John Adams by David McCullogh
A History of the American People by Paul Johnson
Abraham Lincoln by Lord Charnwood
Great Speeches by Native Americans
Great Speeches by American Women
Great Speeches by African Americans
Famous Documents and Speeches of the Civil War
For part of the written final, I'm supposed to memorize 100 dates from American History. The class mentor supplied half the dates and each student chooses the other half of the dates they'd like to memorize. Each student's list of 100 dates will be unique. Based on my love of books and authors, I chose a lot of book publication dates. For the curious, here is my list of 110 American History dates to memorize. When I started making my list I had about 200 dates that seemed important to me - it was tough to cut it down. I knew hardly any of these at the start of the class but I'm almost there on memorizing them all and even better, based on the books we read and discussed, these dates actually mean something to me - I know what the events were. If you were to make up a list of your own, what would it include?
1492-1599 (1-8)
1. 1492: Columbus discovered the New World
2. 1497: John Cabot begins British Colonial presence in the Americas
3. c.1514: Ponce de Leon “discovers” Florida and enslaves the inhabitants
4. 1520s: Spaniards, led by Cortes, invade and destroy ancient Mexican civilizations
5. 1539-1542: Hernando De Soto explores areas of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina
6. 1540: Chief Acuera refuses to treat with De Soto
7. 1587: Roanoke Island colony founded by Sir Walter Raleigh
8. 1590: John White finds Roanoke Island deserted
1600-1700 (9-18)
9. 1607: Jamestown colony settled
10. August 20th 1619: Yeardly and others at Jamestown purchase the first Africans as slaves.
11. November 21st 1620: Mayflower Compact
12. December 11th 1620: Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock
13. 1636: Roger Williams founds Rhode Island and Providence plantations
14. 1649-1650s: Maryland passes the Toleration Acts
15. 1675-1676: King Philip’s war
16. 1676:Bacon’s Rebellion
17. 1686-89: New England directly governed by Britain until the Glorious Revolution
18. 1692: Salem Witch Trials
1700-1799 (19 – 40)
19. 1730s-1740s: First Great Awakening led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield
20. 1754-1763: French and Indian War
21. March 5, 1770 Boston Massacre
22. December 16, 1773 Boston Tea Party
23. 1774: First Continental Congress
24. 1775-1783: American Revolutionary War
25. April 1775: Paul Revere’s Ride
26. April 19, 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord
27. June 17, 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill
28. July 4th, 1776: Declaration of Independence
29. Oct 19, 1781: Surrender of Cornwallis
30. Sep 3, 1783: Treaty of Paris
31. 1787: Constitutional Convention
32. 1787: Northwest Ordinance
33. March 4th 1789: U.S. Government under the Constitution begins
34. 1791: Bill of Rights
35. 1791: First Bank of the U.S. chartered
36. 1794: Whiskey Rebellion
37. 1795: Jay’s Treaty
38. 1798: John Adam’s signs the Alien and Sedition acts
39. 1798: XYZ Affair
40. Dec 14, 1799: Death of George Washington
1800-1899 (41-83)
41. 1803: Marbury v. Madison establishes Judicial Review
42. 1803: Lousiana Purchase
43. 1809: Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle
44. 1812-1814: War of 1812
45. 1820: Missouri Compromise
46. 1823: Monroe Doctrine
47. 1825: The Corrupt Bargain
48. 1826: James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
49. 1830: The Book of Mormon
50. 1831: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia
51. 1831: Edgar Allan Poe, Poems
52. 1832: Jackson vetoes the 2nd Bank of the US charter renewal
53. 1832: Nullification
54. 1836: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
55. 1836: McGuffey Readers
56. 1848: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
57. 1850: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
58. 1850: Fugitive Slave Law
59. 1851: Herman Melville, Moby Dick
60. 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
61. 1854: Repeal of Missouri Compromise
62. 1854: Founding of Republican Party
63. 1854: Henry David Thoreau, Walden
64. 1855: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha
65. 1855: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
66. 1857: Dred Scott decision
67. 1859: John Brown Hanged
68. Nov 6, 1860: Lincoln elected President
69. Dec 20, 1860: South Carolina secedes
70. 1861-1865: Civil War
71. 1862-1863: Emancipation Proclamation
72. April 14, 1865: Lincoln assassinated
73. 1865-1877: Reconstruction Era
74. Dec 6, 1865: 13th Amendment abolishes slavery
75. July 9, 1868: 14th Amendment allows Former slaves to become citizens
76. 1868: Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
77. 1869: First Transcontinental Railroad completed
78. February 3, 1870: 15th Amendment gives all men the vote
79. 1875: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
80. 1881: Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
81. 1884: Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
82. 1889: Washington State admitted to the Union
83. 1890: Wounded Knee Massacre
1900-1999 (84-110)
84. 1901-1909: Theodore Roosevelt’s progressivist presidency
85. 1906: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
86. 1911: Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
87. 1913: Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
88. 1914-1918: World War I
89. 1915: T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
90. 1916: Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
91. 1918: Strunk and White, The Elements of Style
92. 1919: The Education of Henry Adams, receives a Pulitzer Prize
93. Jan 16, 1919: 18th Amendment establishes prohibition
94. Aug 18, 1920: 19th Amendment gives the vote to women
95. 1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
96. 1929: Stock Market Crash begins the Great Depression
97. 1932: Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Little House in the Big Woods
98. December 5, 1933: 21st amendment repeals the 18th, ending prohibition
99. 1936: Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
100. 1939: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
101. 1940: Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls
102. 1940: Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book
103. 1941-1945: US Involvement in World War II, Pearl Harbor to Atomic Bomb
104. 1947-1991: Cold War
105. 1952: E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
106. 1957: Dr. Seuss: The Cat in the Hat
107. 1955-1975: Vietnam War
108. 1960-1965: Civil Rights Movement
109. 1966-1969: Hippie Movement
110. 1973: AIM seizes the trading post at Wounded Knee
Posts
