History
• 1607: Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, is established by the London Company in southeast Virginia
• 1773: Boston Tea Party: Group of colonial patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians board three ships in Boston harbor and dump more than 300 crates of tea overboard as a protest against the British tea tax
• 1776: The signing of the Declaration of Independence
• 1775-1783: American Revolution: War of independence fought between Great Britain and the 13 British colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America. Battles of Lexington and Concord, Mass., between the British Army and colonial minutemen, mark the beginning of the war
• 1791: First ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, are ratified
• 1812: War of 1812
• 1848-1855: Californian Gold Rush
• 1861-1865: Civil War: Conflict between the North (the Union) and the South (the Confederacy) over the expansion of slavery into western states.
• 1865: The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude
• 1865: Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
• 1867: US purchase Alaska from Russia
• 1886: Statue of Liberty is dedicated
• 1914-18: World War I
• 1920: Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which guaranteed women the right to vote.
• 1929 – The stock market crash (Black Friday), and the start of the Great Depression
• 1939-1945: World War II
• 1941 : the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that brought America into World War II
• 1945: the U.S. dropped the nuclear weapons on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9.
• 1947-57: Anti-Communist McCarthy Witch Hunt
• 1949: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is established
• 1959: Alaska becomes the 49th state (Jan. 3) and Hawaii becomes the 50th (Aug. 21).
• 1963: Assassination of president John F Kennedy
• 1969: Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to land on the Moon
• 2003: Space shuttle Columbia explodes upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board
• 2008 – America elected its first African-American President, Barack Obama.