US History Timeline

  • Oct 12, 1492

    The Discovery of America by Columbus

    Columbus discovers the Americas and kicks of the settlement of the new world.
  • The Settlement of Jamestown

    Jamestown is founded, and is the first permanent town in North America.
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    The French and Indian War

    The French and Indian War was a theater of the Seven Years' War, which pitted the North American colonies of the British Empire against those of the French, each side being supported by various Native American tribes.
  • The Boston Tea Party

    The Boston tea party was one of the first examples of the stubbornness and hatred that the colonists had in store for The British Empire.
  • The Battle of Lexington and Concord

    The British marched into Lexington and Concord intending to suppress the possibility of rebellion by seizing weapons from the colonists. Instead, their actions sparked the first battle of the Revolutionary War.
  • The Declaration of Independence

    The United States Declaration of Independence, formally The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, is the pronouncement and founding document adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 1776.
  • The Battle of Yorktown

    The siege of Yorktown, also known as the Battle of Yorktown, the surrender at Yorktown, or the German battle, beginning on September 28, 1781, and ending on October 19, 1781.
  • The Constitutional Convention

    The Constitutional Convention[1] took place in Philadelphia from May 25 to September 17, 1787. Although the convention was intended to revise the league of states and first system of government under the Articles of Confederation.
  • The invention of the cotton gin

    n 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.
  • The Alien and Sedition Acts

    As a result, a Federalist-controlled Congress passed four laws, known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws raised the residency requirements for citizenship from 5 to 14 years, authorized the president to deport "aliens," and permitted their arrest, imprisonment, and deportation during wartime.
  • The Louisiana Purchase

    The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition of the territory of Louisiana by the United States from the French First Republic in 1803. In return for fifteen million dollars, or approximately eighteen dollars per square mile, the United States nominally acquired a total of 828,000 sq mi.
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    The War of 1812

    The War of 1812 was fought by the United States of America and its indigenous allies against the United Kingdom and its allies in British North America, with limited participation by Spain in Florida.
  • The Missouri Compromise

    The Missouri Compromise was United States federal legislation that balanced desires of northern states to prevent expansion of slavery in the country with those of southern states to expand it.
  • Andrew Jackson’s Election

    The campaign of 1828 was a crucial event in a period that saw the development of a two-party system akin to our modern system, presidential electioneering bearing a closer resemblance to modern political campaigning, and the strengthening of the power of the executive branch.
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    The Trail of Tears

    The Trail of Tears was a series of forced displacements of approximately 60,000 Indigenous people of the "Five Civilized Tribes" between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. Part of the Indian removal, the ethnic cleansing was gradual, occurring over a period of nearly two decades.
  • The Panic of 1837

    The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis in the United States that touched off a major depression, which lasted until the mid-1840s. Profits, prices, and wages went down, westward expansion was stalled, unemployment went up, and pessimism abounded. The panic had both domestic and foreign origins.
  • The invention of the telegraph

    Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations.
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    The Mexican-American War

    The Mexican–American War, also known in the United States as the Mexican War and in Mexico as the Intervención estadounidense en México, was an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848.
  • The Compromise of 1850

    The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850 that defused a political confrontation between slave and free states on the status of territories acquired in the Mexican–American War.
  • The Firing on Fort Sumter

    The Battle of Fort Sumter was the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina by the South Carolina militia. It ended with the surrender by the United States Army, beginning the American Civil War.
  • The Organization of Standard Oil Trust

    Standard Oil Company, Inc., was an American oil production, transportation, refining, and marketing company that operated from 1870 to 1911.
  • The Emancipation Proclamation

    The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the Civil War.
  • Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse

    The Battle of Appomattox Court House, fought in Appomattox County, Virginia, on the morning of April 9, 1865, was one of the last battles of the American Civil War.
  • 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments

    The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment gave citizenship to all people born in the US. The 15th Amendment gave Black Americans the right to vote.
  • Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination

    Abraham Lincoln was an American lawyer and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865.
  • Andrew Johnson’s Impeachment

    The impeachment of Andrew Johnson was initiated on February 24, 1868, when the United States House of Representatives resolved to impeach Andrew Johnson, the 17th president of the United States, for "high crimes and misdemeanors", which were detailed in 11 articles of impeachment.
  • The invention of the electric light.

    By January 1879, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting. Still, the lamp only burned for a few short hours.
  • The invention of the telephone

    It was at this time, 1876–1877, that a new invention called the telephone emerged. It is not easy to determine who the inventor was. Both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray submitted independent patent applications concerning telephones to the patent office in Washington on February 14, 1876.
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    The Pullman and Homestead Strikes

    Two major labor strikes were the Homestead Strike and the Pullman Strike. Homestead Strike happened in Homestead, Pennsylvania. The workers from Carnegie mills went on strike because Andrew Carnegie, the head of the Carnegie Steel Company, refused to increase the wages.
  • The Spanish-American War

    The Spanish–American War was a period of armed conflict between Spain and the United States. Hostilities began in the aftermath of the internal explosion of USS Maine in Havana Harbor in Cuba, leading to United States intervention in the Cuban War of Independence.
  • Theodore Roosevelt becomes president

    The presidency of Theodore Roosevelt started on September 14, 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th president of the United States upon the assassination of President William McKinley, and ended on March 4, 1909. Roosevelt had been the vice president for only 194 days when he succeeded to the presidency.
  • The invention of the airplane

    On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made four brief flights at Kitty Hawk with their first powered aircraft. The Wright brothers had invented the first successful airplane.