American history

American History (Era 1850-1990)

  • Millard Filmore President (1850-1853)

    Millard Filmore President (1850-1853)
    As an anti-slavery moderate, he opposed abolitionist demands to exclude slavery from all the territory gained in the Mexican War. Instead he supported the Compromise of 1850, which briefly ended the crisis. In foreign policy,Fillmore denounced secession and agreed that the Union must be maintained by force if necessary, but was very critical of the war policies of President Abraham Lincoln. After the war, he supported the Reconstruction policies of President Andrew Johnson.
  • Fugitive Slave law passed by the U.S. Congress

    Fugitive Slave law passed by the U.S. Congress
    The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway slaves within the territory of the United States. Enacted by Congress in 1793, the first Fugitive Slave Act authorized local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners and imposed penalties on anyone who aided in their flight.
  • Harriet Stowe "Uncle Tom's Cabin" published in newspaper

    Harriet Stowe "Uncle Tom's Cabin" published in newspaper
    As a young wife and mother living in Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe met former and fugitive enslaved people. Cincinnati, then the western frontier of the United States, was an ethnically and culturally vibrant city. On the Ohio River across from Kentucky, a slave state, the city exposed Stowe to the public face of slavery.
  • Franklin Peirce (1853-1857)

    Franklin Peirce (1853-1857)
    Born in New Hampshire, Pierce served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate until he resigned from the latter in 1842. His private law practice in his home state was a success; he was appointed U.S. Attorney for his state in 1845. Pierce took part in the Mexican–American War as a brigadier general in the Army.His popularity in the Northern states declined sharply after he supported the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which annulled the Missouri Compromise, while many whites supported him.
  • Steam Engine

    Steam Engine
    opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing white male settlers in those territories to determine through popular sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory.
  • U.S. Surpreme Court issues a decision in the Dredd Scott decision

    U.S. Surpreme Court issues a decision in the Dredd Scott decision
    The court affirmed the right of slave owners to take their slaves into the western territories, negating the doctrine of popular sovereignty and severely undermining the platform of the newly created Republican Party.
  • Abraham Lincoln is elected president

    Abraham Lincoln is elected president
    president of the United States, beating Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge of the Southern Democrats, and John Bell of the new Constitutional Union Party. He was the first president from the Republican Party.
  • Civil War Begans

    Civil War Begans
    The American Civil War, widely known in the United States as simply the Civil War as well as other sectional names, was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 to determine the survival of the Union or independence for the Confederacy. Among the 34 states in January 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America.
  • President Lincoln gives the Gettysburg Address on Cemetary Hill

    President Lincoln gives the Gettysburg Address on Cemetary Hill
    resident Lincoln was the special guest of David Wills, the 32-year-old lawyer whose house faced the town square. Wills had invited Lincoln to give concluding "remarks" at the dedication ceremony, following the principal address by Edward Everett. Wills helped arrange the cemetery and its dedication on November 19, 1863, on land purchased by Pennsylvania to honor the Union dead.Although President Lincoln spent only 24 hours in Gettysburg, he, too, changed the town's history.
  • The Battle of Gettsburg

    The Battle of Gettsburg
    Having concentrated his army around the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Gen. Robert E. Lee awaited the approach of Union Gen. George G. Meade’s forces. On July 1, early Union success faltered as Confederates pushed back against the Iron Brigade and exploited a weak Federal line at Barlow’s Knoll. The following day saw Lee strike the Union flanks,
  • President Lincoln is aassisanated

    President Lincoln is aassisanated
    Shortly after 10 p.m. on April 14, 1865, actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C., and fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln. As Lincoln slumped forward in his seat
  • 13th Amendment

    13th Amendment
    The 13th amendment, which formally abolished slavery in the United States, passed the Senate on April 8, 1864, and the House on January 31, 1865. On February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln approved the Joint Resolution of Congress submitting the proposed amendment to the state legislatures
  • 15th Amendment

    15th Amendment
    The 15th Amendment to the Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
  • Red Cross was founded

    Red Cross was founded
    The American Red Cross, also known as the American National Red Cross, is a humanitarian organization that provides emergency assistance, disaster relief and education inside the United States.
  • President Garfield assassinated

    President Garfield assassinated
    The assassination of President James A. Garfield took place in Washington, D.C. on July 2, 1881, at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station. Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau at 9:30 am, less than four months into Garfield's term as the 20th President of the United States.
  • The Afro-American League

