Timeline

While researching this series, I had to compile a timeline to help me remember the differences between life in England and the early years of colonialism in America. I have included immigration, public schools, wars and battles, the publication of historical books, and the injustices many have endured. America was a new nation, complete with growing pains and mistakes. It was also overwhelming to see how wealthy merchants controlled the decisions about forming schools to enrich themselves and their companies. This timeline kept my perspective in check while recognizing the achievements and challenges, as well as the huge disparities among people in America.  

In England, proper English language was always associated with the upper class. We need to remember that the American English language was shaped by many different cultures and was almost certainly not the upper-class variety of England. The majority of immigrants were people seeking a better life.  Although this group of new Americans included many who were not here by choice.  Roughly 320,000-500,000 European immigrants, mostly English, who arrived in the 16th-18th centuries, came as indentured servants. This accounted for half of the white settler population in America. Approximately 388,000-500,000 Africans were forcefully put on ships and sold into slavery in the southern colonies. By 1860, the enslaved population had grown to 4 million. Conversely, Native Americans were being forced off their ancestral land, greatly diminishing their population through displacement, disease, and conflicts.     

This contains the years covered in this series of American English. Although lengthy, it is not comprehensive! Please let me know if there is something significant to add!

1400-1700 The Great Vowel Shift happened in England.
1476 Introduction of the printing press and the regulation of the English language began in England.
1590-1611 William Shakespeare writes poems, plays, and sonnets.
1604 Robert Cawdrey publishes the First English Dictionary.
1606 The Franciscan order establishes a Catholic school in what is now St. Augustine, FL, and later founds mission schools throughout the Southwest and California.
1607 The first English colony of Jamestown is settled.
1609 Dutch settlements appear in New York, near the Hudson River.
1611 The Virginia Colonies are founded.1616 John Smith publishes an account of his explorations of the region titled A Description of New England.
1619 The first enslaved Africans arrive in Virginia, initially as indentured servants.
1620 The Pilgrims land on what we now refer to as Plymouth Rock.
1623 The First Folio Edition of Shakespeare’s plays is published in England.
1628 A Collegiate School is founded by a parents’ group of the Dutch Reformed Church. Collegiate is the oldest continuously operating school in the U.S. in modern-day New York City. The all-boys school is rooted in the classical-education model, based on classic books, the liberal arts, and the natural sciences.
1630 The Massachusetts Bay Colony is founded.
1635 The Boston Latin School becomes the first school (boys only) to open in the colonies, focusing on family, religion, and community.
1636 Harvard was the first institution of higher education, founded by the Puritans to train and spread the gospel.
1639 First printing press arrives in Cambridge, MA.
1642 Civil War breaks out in England; King Charles I was executed.
1642 The passage of the Massachusetts Bay School Law requires parents and children,
apprentices and servants, to read and write.
1647 Passage of the Massachusetts Law of 1647 (aka the Old Deluder Satan Act) required every town of at least 50 families to employ a schoolmaster to teach their children to read and write, and every town of at least 100 families to set up a grammar school to prepare boys to attend Harvard College.
1650 Anne Bradstreet writes a series of poems titled. The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up inAmerica, published in London. It is published without her permission, but it makes her the first author to be published in the colonies.
1660 Monarchy is restored in England, and Charles II becomes King.
1662 Royal Society of London creates a committee to make “English the Language of
Science.”
1664 The English capture New York from the Dutch.
1670 German immigrants settle in Pennsylvania and parts of New York.
1697 In his Essay Upon Projects, Daniel Defoe calls for the creation of an Academy of 36
"gentlemen" to dictate English usage.
1700 Boston Merchant Samuel Sewell publishes The Selling of Joseph, a very early
anti-slavery tract.
1702 Cotton Mather publishes Magnalia Christi Americana - The Great Achievement of Christ in America.
1709 More waves of German immigrants settle in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and New England.
1709 Scottish migration begins, including artisans, laborers, and indentured servants.
1717 The English Parliament uses the American Colonies as a punishment, sending
convicted (rightfully and wrongfully convicted) people to Maryland and Virginia.
