📜US History

The diverse nations already here, the empire Spain toppled, and how 1492 rewired the plants, animals, and diseases of two continents.

Native Nations Before 1492 · The Spanish Conquest and the Encomienda System · The Columbian Exchange · European Claims Carve Up North America

Three regions built three different economies out of the same ocean crossing, and how a labor shortage hardened into racial slavery.

Jamestown and the Virginia Company · Plymouth and Puritan New England · Comparing New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South · From Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery · +2 more

How a war debt in London turned into a tax, a protest, and a chain reaction that neither side could walk back.

The Proclamation of 1763 · The Stamp Act Crisis · The Townshend Acts and the Boston Massacre · The Boston Tea Party and the Coercive Acts · +1 more

Independence declared on paper, then won on the ground from Boston to Yorktown with France tipping the balance.

Declaring Independence · The War in the North and the Turning Point at Saratoga · The French Alliance and the War Moves South · Loyalists, Patriots, and a Divided Home Front · +1 more

A failed first government, the deals struck to write a second one, and the fight over whether to ratify it at all.

The Articles of Confederation and Shays' Rebellion · The Constitutional Convention's Compromises · Federalists vs. Antifederalists and the Bill of Rights · Hamilton's Vision Against Jefferson's · +1 more

A doubled nation, a second war with Britain, a line splitting free from slave territory, and democracy widened for some.

The Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition · The War of 1812 · The Missouri Compromise · The Monroe Doctrine · +3 more

The belief that a continent was owed to one nation, and the war, trails, and gold rush that pushed the border to the Pacific.

Manifest Destiny as an Idea · Texas Independence and Annexation · The Mexican-American War · The Oregon Trail and Overland Migration · +1 more

How a cotton machine entrenched slavery instead of ending it, and the chain of compromises that finally ran out.

The Cotton Gin and the Second Slavery · The Domestic Slave Trade and Enslaved Population Growth · The Abolition Movement · The Compromise of 1850 · +2 more

Two economies, one battlefield map redrawn campaign by campaign, until Sherman and Grant made the war unwinnable for the South.

The Union and the Confederacy Compared · The Anaconda Plan and the War's Early Battles · Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation · Gettysburg and Vicksburg · +2 more

Two competing plans for rebuilding the South, three new amendments, and the deal that finally let Reconstruction die.

Presidential Reconstruction Against Radical Reconstruction · The Reconstruction Amendments · The Freedmen's Bureau · Sharecropping and the New South Economy · +2 more

Steel, oil, and rail networks stitched the country together while a handful of trusts learned to run whole industries.

The Transcontinental Railroad · Big Business and the Trusts · Steel, Oil, and the New Industrial Economy · Labor Unions and the Great Strikes · +1 more

Millions of new arrivals reshaped where America's cities grew and who was welcomed once they got there.

New Immigration by Origin, Decade by Decade · Ellis Island and Angel Island · The Growth of Tenement Cities · Nativism and the Chinese Exclusion Act

Journalists, reformers, and new laws tried to clean up the mess industrialization had made of cities, food, and government.

Muckrakers and Public Outrage · Trust-Busting and Regulation · Democratic Reforms and Constitutional Amendments · The Women's Suffrage Movement

An overseas empire acquired in a few months of war, and a European alliance system that dragged America into its first world war.

The Spanish-American War and US Territorial Gains · The Panama Canal · The Alliance System and the Outbreak of War · US Neutrality to Intervention, and Trench Warfare · +1 more

Assembly lines, credit, and jazz remade daily life for some Americans while quotas and Klan violence pushed back on others.

The Assembly Line and Mass Production · Consumer Culture and Buying on Credit · The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance · Prohibition and Organized Crime · +1 more

How a stock market crash became a decade of unemployment, and the alphabet of agencies FDR built to fight back.

The Crash of 1929 and the Unemployment Collapse · The Dust Bowl · Hoover's Response Against FDR's · The New Deal's Alphabet Agencies · +1 more

Fascism's rise, two theaters of war fought an ocean apart, and a home front and atomic decision that changed the postwar world.

Fascism Rises and America Moves from Neutrality · Pearl Harbor and the Pacific Island-Hopping Campaign · The European Theater and D-Day · The Holocaust · +3 more

Two alliance blocs, a divided Europe, and decades of proxy wars, spy scares, and a race to space and to the brink of nuclear war.

Containment, the Iron Curtain, and the Berlin Airlift · NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Korean War · McCarthyism and the Red Scare · The Space Race and the Arms Race · +2 more

From a courtroom ruling to a bus boycott to marches that reached Washington, the strategies that dismantled legal segregation.

Brown v. Board of Education · The Montgomery Bus Boycott · Sit-Ins and Freedom Rides · The March on Washington · +2 more

An escalating war in Southeast Asia, the movement it provoked at home, and a president's own war on poverty.

The Vietnam War Escalates · The Tet Offensive · The Antiwar Movement and the Counterculture · Lyndon Johnson's Great Society

A president brought down by his own cover-up, an oil shock, and the decade that ended with the Cold War itself winding down.

Nixon and Watergate · The 1973 Oil Crisis · The End of the Vietnam War · The Reagan Revolution · +1 more

Population and power shifted south and west at home while a single superpower faced a new kind of enemy abroad.

The Sun Belt Shift · The Gulf War and the Post-Cold War World · September 11 and the War on Terror · A Changing American Population