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500 BCE
the Invention of Cotton Gin
A cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, allowing for much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. The fibers are then processed into various cotton goods such as linens, while any undamaged cotton is used largely for textiles like clothing. Seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil. -
Oct 12, 1494
The Discovery of America by Columbus
Christopher Columbus traveled the oceans and thought he was in Asia when he was really in America. He also thought he was the first one there but the indians had discovered it first. Remembering this part of history is very important because a lot of the indians were treated poorly. -
The settlement of Jamestown
Three ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, the Discovery. !04 english men arrived in North America to start a settlement and picked jamestown, Virgina named after king james. It was the first english settlement. -
The French and Indian War
Also known as the Seven Years War. A new world conflict. It pitted the colonies of British America against those of New France. Frances expansion of the Ohio river valley cause conflict with british colonies. -
The Boston Tea Party
An act of American colonial defiance it was a protest against taxation. They were looking to boost the troubled India Company. Charleston, New York, and Philadephia were not accepting tea shipments. -
The Battle of Lexington and Concord
First Revolutionary battle at Lexington and Concord. It was when the British troops were sent to confiscate colonial weapons and they ran into an untrained and angry miltia -
The Declaration of Independence
On the evening of July 9, 1776, thousands of Continental soldiers who had come from Boston to defend New York City from the British marched to the parade grounds in Lower Manhattan. General George Washington had ordered them to assemble promptly at six o'clock to hear a declaration approved by the Continental Congress calling for American independence from Great Britain. -
The Battle of Yorktown
On this day in 1781, General George Washington, commanding a force of 17,000 French and Continental troops, begins the siege known as the Battle of Yorktown against British General Lord Charles Cornwallis and a contingent of 9,000 British troops at Yorktown, Virginia, in the most important battle of the Revolutionary War. -
The Constitutional Convention
The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia met between May and September of 1787 to address the problems of the weak central government that existed under the Articles of Confederation. The United States Constitution that emerged from the convention established a federal government with more specific powers, including those related to conducting relations with foreign governments. -
The Alien and Sedition Acts
Signed into law by President John Adams in 1798, the Alien and Sedition Acts consisted of four laws passed by the Federalist-controlled Congress as America prepared for war with France. ... An Act Respecting Alien Enemies. An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States (Sedition Act) -
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. Part or all of 15 states were eventually created from the land deal, -
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 Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise was an effort by Congress to defuse the sectional and political rivalries triggered by the request of Missouri late in 1819 for admission as a state in which slavery would be permitted. At the time, the United States contained twenty-two states, evenly divided between slave and free. -
the Andrew Jackson 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 Invention of the Telegraph
Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse (1791-1872) and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. In addition to helping invent the telegraph, Samuel Morse developed a code (bearing his name) that assigned a set of dots and dashes to each letter of the English alphabet and allowed for the simple transmission of complex messages across telegraph lines -
the Panic of 1837
The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that touched off a major recession that lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices, and wages went down while unemployment went up. Pessimism abounded during the time. -
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 -
The Mexican American War
The Mexican–American War, also known as the Mexican War, the U.S.–Mexican War, the U.S.–Mexico War and in Mexico the American Intervention in Mexico or United States-Mexico War, was an armed conflict -
The invention of the electric light, telephone, and airplane
The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, was born in Scotland in 1847, the same year as Thomas Edison. He went to university in Edinburgh and London, then immigrated to Canada in 1870 and to the U.S. a year later. There he used visible speech (a type of phonetic notation that shows the position of the throat, mouth, and tongue to make different sounds) to teach deaf-mute people how speak. -
The Compromise of 1850
Senator Henry Clay introduced a series of resolutions on January 29, 1850, in an attempt to seek a compromise and avert a crisis between North and South. As part of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was amended and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., was abolished. -
The Firing of Fort Sumter
The Battle of Fort Sumter was the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina by the Confederate States Army, and the return gunfire and subsequent surrender by the United States Army that started the American Civil War. -
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. -
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 Theatre in Washington, D.C., just as the American Civil War was drawing to a close.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.His funeral and burial began an extended period of national mourning. -
Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse
On April 9, 1865, near the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. Days earlier, Lee had abandoned the Confederate capital of Richmond and the city of Petersburg; his goal was to rally the remnants of his beleaguered troops, meet Confederate reinforcements in North Carolina and resume fighting -
Andrew Johnsons 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 Organization of Standard Oil Trust
Standard Oil Trust organized. John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil Trust by trading stockholders' shares for trust certificates. The trust was designed to allow Rockefeller and other Standard Oil stockholders to get around state laws prohibiting one company from owning stock in another. -
13th, 14th, 15th Amendments
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, known collectively as the Civil War Amendments, were designed to ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves.
The 13th Amendment banned slavery and all involuntary servitude, except in the case of punishment for a crime. -
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, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. An 1889 strike had won the steelworkers a favorable three-year contract; but by 1892 Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the union. -
The Spanish-American War
The Spanish–American War was a conflict fought between Spain and the United States in 1898. Hostilities began in the aftermath of the internal explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in Cuba leading . -
Theodore Roosevelt becomes president
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was an American statesman, author, explorer, soldier, naturalist, and reformer who served as the 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909.