1719 Daniel Defoe publishes Robinson Crusoe, considered by some to be the first modern English novel.
1721 Nathaniel Bailey publishes his Universal Etymological Dictionary of the English
Language,
1722 At 16, Benjamin Franklin contributes a series of essays to the New England Courant.
1730 German and Scotch-Irish colonize the Virginia Valley and the Carolina back country.
1752 Benjamin Franklin invents the lightning rod.
1755 Samuel Johnson publishes his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language.
1755 Exiled from Nova Scotia, French Acadian survivors settle in Louisiana.
1754- 1763 French and Indian War.
1763 Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring a tax on all printed material: from
newspapers and legal documents to playing cards.
1773 Black poet Phillis Wheatley publishes her first book of poems.
1773 Boston Tea Party, in retaliation for the Tea Tax, men dress as indigenous people and dump the tea overboard.
1773 The Revolutionary War begins in Massachusetts.
1774 Encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine settles in Philadelphia.
1725-1776 Additional German settlers arrive in Pennsylvania, making ⅓ of the area German.
1776 The British government suspends emigration to the American colonies.
1776 Declaration of Independence is signed.
1776 In the best-selling pamphlet Common Sense, English immigrant Thomas Paine is the first to argue that the American colonies should be independent.
1781 U.S. poet Philip Freneau writes The British Prison Ship, describing the horrors of his
experience as a prisoner.
1783 Noah Webster's American Spelling Book is published.
1783 The Revolutionary War ends, and immigration resumes with large numbers of
Scotch-Irish.
1785 The Continental Congress (before the U.S. Constitution was ratified) passes a law
calling for a survey of the "Northwest Territory," which includes what is to become the state of Ohio. The law created "townships," reserving a portion of each township for a local school. From these "land grants" eventually came the U.S. system of "land grant universities," the state public universities that exist today. Of course, to create these townships, the Continental Congress assumes it has the right to give away or sell land that is already occupied by Native people.
1786 Philip Freneau, often referred to as the poet of the American Revolution, publishes his first collection of poems.
1787 Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey became states.
1789 The US Constitution is written.
1788 Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire,
Virginia, and New York become States.
1789 George Washington is inaugurated as the first president.
1789 Olaudah Equiano, a slave captured as a child in Africa, becomes a best-selling author on both sides of the Atlantic, writing a biography titled The Interesting Narrative of the Lifeof Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.
1789 William Dunlap has success with his comedy, The Father, or American Shandyism.
1790 U.S first patent is given to Samuel Hopkins for a new method of making potash and pearl ash.
1797 Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin.
1799 North Carolina becomes a state.
1789 Noah Webster's Dissertations on the American English Language is published, advocating for an American English standard.
1798 Jon Adams becomes president.
1798 Charles Brockden Brown publishes Wieland, the first of four Gothic romances set in America.
1790 Rhode Island becomes a state.
1790 Pennsylvania law calls for free public education for poor people, citing that the rich can afford to teach their children.
1791 Vermont becomes a state.
1792 Kentucky becomes a state.
1796 Tennessee becomes a state.
1800 The Library of Congress is founded in Washington.
1801 Thomas Jefferson becomes president.
1803 Ohio becomes a state.
1803 The creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1803 President Thomas Jefferson issues instructions for the Lewis and Clark Expedition to find the Northwest Passage.
1803 The Louisiana Purchase from France cost $15,000,000, doubling the size of America.
1805 New York Public School Society is formed by wealthy businessmen to provide education for poor children. Schools are run on the "Lancasterian" model, in which one "master" teaches hundreds of students in a single room. The master gives a rote lesson to the older students, who then pass it down to the younger students. These schools emphasize discipline and obedience, qualities that factory owners want in their workers.
1809 Washington Irving publishes a comic titled History of New York under the fictional
name Dietrich Knickerbocker.
1809 James Madison becomes president.
1812 Louisiana became a state.
1812–1815 War of 1812 against Britain.
1816 Indiana becomes a state.
1817 Work on the Erie Canal begins.
1816 John Pickering publishes the first book of Americanisms.
1817 James Monroe becomes president.
1817 A petition presented in the Boston Town Meeting calls for the establishment of a system of free public primary schools. Main support comes from local merchants, businessmen, and wealthier artisans. Many wage earners oppose it because they don't want to pay the taxes.
