APUSH timeline by decades (1760+)

1760 period of Salutary Neglect ends

1760 Sugar Act

1760 Stamp Act

1760 Townshend Acts


1770 Boston Massacre

1770 Tea Act

1770 Boston Tea Party

1770 Intolerable Acts

1770 First Continental Congress 

1770 Lexington and Concord 

1770 Second Continental Congress

1770 Olive Branch Petition 

1770 American Revolution

1770 Thomas Paine, Common Sense

1770 Declaration of Independence 


1780 Articles of Confederation 

1780 Shay’s Rebellion 

1780 Northwest Ordinance 

1780 Constitutional Convention 

1780 Constitution ratified 

1780 French Revolution

1780 Washington became president 


1790 First Bank of the US

1790 Whiskey Rebellion 

1790 Invention of cotton gin


1800 Jefferson won presidential election 

1800 Second Great Awakening 

1800 Expansion of universal white manhood suffrage 

1800 Temperance Movement 

1800 Napoleonic Wars in Europe

1800 Louisiana Purchase

1800 Embargo Act

1800 Prohibition of international slave trade


1810 Congress enacted American System programs

1810 Second Bank of the US 


1820 Missouri Compromise 

1820 Monroe Doctrine 

1820 Opening of first mill in Lowell 

1820 Founding of Democratic Party

1820 Erie Canal completed

1820 Market Revolution 

1820 Andrew Jackson elected as president 


1830 Indian Removal Act

1830 Founding of Whig Party

1830 Texas Revolution 


1840 James K. Polk won presidential election

1840 Brigham Young becomes leader of Latter-day Saints

1840 Mexican-American War

1840 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

1840 Utopian Communities 

1840 Seneca Falls Convention 

1840 Free Soil Party


1850 Know Nothing Party popular  

1850 Republican Party founded 

1850 Kansas Nebraska Act

1850 Dred Scott Decision 


1860 Lincoln won presidential election 

1860 South Carolina first state to secede 

1860 Confederate States of America formed 

1860 Civil War

1860 Emancipation Proclamation 

1860 Reconstruction 

1860 Completion of first Transcontinental Railroad 


1870Gilded Age 

1870 Social Gospel movement 

1870 Founding Rockefeller Oil 

1870 the New South 

1870 Conviction of Boss Tweed

1870 Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened 


1880 first references to Social Darwinism 

1880 Jane Addams founded Hull House

1880 Andrew Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth”


1890 Progressive Era 

1890 Wounded Knee Massacre

1890 Changes in immigration patterns 

1890 Census Bureau declared the frontier closed 

1890 Founding People’s Party (Populist Party)

1890 Founding Carnegie Steel

1890 Imperial Japan

1890 Plessy v. Ferguson 

1890 Spanish American War

1890 Philippine-American War


1900 McKinley assassinated; TR became president


1910 Great Migration

1910 Woodrow Wilson won presidential election

1910 Panama Canal completed

1910 World War I

1910 US enters WWI; Russian Revolution

1910 Red Scare

1910 Red Summer


1920 19th Amendment

1920 Roaring Twenties/Jazz Age

1920 Founding of USSR

1920 Johnson-Reed Act

1920 Great Depression begins


1930 FDR won presidential election

1930 Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany

1930 World War II


1940 Pearl Harbor

1940 Internment of Japanese Americans

1940 Final Solution

1940 D-Day

1940 Death of FDR; Truman became president

1940 VE Day

1940 Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

1940 Decolonization of Asian and African countries

1940 Baby Boom

1940 Cold War

1940 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

1940 Desegregation of Armed Forces

1940 Dixiecrats

1940 Founding of NATO

1940 People’s Republic of China created; USSR tested A-bomb


1950 Korean War

1950 Joseph McCarthy makes first accusations

1950 Growth of the suburbs

1950 Immigration and Nationality Act

1950 Brown v Board of Education

1950 Civil Rights Movement

1950 Murder of Emmett Till; Rosa Parks arrested; beginning of Montgomery Bus Boycott

1950 Vietnam War


1960 JFK won presidential election

1960 Formation of SNCC

1960 Freedom Rides

1960 Cuban Missile Crisis

1960 JFK assassinated; LBJ became president

1960 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

1960 Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique

1960 Freedom Summer

1960 Civil Rights Act; beginning of Republican Party’s Southern Strategy

1960 Tonkin Gulf Resolution

1960 LB Johnson starts Great Society program

1960 Voting Rights Act

1960 Malcolm X assassinated

1960 Griswold v Connecticut

1960 Riots in American cities over police brutality

1960 Chicano Movement

1960 Formation Black Panthers

1960 Loving v Virginia

1960 Women’s Liberation Movement

1960 Asian American Movement

1960 MLK assassinated; Bobby Kennedy assassinated

1960 Nixon won presidential election

1960 American Indian Movement began

1960 Stonewall Uprising


1960s: countercultures, youth culture, antiwar protests


1970 First Earth Day

1970 oil crisis; stagflation

1970 manufacturing in the US begins to decline

1970 rise of Christian fundamentalism (1979 Moral Majority)

1970 Pentagon Papers

1970 Nixon travelled to China

1970 Watergate break-in

1970 Title IX; ERA went to the states for ratification

1970 Roe v Wade

1970 Nixon resigned

1970 Iran hostage crisis


1980 Reagan won presidential election

1980 AIDS epidemic


1990 end of Cold War (fall of Soviet Union)

1990 Clinton impeachment

2000 attacks; beginning of War on Terror

2000 Financial Crisis