The History of Thanksgiving: Tradition vs Record
What the 1621 Plymouth harvest really was, what the two eyewitness accounts say, what people ate, and how Hale, Lincoln and FDR made the modern holiday.
1492 to 1788
Colonial America and the Revolution
On This Day in This Era
Events from 1492 to 1788, by date.
- December 31, 1600Queen Elizabeth I grants a royal charter to the English East India Company.
- January 7, 1610Galileo Galilei observed moons circling Jupiter through his telescope, at first taking them for small stars.
- November 11, 1620Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower signed the Mayflower Compact before going ashore in New England.
- January 26, 1700A great earthquake of about magnitude 9 ruptures the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the Pacific Northwest.
- November 22, 1718The pirate Blackbeard was killed in a battle off North Carolina's Outer Banks.
- February 22, 1732George Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia.
- February 10, 1763The Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years' War and the French and Indian War.
- December 16, 1773Colonists dumped 342 chests of British tea into Boston Harbor in the Boston Tea Party.
- January 10, 1776Thomas Paine published Common Sense, his pamphlet arguing for American independence.
- December 25, 1776George Washington leads the Continental Army across the icy Delaware River on Christmas night.
- December 26, 1776Washington's army surprises and defeats the Hessian garrison at Trenton, New Jersey.
- January 3, 1777George Washington defeated British troops at the Battle of Princeton.