1817 Mississippi becomes a state.
1818 Illinois becomes a state.
1819 Alabama becomes a state.
1819 East and West Florida are purchased from Spain for $5 million dollars.
1819 Washington Irving writes Rip Van Winkle.
1820 Maine becomes a state.
1820 At age 13, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had his first poem, The Battle of Lovell's Pond, published in his hometown's newspaper, the Portland, Maine.
1821 James Fenimore Cooper writes The Spy, a romance set during the American Revolution.
1821 The Cherokee language is first written with a unique 86-character (later 85) syllabary created by Sequoyah (c.1770–1843) to represent Cherokee syllables. Developed over a decade, this system allows for rapid literacy within the Cherokee Nation.
1821 Missouri becomes a state.
1821 First public high school in the U.S., Boston English, opens in Boston, Massachusetts. An alternative to Boston Latin, the school is established to prepare boys for success in business and industry. Girls were not admitted until the 1870s.
1825 John Quincy Adams becomes president.
1826 James Fenimore Cooper writes The Last of the Mohicans.
1827 Massachusetts passes a law making all grades of public school open to all pupils, free of charge.
1828 Noah Webster publishes the American Dictionary of the English Language.
1829 Andrew Jackson becomes president.
1830s By this time, most southern states have laws that forbade teaching people in slavery from reading. Even so, around 5 percent become literate at great personal risk.
1833 Walter Hunt invents the first lock-stitch sewing machine, but loses interest and does not patent his invention. Later, Elias Howe secures a patent on an original lock-stitch machine, but fails to manufacture and sell it. Still later, Isaac Singer infringes on Howe's patent to make his own machine, which makes Singer rich. Hunt also invents the safety pin, which he sells outright for $400.
1834 John A. and Hiram Abial Pitts invents a machine that automatically threshes and
separates grain from chaff, freeing farmers from a slow and laborious process.
1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes Nature, launching the American Transcendental
movement.
1836 To finance the development of his "six-shooter," Samuel Colt travels the lecture circuit, giving demonstrations of laughing gas. Colt's new weapon fails to catch on, and he goes bankrupt in 1842 at age 28. He reorganizes and sells his first major order to the War Department during the Mexican War in 1846, and goes on to become rich.
1836 In their attempt to take Texas by force from Mexico, slave-owner James Bowie and
Indian-killer Davy Crockett are among those killed in the Battle of the Alamo in Texas.
1836 Arkansas becomes a state.
1837 Martin Van Buren becomes president.
1837 Michigan becomes a state.
1837 Horace Mann becomes head of the newly formed Massachusetts State Board of
Education. Edmund Dwight, a major industrialist, thought a state board of education is so important to factory owners that he offers to supplement the state salary with his own funds.
1837 Buffalo, New York, and Louisville, Kentucky, appoint the first school superintendents.
1837- 1839 The forced removal of the Cherokee Nation: A devastating migration of over 16,000 Cherokee people occurrs, resulting in over 4,000 deaths. Known as the Trail of Tears.
1840 The second volume of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language is published.
1840 Over a million Irish immigrants forced from their homes because of the potato famine land in New York. Irish Catholics in New York City struggle for local neighborhood control of schools as a way of preventing their children from being force-fed a Protestant curriculum.
1841 WilliamHenry Harrison becomes president.
1841 Tyler Jackson becomes president.
1842 Crawford Williamson Long, of Jefferson, Georgia, performs the first operation using an ether-based anesthesia, when he removes a tumor from the neck of Mr. James Venable. Long will not reveal his discovery until 1849.
1844 The telegraph is invented by Samuel Morse, inaugurating the development of rapid communication, a major influence on the growth and spread of English.
1845 James Polk becomes president.
1845 Edgar Allan Poe writes The Raven.
1845 The United States annexes Texas.
1845 Florida and Texas become states.
1846 Iowa becomes a state.
1846 Richard M. Hoe creates a revolution in printing by rolling a cylinder over stationary plates of inked type and using the cylinder to make an impression on paper. This eliminates the need for making impressions directly from the type plates themselves, which were heavy and difficult to maneuver.
1846 President James Polk orders the invasion of Mexico.
1846-1856 3.1 million immigrants arrive in the USA, a number equal to one-eighth of the entire U.S. population. Industry owners require a docile, obedient workforce, and they look to public schools to provide it.
1848 Massachusetts Reform School at Westboro opens, where children who have refused to attend public schools are sent. This marks the beginning of a long tradition of "reform schools" that combine the education and juvenile justice systems.
