HISTORY’S MIXED FABRIC

1513 Juan Ponce de Leon explores Florida in search of the fountain of youth

1607 The English establish the ill-fated Jamestown colony in Virginia

“Old Ship” Puritan meetinghouse in Hingham, Massachusetts

1620 The Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock

1682 William Penn founds Pennsylvania

Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe transforms history painting

1765 The British Parliament inflames revolutionary sentiments by imposing the Stamp Act

1773 American patriots dump tea in Boston Harbor

1781 Lord Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown, ending the American Revolution

The Townsend-Goddard shop in Newport, Rhode Island, pioneers the blockfront style of furniture design

1789 George Washington is sworn in as the first President of the U.S.

1793 Eli Whitney’s cotton gin makes possible the rise of the antebellum South

1801 Jefferson’s presidency starts a vast expansionist drive across the continent

Thomas Jefferson’s rotunda at the University of Virginia

1812 The War of 1812 turns Andrew Jackson into a national hero

1825 The Erie Canal spurs trade beyond the East Coast

Apogee of Shaker furniture design

1839 Abner Doubleday devises rules for baseball

Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow

1844 Samuel F.B. Morse perfects the telegraph

1846 The U.S. goes to war with Mexico

1849 The discovery of gold in California sets off a rush to the West

Asher Durand’s Kindred Spirits

1851 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

1861 The Civil War starts when Confederate guns fire on Fort Sumter

1865 President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated

Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field

1869 Railways link the two coasts at Promontory, Utah

1877 Thomas Edison invents the cylinder player

Heyday of stained-glass designs by Louis Comfort Tiffany

1882 John D. Rockefeller and associates form the Standard Oil trust

1884 Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Peak development of quilt design by the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Amish

1890 The Battle of Wounded Knee, last major confrontation between American Indians and U.S. troops

1893 The World’s Columbian Exposition opens in Chicago

Thomas Moran’s The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

1895 Booker T. Washington calls for economic and educational advancement for blacks

1898 In the Spanish-American War, the U.S. acquires the Philippines and Puerto Rico

1903 The Wright brothers make their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina

Richard Morris Hunt designs the Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island

1904 Construction begins on the Panama Canal

1912 Sinking of the Titanic

John Marin’s Movement, Fifth Avenue

1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo precipitates World War I

Marsden Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer

1917 Lenin sparks the Russian Revolution

1920 The 19th Amendment grants women the right to vote

1923 Artists and writers like Ernest Hemingway flock to Paris

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Light Coming on the Plains III

1925 America revels in the Roaring Twenties as federal agents do battle with bootleggers

1927 Charles Lindbergh flies the Atlantic nonstop

1929 The stock market crashes, plunging the U.S. into the Great Depression

Charles Demuth’s The Figure 5 in Gold

1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt is sworn in as President

1939 The World’s Fair opens in New York City

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

1941 Japanese planes bomb Pearl Harbor, dragging the U.S. into World War II

1945 President Roosevelt dies; Harry Truman is sworn in

Arshile Gorky’s The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb

1945 The dropping of the atom bomb ends the war

1947 The Marshall Plan boosts Europe’s recovery

Willem de Kooning’s Excavation

1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy starts a witch-hunt for phantom communists

1956 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leads a boycott of the segregated Montgomery, Alabama, bus system

Mark Rothko’s Ochre and Red on Red

1957 Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

1959 The space race heats up

1960 Richard Nixon and John Kennedy engage in the first televised presidential debate

Roy Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl

1963 President Kennedy is assassinated

1965 The U.S. slips deeper into the Vietnam War

Romare Bearden’s The Dove

1968 Antiwar protests rage across the nation

1969 American astronauts land on the moon

Philip Guston’s The Studio

1974 President Nixon resigns in Watergate scandal

1989 The Berlin Wall comes down

1991 Allied forces crush Iraq in the Persian Gulf War

Richard Meier’s Getty Center in Los Angeles

1997 President Bill Clinton is sworn in for second term