Introduction: A Timeline of Significant Events and Publications
(Adapted from the Norton American Lit Website)

1492 Christopher Columbus arrives in the Bahamas. Between 4 and 7 million Native American peoples estimated in present-day United States, including Alaska.

1500 Native American populations begin to be ravaged by European diseases

1526 Spanish explorers bring first African slaves to South Carolina

1539 First printing press in the Americas set up in Mexico City.

1584 Walter Ralegh lands on "island" of Roanoke; names it "Virginia" for Queen Elizabeth

1603-13 Samuel de Champlain explores the St. Lawrence River; founds Québec

1607 Jamestown, the first successful English colony, is established in Virginia. Powhatan confederacy prevents colonists from starving; teaches them to plant tobacco

1619 Twenty Africans arrive in Jamestown on a Dutch vessel as indentured servants

1620 Mayflower drops anchor in Plymouth Harbor

1630-43 Immigration of English Puritans to Massachusetts Bay

1635 First “Free Grammar School” established in Boston

1670 Hudson's Bay Company chartered

1675-78 King Philip's War destroys power of Native American tribes in New England

1681 William Penn founds Pennsylvania

1692 Salem witch trials

         Visit http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SALEM.HTM for details

1700s Spread of Enlightenment values and beliefs; decline of Puritan influence

1718 French found New Orleans

1726-56 The "Great Awakening"

1741 Russian explorer Vitus Bering discovers Alaska

1771-90 Benjamin Franklin continues his Autobiography (Part I pub. 1818)

1773 Boston Tea Party

1775-83 War for American Independence

1776 Declaration of Independence

1787 U.S. Constitution adopted

1789 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano . (first slave narrative)

1789 George Washington elected first president

1803 U.S. buys Louisiana Territory from France

1819 Spain exchanges Florida for U.S. assumption of $5 million in claims

1823 Monroe Doctrine warns all European powers not to establish new colonies on either American continent

1827 Baltimore and Ohio, first U.S. railroad

1829-37 President Andrew Jackson encourages westward movement of white population

1830 Congress passes Indian Removal Act, allowing Jackson to relocate eastern Indians west of the Mississippi

1831 William Lloyd Garrison starts The Liberator , antislavery journal

1836 Transcendentalists meet informally in Boston and Concord; Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes Nature

1838 Underground Railroad aids slaves escaping north, often to Canada

1838-39 "Trail of Tears": Cherokees forced from their homelands by federal troops

1839   Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

1845 United States annexes Texas; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

1846–48 United States wages war against Mexico; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo cedes entire southwest to United States

1848-49 California Gold Rush

1848 Seneca Falls Convention inaugurates campaign for women's rights

1851 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin .

1850 Fugitive Slave Act compromise obliges free states to return escaped slaves to slaveholders

1854 Henry David Thoreau, Walden

1855 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

1859 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision denies citizenship to African Americans

1860-65 Emily Dickinson writes several hundred poems

  1861 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl .

1861 South Carolina batteries fire on U.S. Fort, initiating the Civil War;   Southern states secede from the Union and found the Confederate States of America

1861-65 Civil War

1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Battle of Gettysburg

1869 First transcontinental railroad completed