1848 Wisconsin becomes a state.
1848 California Gold Rush begins.
1848 The war against Mexico ends with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo,
which gives the United States almost half of what was then Mexico. This includes all of what is now the U.S. Southwest, plus parts of Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming, and most of California. The treaty guarantees citizenship rights to everyone living in these areas, mostly Mexicans and Native people. It also guarantees the continued use of Spanish, including in education. One hundred fifty years later, in 1998, California broke that treaty by passing Proposition 227, which would make it illegal for teachers to speak Spanish in public schools.
1849 Henry David Thoreau releases his essay Civil Disobedience.
1849 Zachary Taylor becomes president.
1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne writes The Scarlet Letter.
1850 California becomes a state.
1850 Millard Fillmore becomes president.
1851 Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick.
1851 The state of Massachusetts passes the first compulsory education law. The goal is to ensure that the children of poor immigrants become "civilized" and learn obedience and restraint, so they become good workers and don't contribute to social upheaval.
1852 The first edition of Roget's Thesaurus is published.
1852 Emily Dickinson publishes her first poem, A Valentine.
1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe writes Uncle Tom’s Cabin, beginning the American tradition of social writing.
1853 Franklin Pierce becomes president.
1854 Hener David Thoreau writes Walden.
1855 Frederick Douglass publishes My Bondage and My Freedom.
1855 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writes The Song of Hiawatha.
1855 Walt Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass.
1857 James Buchanan becomes president.
1858 Minnesota becomes a state.
1859 Oregon becomes a state.
1860 John Pickering's dictionary is published.
1820-1860 The percentage of people working in agriculture plummets as family farms are gobbled up by larger agricultural businesses, forcing people to look for work in towns and cities. At the same time, cities grow rapidly, fueled by new manufacturing industries, the influx of people from rural areas, and the arrival of many immigrants from Europe.
1861 Abraham Lincoln becomes president.
1861 Kansas becomes a state.
1862 Dakota War in Minnesota
1863 West Virginia becomes a state
1863 The Emancipation Proclamation is issued by Abraham Lincoln.
1864 Nevada becomes a state.
1861 - 1864 The American Civil War is fought.
1864 Congress deems it illegal for Native Americans to be taught their native language.
1865 Civil War ends, and the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery.
1865 Andrew Jackson becomes president.
1866 The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable is completed.
1867 Nebraska becomes a state.
1867 The Federal Department of Education is founded.
1867 The first public kindergarten opens in St. Louis, Missouri.
1867 Alaska is purchased from Russia for $7,200,000.
1868 Louisa May Alcott writes Little Women .
1869 The first Transcontinental Railroad is completed.
1869 Ulysses S. Grant becomes president.
1870 Mark Twain writes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, thus modernizing private communication.
1876 Colorado becomes a state.
1865-1877 African Americans mobilize to bring public education to the South for the first time. After the Civil War and with the legal end of slavery, African Americans in the South make alliances with white Republicans to push for many political changes, including for the first time rewriting state constitutions to guarantee free public education. In practice, white children benefit more than Black children.
1877 Rutherford B Hayes becomes president
1878 Henry James writes Daisy Miller.
1879 Establishment of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The firstgovernment-run, off-reservation boarding school for Native Americans, it is founded with a philosophy of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” It paves the way for roughly 400 other boarding schools across 37 states over the next century, forcing hundreds of thousands of Native American children to give up their culture and customs and assimilate into white American society.
1879 James A.H. Murray begins editing the Philological Society's New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (later renamed the Oxford English Dictionary).
1881 James A Garfield becomes president.
1881 Chester A Arthur becomes president.
1884 Mark Twain writes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
1885 Grover Cleveland becomes president.
1886 The Statue of Liberty is dedicated.
1889 North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington become states.
1889 Benjamin Harris becomes president. ,
1893 The first silent motion pictures in the US were short films produced at Thomas Edison's studio in West Orange, New Jersey. The first commercial US film screening to a paying audience took place soon after, in April 1896, in New York City. 