    The Afro-American League
    The National Afro-American League was formed on January 25, 1890, by Timothy Thomas Fortune. Preceding the foundation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the organization dedicated itself to racial solidarity and self-help. The organization became defunct in 1893 due to lack of support and funding.
  • A Race Riot

    A Race Riot
    an African-American teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after violating the unofficial segregation of Chicago’s beaches and being stoned by a group of white youths.
  • Black women organize

    Black women organize
    The first organized gathering of women to demand their rights as women took place during two days in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. The manifesto produced by the women in Seneca Falls offered a blueprint for feminist organizing for decades to come. The most “radical” demand — at least the only demand not passed unanimously by the assembly — was for universal suffrage
  • BOXER REBELLION

    BOXER REBELLION
    In 1900, in what became known as the Boxer Rebellion (or the Boxer Uprising), a Chinese secret organization called the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists led an uprising in northern China against the spread of Western and Japanese influence there. The rebels, referred to by Westerners as Boxers because they performed physical exercises they believed would make them able to withstand bullets, killed foreigners and Chinese Christians and destroyed foreign property.
  • Census of 1900.

    Census of 1900.
    U.S. population: 75,994,575
    Black population: 8,833,994 (11.6%)
  • Foraker Act

    Foraker Act
    An unincorporated territory in American law is an area controlled by the United States government "where fundamental rights apply as a matter of law, but other constitutional rights are not available".[1] Selected constitutional provisions variously apply depending on Congressional Organic Acts and judicial rulings according to U.S. constitutional practice, local tradition and law.
  • WW1 Begins

    WW1 Begins
    World War 1 began on July 28, 1914 and lasted until November 11, 1918. Differences in foreign policies were to blame, although the immediate cause was the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand. By the end of WW1, over 9 million soldiers had been killed, and another 21 million wounded. Over a million soldiers were killed in the infamous Battle of the Somme alone, including about 30,000 in just one day.
  • U.S. entry in WW1

    U.S. entry in WW1
    On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany. Wilson cited Germany’s violation of its pledge to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, as well as its attempts to entice Mexico into an alliance against the United States, as his reasons for declaring war. On April 4, 1917, the U.S. Senate voted in support of the measure to declare war on Germany. The House concurred tw
  • Malcolm X

    Malcolm X
    Was an American Muslim minister and a human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans; detractors accused him of preaching racism and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history.
  • Martin Luther King Jr.

    Martin Luther King Jr.
    Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs.King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. In 1965,
  • The Great Depression(1929-1930)

    The Great Depression(1929-1930)
    The depression originated in the United States, after the fall in stock prices that began around September 4, 1929, and became worldwide news with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (known as Black Tuesday). The Great Depression had devastating effects in countries rich and poor.Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. In many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II.
  • Attack on Pearl Harbor

    Attack on Pearl Harbor
    The attack on Pearl Harbor[nb 4] was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, in the United States Territory of Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941 Because the attack happened without a declaration of war and without explicit warning, the attack on Pearl Harbor was judged by the Tokyo Trials to be a war crime.
  • U.S. enters World War II

    U.S. enters World War II
    Although the war began with Nazi Germany's attack on Poland in September 1939, the United States did not enter the war until after the Japanese bombed the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Between those two events, President Franklin Roosevelt worked hard to prepare Americans for a conflict that he regarded as inevitable.
  • D-DAY

    D-DAY
    Planning for the operation began in 1943. In the months leading up to the invasion, the Allies conducted a substantial military deception, codenamed Operation Bodyguard, to mislead the Germans as to the date and location of the main Allied landings. The weather on D-Day was far from ideal,Hitler placed German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in command of German forces and of developing fortifications along the Atlantic Wall in anticipation of an Allied invasion.
  • The Cold War

    The Cold War
    The first phase of the Cold War began in the first two years after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The USSR consolidated its control over the states of the Eastern Bloc while the United States began a strategy of global containment to challenge Soviet power,
  • The Civil Right Movement

    The Civil Right Movement
    The African-American Civil Rights Movement or 1960s Civil Rights Movement encompasses social movements in the United States whose goals were to end racial segregation and discrimination against black Americans and to SECURE legal recognition and federal protection of the citizenship rights enumerated in the Constitution and federal law.
  • NATO formation

