Personal Timeline
Xenia Joy Huffman-Scott
Written at four in the morning the day the history project was due.
May 1, 2006
Prior to 1492 but after the Vikings: Native Americans live in harmony without
oppression or knowledge by/of white man.
Columbus and his crew discover the Americas and immediately take over.
Spanish Conquistadors come and take all the gold from the Aztec and Inca while
giving them horrible diseases and killing everyone else if they didn’t become
Christian.
Explorers look for the Northeast Passage that doesn’t exist and instead explore
North America.
Britain tries to make a colony on Roanoke Island but everyone disappears
mysteriously, so they try again with Jamestown and fare better but everyone
really hates it there. Finally the Puritans do it right and settle Plymouth
though they do really badly the first winter.
Over the next century the first thirteen colonies are founded and populated,
each region drawing a specific kind of people depending on the culture they are
looking for.
Britain practices salutary neglect until they realize the colonies are
prospering then they try to regulate them and Americans get a tiny bit angry and
have a Revolution after Britain tries to make them pay taxes for British troops
fighting to protect the Americans during the French and Indian War. Americans
think this is terribly unfair so boycott so Britain makes new taxes and
Americans still think this is unfair and so began a horrible cycle until
Americans signed the Declaration of Independence and told Britain to screw off.
In the early years of the United States of America, a new constitution is
written which has a Bill of Rights which has constantly been violated since its
writing. George Washington became the greatest president ever when he resigned
from the presidency after two terms and Alexander Hamilton solved the national
debt before being shot by conspirator/almost traitor Aaron Burr. Thomas
Jefferson was a constitution strictest until it came to him buying the Louisiana
territory for a really good deal and he figured a land sale was worthy of
bending the rules of the Constitution just a little. Then he sent off Lewis and
Clark to travel across the continent even though he didn’t know if they would
come back alive or not, and only thanks to an Indian woman did they make it to
the Pacific Ocean and back.
In 1812 Americans were getting antsy from not fighting the British in a while so
James Madison had a war where Canadians burnt our capital and we pretended we
won though neither side really lost.
Next Americans were feeling really crowded in the East and started moving west
because Americans thought that Manifest Destiny was the coolest thing ever at
this point in time and they were also feeling good during the Era of Good
Feelings right after the War of 1812 because politicians weren’t so divided on
subjects and President Monroe even promised that Europeans would no longer
colonize the Western Hemisphere with his wimpy Monroe Doctrine.
The Missouri Compromise banned slavery north of the 36th parallel even though
Missouri was north of the 36th parallel.
Good feelings were gone in 1824 when John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson went
head to head for the presidency and JQA won after four years, though, Andrew
Jackson beat out JQA fair and square with no suspected creepy political dealings
even though the campaign was pretty brutal with the mudslinging and name
calling. Andrew Jackson then appointed a lot of his political supporters into
federal jobs even though they weren’t very qualified and threatened South
Carolina when they tried to nullify a hurtful tariff.
In the 1840s Americans still thought Manifest Destiny was really cool and got
the president to fight a war to get more land from Mexico including Texas and
California. Texas said it was already free, but Mexico didn’t think so until
after America kicked their butt.
Abolition and women’s suffrage became trendy and abolition got so hot that there
were lots of debates in Congress and even a compromise in 1850 to make sure the
South didn’t secede, even though they did anyway when Republican president
Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860. We fought a really bloody Civil War and the
North won because we had more people and a brutal commander at the end of the
war. See Gone With the Wind for a really long but eye candy full visual. Lincoln
abolished slavery and got assassinated in a theater.
Reconstruction of the South made lots of Southerners so angry they formed a club
that only allowed you in if you wore a white sheet and a dunce cap. These white
sheeted dunce capped friends rode around on horses and lynched blacks in the
South to enforce their WE HATE BLACKS motto that they said when passing laws to
prevent blacks from gaining any sort of power.
While the South was trying to get onto its feet again the North had more fun
with the factories they built before the war and labor unions were created to
help protect the individual from the crazy scary employers. Employers were also
having fun merging their super big companies to create even BIGGER super big
companies and creating trusts to scare the little people. But they had strikes
and Congress passed some antitrust legislation.
Meanwhile out west the land was filling up and in 1890 the frontier was
officially closed even though there was lots of land still unsettled. Of course
Americans wanted even more land and pushed Indians off of the land we promised
would be theirs forever and put them on crappy little reservations after kicking
the crap out of them.
Then we kicked the crap out of Spain in Cuba even though they said they didn’t
want to fight and would agree with whatever we said. Such is life.
After all the corrupted business and crooked dealings with just about everybody,
Americans wanted reform and around the turn of the century after Theodore
Roosevelt got the presidential seat after McKinley was assassinated he did just
that. He became a trust-buster and a conservationist and also helped America on
the road to becoming an imperial power by adding the Roosevelt Corollary to the
Monroe Doctrine and building a canal in Panama.
When Woodrow Wilson came upon the presidency in 1912 (AFTER THE TITANIC SANK) he
also worked for reform by going after Congress to pass his reform bills. Then
Wilson got us into a war to help make ‘democracy safe for the whole world.’
Afterwards, though, America wasn’t very democratic and stifled the Americans
suspected of being communists.
In the 1920s there was much boozing and sexing it up even though the government
has passed the amendment to ban liquor. At the end of the decade after all the
prosperity, however, the rubber band of economy snap and we fell into the Great
Depression where no on had jobs and Hoover was thought to be the biggest loser
ever.
Then Americans elected FDR who took the American government down a jolly road
toward socialism in an attempt to end the Great Depression. The thing that did
pull America out of the Great Depression was, in fact, World War II which we
entered because Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan, so we made an alliance with
Russia and Britain to kick Hitler’s butt then to go after Japanese. During this,
we made atomic bombs and used two of them on Japan to make them STOP FIGHTING.
It worked and we won.
After the war we entered the Cold War and had a nuclear weapons race with Russia
and played world peace with the United Nations. Next the U.S. went into the
Korean War to stop the spread of communism which ended in a stalemate since no
one really gained anything but lost lives. At home McCarthy was also scaring
people into preventing communism by going on witch hunts but was finally shot
down when he accused the army of being communist.
In the 1960s we started building space ships and Martin Luther King Junior
gained civil rights for blacks because people in the south were still really
oppressive. Then the U.S. got into the Vietnam War because of the containment
policy and hippies were really angry so they took some breaks from their free
love + birth control to have lots of protests and some monks lit themselves on
fire to make a statement.
The seventies were a flurry of government scandal because of the Watergate
burglary and Americans being held hostage in Iran.
When Regan was elected president, though, he solved all world problems by being
the best Republican president ever and ending the Cold War.