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Browse our archive of historical events by year including the dates of important, interesting and notable events from thousands of years of history.
Sep 6, 2020 · Over the past 100 years, some of the most profound events in human history have occurred including societal and political change, war and discoveries.
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- Overview
- 1770s: Declaration of Independence (1776)
- 1780s: Constitution of the United States of America (1787)
- 1790s: Whiskey Rebellion (1794)
- 1800s: Louisiana Purchase (1803)
- 1810s: Battle of New Orleans (1815)
- 1820s: Monroe Doctrine (1823)
- 1830s: Era of the Common Man (1829–37)
- 1840s: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)
- 1850s: Dred Scott Decision (1857)
Dividing history into decades is an arbitrary but sometimes very useful way of trying to understand the arcs and significance of events. Trying to identify any single event as crucial to the understanding of a given decade may be even more arbitrary. It is certainly subjective. Nevertheless, that attempt can at the very least be a catalyst for disc...
The centrality of the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the developments of the 1770s is self-evident. From the Boston Tea Party to the “shot heard round the world,” Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River, and the Valley Forge winter, the American Revolution’s pursuit of liberty was made meaningful by the founding document of the great Ame...
With the war won, independence secured, and the Articles of Confederation proving inadequate, the Founding Fathers laid down the law by which the new country would be governed in the elegantly crafted Constitution, which, depending on one’s perspective, was meant either to evolve to meet changing circumstances or to be strictly interpreted to adher...
As the new country began finding its feet, U.S. President George Washington sent troops to western Pennsylvania in 1794 to quell the Whiskey Rebellion, an uprising by citizens who refused to pay a liquor tax that had been imposed by Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton to raise money for the national debt and to assert the power of the national...
The Louisiana Territory, the huge swath of land (more than 800,000 square miles) that made up the western Mississippi River basin, passed from French colonial rule to Spanish colonial rule and then back to the French before U.S. President Thomas Jefferson pried it away from Napoleon in 1803 for a final price of some $27 million. Out of it were carv...
On January 8, 1815, a ragtag army under the command of Andrew Jackson decisively defeated British forces in the Battle of New Orleans, even though the War of 1812 had actually already ended. News of the Treaty of Ghent (December 24, 1814) had yet to reach the combatants. The American victory made a national figure of future president Jackson and co...
The Era of Good Feelings (roughly 1815–25), a period of American prosperity and isolationism, was in full swing when U.S. President James Monroe articulated a set of principles in 1823 that decades later would be called the Monroe Doctrine. According to the policy, the United States would not intervene in European affairs, but likewise it would not...
Andrew Jackson, U.S. president from 1829 to 1837, was said to have ushered in the Era of the Common Man. But while suffrage had been broadly expanded beyond men of property, it was not a result of Jackson’s efforts. Despite the careful propagation of his image as a champion of popular democracy and as a man of the people, he was much more likely to...
Signed on February 2, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought to a close the Mexican-American War (1846–48) and seemingly fulfilled the Manifest Destiny of the United States championed by President James K. Polk by adding 525,000 square miles of formerly Mexican land to the U.S. territory.
The 1850s were awash in harbingers of the American Civil War—from the Compromise of 1850, which temporarily forestalled North-South tensions, to John Brown’s Harpers Ferry Raid, which ramped them up. Arguably, though, by stoking abolitionist indignation in an increasingly polarized country, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision set the table...
- Jennifer Rosenberg
- The 1900s. This decade opened the century with some amazing scientific and technological feats: the first flight by the Wright brothers, Henry Ford's first Model-T, and Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
- The 1910s. This decade was dominated by the first "total war"—World War I. It also saw other huge changes during the Russian Revolution and the beginning of Prohibition in the United States.
- The 1920s. The Roaring '20s were a time of a booming stock market, speakeasies, short skirts, the Charleston, and jazz. The '20s also showed great strides in women's suffrage—women got the vote in 1920.
- The 1930s. The Great Depression hit the world hard in the 1930s. The Nazis took advantage of this situation and came to power in Germany, established their first concentration camp, and began a systematic persecution of Jews in Europe.
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Dec 17, 2020 · 2020 was a tumultuous year that saw the onset of a deadly global pandemic, widespread protests over systemic racism and a historic U.S. presidential election.
