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On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus went down to the Bahamas, then he went to Guanahani which is now San Salvador. -
Cortes wins the war against The Aztec Empire. The war started on February 1519 to August 1521. -
104 English men and boys arrived in North America and they started a settlement on May 13 in Jamestown Virginia named after their King James I. This was the first permanent English settlement in North America. -
The first African Slaves to Virginia happened on August 20, 1619, kidnapped by the Portuguese. -
In 1629 King Charles 1 of England granted Massachusetts Bay Company a charter to trade and the settlement began in 1630. -
The Navigation Acts (1651, 1660) were acts of Parliament intended to promote the self-sufficiency of the British Empire by restricting colonial trade to England and decreasing dependence on foreign imported goods. -
William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681, King Charles II granted him a charter for over 45,000 square miles of land. -
This case of John Peter helped establish the first important victory for freedom of the press in the English Colonies of North America. -
The French and Indian War began in 1754 and ended in 1763, it was a 7-year war witH Great Britain and France. -
After Britain won the Seven Years' War and gained land in North America, it issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited American colonists from settling west of Appalachia. -
1764: Sugar Act imposes new taxes on trade; James Otis argued that taxation without representation violates colonist’s liberties -
The Stamp Act Congress passed a "Declaration of Rights and Grievances," which claimed that American colonists were equal to all other British citizens, protested taxation without representation, and stated that, without colonial representation in Parliament, Parliament could not tax colonists. -
The Stamp Act was designed to force colonists to use special stamped paper in the printing of newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and playing cards. -
Specifically, the act required that starting in the fall of 1765, legal documents and printed materials must bear a tax stamp provided by commissioned distributors who would collect the tax in exchange for the stamp. -
The campaign was to refuse to import British goods and the daughters helped by spinning cloth. -
On March 5, 1770, a crowd confronted eight British soldiers in the streets of the city. As the mob insulted and threatened them, the soldiers fired their muskets, killing five colonists. -
On April 12, 1770, the British government moves to mollify outraged colonists by repealing most of the clauses of the hated Townshend Act. -
The Boston Tea Party was a political protest that occurred on December 16, 1773, at Griffin's Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts. American colonists, frustrated and angry at Britain for imposing “taxation without representation,” dumped 342 chests of tea, imported by the British East India Company into the harbor. -
The Declaration outlined colonial objections to the Intolerable Acts, listed a colonial bill of rights, and provided a detailed list of grievances. It was similar to the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, passed by the Stamp Act Congress a decade earlier. -
The first shots were fired just after dawn in Lexington, Massachusetts and colonial militia, a band of 500 men, were outnumbered and initially forced to retreat. -
In 1775, the Second Continental Congress convened after the American Revolutionary War (1775-83) had already begun. -
On January 9, 1776, writer Thomas Paine publishes his pamphlet “Common Sense,” setting forth his arguments in favor of American independence. -
August 2, 1776, is one of the most important but least celebrated days in American history when 56 members of the Second Continental Congress started signing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. -
On March 1, 1781, the Articles of Confederation are finally ratified. The Articles were signed by Congress and sent to the individual states for ratification on November 15, 1777, after 16 months of debate.
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On October 19, 1781, British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered his army of some 8,000 men to General George Washington at Yorktown, giving up any chance of winning the Revolutionary War. -
The Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War between Great Britain and the United States, recognized American independence, and established borders for the new nation. -
The Treaty of Paris was signed by U.S. and British Representatives on September 3, 1783, ending the War of the American Revolution. Based on a a1782 preliminary treaty, the agreement recognized U.S. independence and granted the U.S. significant western territory. The 1783 Treaty was one of a series of treaties signed at Paris in 1783 that also established peace between Great Britain and the allied nations of France, Spain, and the Netherlands. -
Since America couldn't trade with Britain they then started trading with China. -
Farmers in western Massachusetts began to take direct action against debtors' courts. -
The Constitutional Convention took place from May 14 to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The point of the event was to decide how America was going to be governed. -
The constitution became now the official framework for governments and for the people in America. -
January 7, 1789, was the first election and Washington won with ease.