notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
A Timeline of American History
One event per line, the whole story in one column, from Columbus to the current administration. Skim, don't memorize; the point of a timeline is the shape, not the recall. Some years earn two lines and some decades get one; that's editorializing, and I stand behind it. Extended to the present in March 2020, touched up since.
1492 Columbus makes landfall in the Bahamas. He thinks he is somewhere near Japan, which tells you most of what went wrong for the next five hundred years.
1513 Ponce de León reaches Florida, looking (per the legend) for a fountain of youth, finding (per the record) the beginning of Spanish claims to the continent's southern rim.
1565 St. Augustine founded by Spain; the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in what became the United States, and the reminder that our story starts a century before 1607.
1607 Jamestown. A disastrous start (cannibalism in the winter of 1609-10, per the archaeology) that survived on tobacco and a new strain of indentured servitude.
1619 A privateer, the White Lion, lands at Point Comfort, Virginia, and sells "twenty and odd Negroes" taken from a Portuguese slave ship: the first enslaved Africans in English North America. The same summer, the colony's assembly meets, the beginning of representative government. The two facts share a year and, for a long time, not a classroom.
1620 The Mayflower lands the Separatists at Plymouth; the Mayflower Compact, forty-one signatures, governs them while it can.
1636 Harvard College founded, the same year the Pequot War begins, a pairing that tells the truth about colonial New England in one line.
1676 Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia. Frontier grievance plus resentment of the governor, and a coalition of poor white and Black bond-laborers that scared the planter class into some of the hardening racial law that followed.
1692 Salem. Nineteen hanged, one pressed to death, the math of panic in a cold winter church-state.
1735 The Zenger trial in New York: a printer acquitted of seditious libel because what he printed was true, a seed of a free press before there was a Constitution to plant it in.
1754 The French and Indian War begins, with a young George Washington very much involved and very much defeated at Fort Necessity.
1763 Britain wins. The Treaty of Paris hands her the French claims east of the Mississippi, and the Proclamation Line tries to keep colonists east of the Appalachians, about as effectively as telling water to stay in the bucket.
1765 The Stamp Act. The colonies respond with congresses, boycotts, and effigies; see the independence page for the whole ladder.
1770 The Boston Massacre. Five dead, including Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native descent; the engraving that followed did more work than the shooting.
1773 The Tea Act and the Tea Party, 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, in roughly three hours.
1774 The Coercive (or Intolerable) Acts; the First Continental Congress. Punishment organizes the victim.
1775 Lexington and Concord, April 19: the shot nobody has ever identified. Bunker Hill in June. Washington takes command in July.
1776 Common Sense in January; the Declaration in July (adopted July 4). Paine sells the idea; Jefferson drafts the legal brief for it.
1777 Saratoga, October. An entire British army surrenders, and France takes the call.
1781 Yorktown, October 19. The French fleet seals the bay; the world's best army marches out and stacks arms.
1783 The Treaty of Paris ends the shooting and doubles the country's claims at a stroke, with the Mississippi as the western boundary.
1787 Philadelphia. Fifty-five men, shut windows, secret proceedings, a new Constitution; see the documents page.
1789 The Constitution takes effect; Washington is inaugurated in New York on April 30, having been elected unanimously, a feat nobody has managed since and everybody claims to deserve.
1791 The Bill of Rights ratified; ten amendments that mostly tell the government what it may not do.
1793 Eli Whitney's cotton gin. A machine meant to reduce the need for enslaved labor increases it beyond any previous calculation, and the nineteenth century gets its engine.
1800 The capital moves to Washington, a swamp with a plan, as everyone said except the people who had seen the plan.
1803 The Louisiana Purchase. Fifteen million dollars, 828,000 square miles; Jefferson exercises a constitutional power he did not believe he had, to the lasting benefit of everyone but the people already living there.
1812-15 The War of 1812. The White House burns; Fort McHenry holds and produces the anthem; New Orleans is won after the treaty is signed, in a war that settled almost nothing and convinced the country it had won it.
1819 The Panic of 1819, the new country's first big one; also the Adams-Onís treaty, which adds Florida and fixes a western line.
1820 The Missouri Compromise: Missouri slave, Maine free, a line at 36°30' drawn across the continent like a bandage over a wound nobody would name.
1823 The Monroe Doctrine warns Europe off the hemisphere. Bold, given that the muscle behind the warning was mostly the British navy.
