Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Colonial Era Timeline

The time has come, the Walrus said, to start making timelines.

Pre-Revolutionary America - Key Events

1585-1587 - Various Foundings of Roanoke Colony (Morgan)
1590 - Publication of Thomas Hariot's Briefe and True Report
1607 - Founding of Jamestown Settlement (Morgan)
1620 - Founding of Plimouth Plantation (Demos; Karlsen)
1638 - Anne Hutchinson exiled from Puritan church, colony
1639 - Birth of Increase Mather (Bercovitch)
1649 - King Charles I, enemy of the Puritans, executed; eyes of the world turn away from American colonies (or so they perceive) (Miller)
1662 - Halfway Covenant proclaimed, admitting to the church a wider array of members
1663 - Birth of Cotton Mather (Bercovitch; Miller)

1675-6 - King Philip's War (Young Cotton Mather sees Philip's head on a stick) (Lepore; White)
1676 - Mary Rowlandson abducted in Lancaster, MA, by Nashaway Indians (Lepore; Kolodny)
1676 - Bacon's Rebellion (Morgan)
1679 - Synod, examining questions of "why the land suffers" - the angst of the Puritan elders (Miller)
1682 - Rowlandson publishes The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, forward by Cotton Mather1690-1730ish - African slavery takes hold on a broad scale in Virginia (Morgan)
1691-2 - Plymouth Colony, others absorbed by Massachusetts Bay Colony
1692-3 - Salem Witch Trials (Karlsen)
1697 - Fast day of atonement for the witch trials ("Tragedy, caused by Satan and his works among us")
1703 - Jonathan Edwards born (Bercovitch)
1706 - Ben Franklin born
1723 - Death of Increase Mather (damn, he was old) (Bercovitch)1728 - Death of Cotton Mather (not so old) (Bercovitch)
1732 - George Washington born
1733-4 - Great Awakening begins in Northampton; properly takes place 1739-40 (Bercovitch)
1743 - Thomas Jefferson born
1756-63 - Seven Years' War (Winston Churchill called it the "first world war") (White)
1763 - Cession of Canada to the British (Indians felt betrayed by French; Puritans felt their mission justified) (White; Bercovitch)
1775 - Thomas Paine's Common Sense published in England
1776 - REVOLUTION!

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