    NATO formation
    In 1949, the prospect of further Communist expansion prompted the United States and 11 other Western nations to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).The process gained new urgency in June of that year, when the USSR cut off ground access to Berlin, forcing the U.S., Britain and France to airlift supplies to their sectors of the German city, which had been partitioned between the Western Allies and the Soviets following World War II.
  • McCarthyism

    McCarthyism
    the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence. It also means "the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.
  • The Korean War

    The Korean War
    the Korean War began when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south.
  • Brown v. Board of Education,

    Brown v. Board of Education,
    Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954,
  • SEATO alliance

    SEATO alliance
    Primarily created to block further communist gains in Southeast Asia, SEATO is generally considered a failure because internal conflict and dispute hindered general use of the SEATO military; however, SEATO-funded cultural and Educational programs left long-standing effects in Southeast Asia. SEATO was dissolved on 30 June 1977 after many members lost interest and withdrew.
  • The Space Race

    The Space Race
    competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US), for supremacy in spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations that occurred following World War II, enabled by captured German rocket technology and personnel. The technological superiority required for such supremacy was seen as necessary for national security, and symbolic of ideological superiority
  • Emmett Till’s murder

    Emmett Till’s murder
    Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, on August 24, 1955, when he reportedly flirted with a white cashier at a grocery store. Four days later, two white men kidnapped Till, beat him and shot him in the head. The men were tried for murder, but an all-white, male jury acquitted them.
  • The Vietnam War

    The Vietnam War
    The U.S. government viewed its involvement in the war as a way to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam. This was part of a wider containment policy, with the stated aim of stopping the spread of communism. The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam under communist rule.
  • The “Little Rock Nine”

    The “Little Rock Nine”
    The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • The Fall of The Berlin Wall

    The Fall of The Berlin Wall
    Hungary effectively disabled its physical border defenses with Austria on 19 August 1989 and, in September, more than 13,000 East German tourists escaped through Hungary to Austria.[75] This set up a chain of events. The Hungarians prevented many more East Germans from crossing the border and returned them to Budapest. These East Germans flooded the West German embassy and refused to return to East Germany
  • Cuban Missile Crisis

    Cuban Missile Crisis
    The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict. After the failed U.S. attempt to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion, and while the Kennedy administration planned Operation Mongoose, in July 1962 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev reached a secret agreement with Cuban premier Fidel Castro to
  • JFK Assassination

    JFK Assassination
    Shortly after noon on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas. By the fall of 1963, President John F. Kennedy and his political advisers were preparing for the next presidential campaign.
  • Woodstock, 1969

    Woodstock, 1969
    The event was captured in the 1970 documentary movie Woodstock, an accompanying soundtrack album, and Joni Mitchell's song "Woodstock", which commemorated the event and became a major hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
  • John Lennon’s Murder

    John Lennon’s Murder
    Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital. He was 40 years old. At the hospital, it was stated that nobody could have lived for more than a few minutes after sustaining such injuries
  • Assassination attempt of Ronald Reagon

    Assassination attempt of Ronald Reagon
    Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest and in the lower right arm. He suffered a punctured lung and heavy internal bleeding, but prompt medical attention allowed him to recover quickly. No formal invocation of presidential succession took place, although Secretary of State Alexander Haig controversially stated that he was "in control here" while Vice President George H. W. Bush returned to Washington
  • HIV/AIDS

    HIV/AIDS
    The red ribbon is the global symbol for solidarity with HIV-positive people and those living with AIDS. World AIDS Day, designated 1 December every year since 1988, is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection, and mourning those who have died of the disease.
  • Fall of Communism

    Fall of Communism
    The revolutions of 1989 marked the death knell of communism in Europe. As a result, not only was Germany reunified in 1990, but soon, revolution spread to the Soviet Union itself. After surviving a hard-line coup attempt in 1991, Gorbachev was forced to cede power in Russia to Boris Yeltsin, who oversaw the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
  • The Breakup of The Berlin Wall

    The Breakup of The Berlin Wall
    Acknowledging the independence of the erstwhile Soviet republics and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – although five of the signatories ratified it much later or not at all. On the previous day, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union, resigned, declared his office extinct, and handed over its powers – including control of the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes – to Russian President Boris Yeltsin
  • South Carolina is the 1st State to sucede The Union

    South Carolina is the 1st State to sucede The Union
    South Carolina was a site of major political and military importance for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The white population of the state strongly supported the institution of slavery long before the war. Political leaders such as John C. Calhoun and Preston Brooks had inflamed regional (and national) passions, and for years before the eventual start of the Civil War in 1861