1830 The Indian Removal Act.
1831 Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia; Garrison starts The Liberator in Boston. The year slavery's future stopped being discussable in the abstract.
1836 Texas declares independence, the Alamo falls; also the Gag Rule in the House, banning any petition about slavery, a fine free-speech precedent for the century to come.
1838 The Trail of Tears. The Cherokee removal that killed something like a quarter of them on the way west, under treaty signed at gunpoint and honored by nobody who had the power to honor it.
1845 Texas annexed.
1846-48 War with Mexico. A land war that acquired California and the Southwest; Grant, who fought in it, called it "one of the most unjust" wars ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation, and he was in a position to know.
1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; gold at Sutter's Mill in January; the Seneca Falls convention in July. A big year, and it only looks like an accident that the manifesto and the gold rush share it.
1850 The Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act; a truce that put Northern marshals in the man-catching business, see the Civil War page.
1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin. The best-selling novel of the century; a book that made the argument in kitchens where the newspapers could not reach.
1854 The Kansas-Nebraska Act repeals the Missouri line, and "Bleeding Kansas" follows. See essay 1.
1857 Dred Scott. Seven justices to two, the Court rules that Congress cannot bar slavery from a territory, and the last compromise door slams.
1859 John Brown at Harpers Ferry in October; hanged in December, right about what would come next.
1860 Lincoln elected with 39.8 percent; South Carolina secedes on December 20 before the year is out.
1861 Fort Sumter, April 12; eleven states out by June; Bull Run in July teaches everyone what the next four years would be.
1862 Antietam, September 17: still the bloodiest single day in American history. The Homestead Act the same year; the Emancipation's preliminaries five days after the battle.
1863 The Emancipation Proclamation on January 1; Gettysburg and Vicksburg in the same July week; the draft riots in New York the same month; the Address at Gettysburg in November.
1864 Grant takes command and fights without stopping; Atlanta falls in September; Lincoln is re-elected, which in October nobody would have bet a dime on.
1865 Appomattox, April 9; Lincoln shot on the 14th, dead on the 15th; the Thirteenth Amendment ratified in December.
1867 Alaska, from Russia, for $7.2 million. Seward's Folly, they said, until they found the gold and the oil; check the man's name if you doubt the year, that's my mnemonic and it works. Readers have caught me on this date twice, both times fairly.
1869 The transcontinental railroad completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10; a golden spike, a famous photograph, and a Chinese labor force mostly cropped out of both.
1870 The Fifteenth Amendment; Hiram Revels becomes the first Black senator, seated from Mississippi within a month, and the chamber he entered included men who had resigned from it to join the Confederacy.
1873 The Panic of 1873 begins the Long Depression; a reminder that the Gilded Age gilded unevenly.
1876 The disputed Hayes-Tilden election, and Little Bighorn in June.
1877 The Compromise of 1877 ends Reconstruction; federal troops come out of the South, and everything the next ninety years undid began.
1883 The railroads reset the clocks on November 18; the day of two noons, and my favorite essay on this site. Also the Pendleton Act, which took the post office out of the prizes cabinet.
1886 Haymarket Square, Chicago.
1890 Wounded Knee, December 29: the Indian wars end where they began, in a massacre; also the census declares the frontier line closed, and historians have been arguing about the sentence ever since.
1892 The Homestead strike; Pinkertons versus the workers, and the workers lose.
1896 Plessy v. Ferguson, "separate but equal," the law of the land for fifty-eight years. Also Bryan's cross of gold in Chicago; see the glossary.
1898 The Spanish-American War ("splendid little war," per our ambassador, who did not have to fight in it); Hawaii annexed on the way.
1901 McKinley assassinated in Buffalo; Theodore Roosevelt, forty-two, becomes president, and the century changes gears.
1903 The Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, December 17, twelve seconds the first time. Also Panama, in the same year, and the canal that followed; the two events rhyme, in that both were about shrinking distance.
1906 The Jungle, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Meat Inspection Act; Upton Sinclair aimed at the country's heart and hit its stomach, as he said first.
1909 The NAACP founded.
1912 The Titanic; a four-way presidential election with three former or future presidents in it, splitting the vote and electing Wilson.
1914 The Panama Canal opens; war breaks out in Europe, and the United States declares neutrality, sort of, on paper.
1917 The United States enters the Great War, April 6, and tips the scales; also the Espionage Act, which tips some others.
