, pitted one of the most powerful new corporations, Carnegie Steel Company, against the nation’s strongest trade union. An 1889 strike had won the steelworkers a favorable three-year contract; but by 1892 Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the union. His plant manager, Henry Frick, stepped up production demands, and when the union refused to accept the new conditions, Frick began locking the workers out of the plant. -
The Spanish-American War
Spain declared war on the United States on April 24, followed by a U.S. declaration of war on the 25th, which was made retroactive to April 21. The ensuing war was pathetically one-sided, since Spain had readied neither its army nor its navy for a distant war with the formidable power of the United States. Commo.
what it did:ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America. -
The invention of the telegraph
In the early 19th century, two developments in the field of electricity opened the door to the production of the electric telegraph. First, in 1800,the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta invented the battery, which reliably stored an electric current and allowed the current to be used in a controlled environment. Second, in 1820, the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted demonstrated the connection between electricity and magnetism by deflecting a magnetic needle with an electric current. -
Theodore Roosevelt becomes president
The rising young Republican politician Theodore Roosevelt unexpectedly became the 26th president of the United States in September 1901, after the assassination of William McKinley. Young and physically robust, he brought a new energy to the White House, and won a second term on his own merits in 1904.
