1607-1754
This cash crop allowed Jamestown to survive and expand.
Tobacco
The costs of this war pushed Britain to tax the colonies, leading to conflict.
The French and Indian War
This land purchase in 1803 doubled the size of the United States.
The Louisiana Purchase
This belief justified westward expansion across the continent.
Manifest Destiny
This early-colonial labor system exchanged work for passage to America.
Indentured servitude
This 1620 agreement created self-government for the Pilgrims.
The Mayflower Compact
This 1776 document justified independence using Enlightenment ideas.
The Declaration of Independence
This invention by Eli Whitney expanded the cotton economy and slavery.
The cotton gin
This 1850 law required the return of escaped enslaved people.
The Fugitive Slave Act
This early conflict proved the strength of the new Constitution when Washington ended a tax revolt.
The Whiskey Rebellion
This 1676 uprising revealed class tensions between frontier farmers and Virginia elites.
Bacon’s Rebellion
This first U.S. governing document created a weak central government.
The Articles of Confederation
This era featured rising nationalism and only one major political party.
The Era of Good Feelings
This 1857 Supreme Court decision stated that enslaved people were property, not citizens.
Dred Scott v. Sandford
This 1823 policy warned European nations not to interfere in the Western Hemisphere.
The Monroe Doctrine
This economic policy guided Britain’s trade restrictions on the colonies.
Mercantilism
This 1803 Supreme Court case established judicial review.
Marbury v. Madison
This 1819 Supreme Court case ruled that states could not tax the national bank.
McCulloch v. Maryland
This 1863 order by Lincoln freed enslaved people in Confederate-held areas.
The Emancipation Proclamation
This 1848 convention launched the organized women’s rights movement in the United States.
The Seneca Falls Convention
This 1754 plan by Benjamin Franklin attempted to unite the colonies for defense.
The Albany Plan of Union
This Constitutional Convention compromise created a bicameral legislature.
The Great Compromise
This reform movement, inspired by the Second Great Awakening, sought to limit alcohol consumption.
The Temperance Movement
These Reconstruction laws placed Southern states under military control to enforce civil rights.
The Reconstruction Acts
This post–Civil War labor system trapped freedmen and poor whites in cycles of debt.
Sharecropping