1897 William McKinley becomes president.
1898 The Spanish-American War.
1890 Idaho and Wyoming become states.
1890 The Battle of Wounded Knee.
1895 Stephen Crane writes The Red Badge of Courage.
1896 Southern states pass laws for segregation in public schools.
1896 Utah becomes a state.
1898 Puerto Rico, through a treaty with Spain, is acquired by the United States.
1899 Guam, through a treaty with Spain, is acquired by the United States.
1899 By a treaty with Great Britain and Germany, Eastern Samoa becomes a territory of the United States.
1901 Theodore Roosevelt becomes president.
1903 The Panama Canal Zone, through a treaty with Panama, gives the United States
control for $10 million and an annual fee of $250,000.
1903 Jack London writes Call of the Wild.
1903 The Wright brothers made their first flight.
1905 The U.S. Supreme Court requires California to extend public education to the children of Chinese immigrants.
1905 America’s greatest short story writer, O Henry, writes The Gift of the Magi.
1906 Upton Sinclair writes The Jungle and helps launch America’s tradition of investigative journalism.
1907 Oklahoma becomes a state.
1909 William Howard Taft becomes president.
1893-1913  The size of school boards in the country's 28 biggest cities is cut in half. Most local district-based (or "ward") positions are eliminated in favor of citywide elections. This means that local immigrant communities lose control of their schools. The makeup of school boards changes from small local businessmen and some wage earners to professionals (doctors, lawyers and such), big businessmen, and other members of the richest classes.                                                                                                             
1912 New Mexico and Arizona became states.
1913 Woodrow Wilson became president.
1913 William Carlos Williams released his first book of poems, The Tempers.
1913 The Federal Reserve System is established.
1914 Carl Sandburg publishes Chicago.
1915 Edgar Lee Masters releases Spoon River Anthology.
1917 T. S. Eliot writes The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
1917 Smith-Hughes Act was passed, providing federal funding for vocational education. Big manufacturing corporations push this because they want to remove job-skills training from trade union apprenticeship programs and bring it under their own control.
1914 - 1918 The First World War
1918 Mississippi becomes the last state to pass a compulsory attendance law.
1918 All states require students to complete elementary school. 
1919 H.L. Mencken publishes the first edition of The American Language, a pioneer study in the history of a major national version of English.
1919 Sherwood Anderson writes Winesburg, Ohio.
1920 Edith Wharton becomes the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence. 1920 The first American commercial radio station begins operating in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
1920 The 19th Amendment grants women the right to vote.
1921 Warren G Harding becomes president.
1922 T.S. Eliot publishes The Wasteland.
1923 Kelvin Coolidge becomes president.
1923 E. E. Cummings publishes his first book of poems, Tulips and Chimneys.
1923 Robert Frost publishes Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.
1924 An act of Congress makes Native Americans U.S. citizens for the first time.
1925 The New Yorker magazine is founded by Harold Ross and Jane Grant.
1925 George P. Krapp publishes his two-volume The English Language in America, the first comprehensive and scholarly treatment of the subject.
1925 Theodore Dreiser writes An American Tragedy.
1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald writes The Great Gatsby.
1926 Ernest Hemingway writes The Sun Also Rises.
1927 Willa Cather writes Death Comes for the Archbishop.
1927 The first "speaking motion picture," The Jazz Singer, is released.
1929 William Faulkner writes The Sound and the Fury.
1929 Herbert Hoover becomes president.
1929 Thomas Wolfe writes Look Homeward Angel.
1929 The stock market crashes, triggering the Great Depression.
1930 Sinclair Lewis becomes the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
1931 Pearl Buck writes The Good Earth.
1932 A survey of 150 school districts reveals that three-quarters use so-called intelligence testing to place students in different academic tracks.
1933 Franklin D Roosevelt becomes president.
1934 Henry Miller writes Tropic of Capricorn.
1936 Playwright Eugene O’Neill wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.                             
1938 Pearl Buck wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
1939 John Steinbeck publishes The Grapes of Wrath.
1939 - 1945 The Second World War.
1945 Harry S Truman becomes president.
1945 At the end of World War 2, the G.I. Bill of Rights gave thousands of working-class men college scholarships for the first time in U.S. history.
1948 Educational Testing Service is formed by merging the College Entrance Examination Board, the Cooperative Test Service, the Graduate Records Office, the National Committee on Teachers Examinations, and others, with major funding from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. These testing services continue the work of eugenicists like Carl Brigham (originator of the SAT), who did research "proving" that immigrants were feeble-minded.
1959 Alaska and Hawaii become states