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Columbus and his crew set sail from Spain in three ships: the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. On October 12, the ships made landfall—not in the East Indies, as Columbus assumed, but on one of the Bahamian islands, likely San Salvador. -
On May 14, 1607, a group of roughly 100 members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River. -
Also known as the Seven Years’ War, the French and Indian war 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.
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In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor. The midnight raid, popularly known as the “Boston Tea Party,” was in protest of the British Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade. -
In Lexington, about 77 colonial militia, known as minutemen, were confronted by the British soldiers. After a shot was fired, the British fired on the minutemen, resulting in 8 colonial deaths and 10 wounded The British troops then moved on to Concord, where they found that the majority of the supplies had been removed by the colonists. -
The Declaration of Independence was the first formal statement by a nation’s people asserting their right to choose their own government. -
the final major battle of the American Revolutionary War, where American and French forces, led by George Washington and French General Rochambeau, besieged and forced the surrender of British General Charles Cornwallis's army on October 19, 1781, in Yorktown, Virginia.