1918 The armistice, November 11; also the influenza, which killed more Americans than the war did, and did not get a memorial for a century.
1919 Versailles; the Senate rejects the League; Prohibition ratified in January, effective the next year.
1920 The Nineteenth Amendment; also the first commercial radio broadcast, KDKA in Pittsburgh, election returns. Also the census passes the line of a hundred million; the country has roughly tripled since the Civil War.
1927 Lindbergh flies the Atlantic alone; The Jazz Singer makes the movies talk. The two technologies of loneliness were both born within six months.
1929 The crash, October 29.
1933 FDR inaugurated in March ("the only thing we have to fear"); the bank holiday in his first week; the New Deal begins; Prohibition repealed in December, which kept the year honest about which emergency mattered most.
1935 Social Security, the Wagner Act, the WPA; the peak of the first hundred days' second year.
1941 Lend-Lease in March; Pearl Harbor on December 7, and the country is in the war it had been arming against since 1939.
1945 FDR dies in April; Germany surrenders in May; the atomic bombs in August; Japan surrenders in August and September; the United Nations founded, exhausted, and hoping.
1947 The Truman Doctrine in March; Jackie Robinson in April; the Marshall Plan proposed in June. A year of three beginnings, and all three argued about since.
1948 The Berlin Airlift begins; Truman wins re-election against every poll; the armed forces ordered desegregated in July, eighteen years before the rest of the country catches up.
1950 Korea, June 25; also McCarthy in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February, with a list whose number kept changing, which was the point of a list like that.
1954 Brown v. Board of Education, May 17: "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
1955 Emmett Till in August; Montgomery in December, and Rosa Parks, who was tired the way a movement is tired.
1957 Little Rock Nine; Sputnik, October 4, and the space race begins with a beeping sphere.
1960 The Greensboro sit-ins, February 1, four freshmen at a lunch counter; the election in November, decided in part on television, which the candidates had not quite figured out yet.
1962 The Cuban missile crisis in October, thirteen days; the world learns how close "close" was only decades later.
1963 The March on Washington in August ("I have a dream," from the documents page's era); Dallas on November 22.
1964 The Civil Rights Act in July; the Gulf of Tonkin in August; the Beatles in February, and not the least historical of the three.
1965 Selma in March; the Voting Rights Act in August; Medicare and Medicaid; Watts in August, burning six days after the act was signed, which told everyone what a law can and cannot do.
1968 Tet in January; Dr. King killed in April; Robert Kennedy killed in June; Apollo 8 reads Genesis from the Moon at Christmas, and it is somehow the same year.
1969 Apollo 11 in July; Woodstock in August; Stonewall in June. The ARPANET sends its first message in October, and the century quietly begins its next act.
1972 Nixon in China; the Watergate break-in in June, a third-rate burglary that ended a presidency.
1973 Roe v. Wade in January; the last troops home in March; the oil embargo in October. Also the Endangered Species Act, in a year when the country decided to protect what was left.
1974 Nixon resigns, August 8, the first president to do it.
1979 Three Mile Island in March; the Iran hostage crisis in November, 444 days.
1980 Reagan elected, and the map turns a color it had not been in a generation.
1981 The hostages freed in January (on inauguration day, to the minute); the shuttle flies in April; the air traffic controllers fired in August; MTV in August, "Video Killed the Radio Star" first, which was a documentary.
1986 Challenger, January 28; Iran-Contra in November.
1989 The Berlin Wall falls, November 9; the Exxon Valdez in March; the San Francisco earthquake in October.
1991 The Gulf War in January; the Soviet Union dissolves in December, and with it the world the timeline had run on since 1945.
1995 Oklahoma City, April 19.
2000 The election goes to the courts; Bush v. Gore in December, 537 votes in Florida.
2001 September 11; the war in Afghanistan in October.
2008 Lehman Brothers in September; the first Black president in November, both in the same quarter, and only one of them on any ballot.
2020 The pandemic; the lockdowns; an election held anyway, at record turnout, mostly by mail. Historians will write the entry; I only know what the year felt like from the kitchen table.
2021 The Capitol, January 6; a new administration inaugurated January 20. The line ends here for now, not because history stops, but because I type slowly.
Corrections are welcome and get logged here; readers have caught me several times over the years (1867, twice), and the timeline is better for it. If you are a teacher, the print stylesheet will give you the whole column on four sheets, landscape if your printer argues about the longer lines.