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The Mystic Massacre was an attack by colonists and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies on a Pequot fort near the Mystic River on May 26, 1637, during the Pequot War. -
The Scalp Act of 1749 was not a single, specific act but rather the term for the bounty acts issued by British colonies like Massachusetts and New Hampshire during the 18th century to encourage the killing and scalping of Indigenous people, specifically Mi'kmaq and Abenaki peoples, in exchange for monetary rewards. -
The Three-Fifths Compromise was an agreement made during the 1787 Constitutional Convention that determined how enslaved people would be counted for purposes of both congressional representation and direct taxation. -
On January 1, 1808, the United States formally ended the importation of enslaved people from Africa through the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves. -
The Battle of Tippecanoe occurred on November 7, 1811, near present-day Lafayette, Indiana, where U.S. forces led by William Henry Harrison clashed with a Native American confederacy assembled by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother, "The Prophet" Tenskwatawa. -
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a legislative agreement that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state to maintain a balance of power in Congress -
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was a U.S. law signed by President Andrew Jackson that authorized the President to negotiate removal treaties with Native American tribes to exchange their ancestral lands in the East for territories west of the Mississippi River. -
Nat Turner's Rebellion was a violent slave uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, beginning on August 21, 1831, led by Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher who believed he was called by God to revolt. -
The Trail of Tears refers to the brutal forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) between 1838 and 1839 -
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was a controversial provision of the Compromise of 1850 that required federal and state officials, as well as private citizens, to assist in the capture and return of escaped enslaved people to their enslavers. -
The 1857 Dred Scott decision ruled that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, were not American citizens and therefore could not sue in federal court. -
The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, declared that enslaved people in the rebellious Confederate states were free, transforming the Civil War into a fight for freedom as well as the Union. -
The 13th Amendment, formally ratified on December 6, 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, except as a punishment for a crime. -
The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, granted African American men the right to vote by prohibiting states from denying the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. -
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, granting citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and prohibiting states from denying any person "life, liberty, or property" without due process of law or denying "equal protection of the laws". -
The Battle of Little Bighorn occurred on June 25–26, 1876, in present-day Montana, where a large coalition of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, decisively defeated Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and his 7th Cavalry. -
The Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on December 29, 1890, when U.S. Army soldiers killed an estimated 250–300 Lakota men, women, and children near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. -
Plessy v. Ferguson was an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine, providing the legal basis for Jim Crow laws for nearly 60 years.