USA 250 on the Timeline
250 years of American history, from 1776 to today. Here’s a taste of the USA 250 pack — 250 verified moments and counting.
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That’s Whensly — a new daily puzzle of real moments on the timeline.
Play today’s puzzle — free on the App Store- 1776📖 Anonymous pamphleteer Thomas Paine publishes 'Common Sense' in Philadelphia, arguing forcefully for American independence from Britain.
- 1776🪢 The British hang a young Continental Army officer as a spy in New York City, after he is caught behind enemy lines gathering intelligence.
- 1778🌡️ Washington's Continental Army fights the British to a draw at Monmouth Court House, New Jersey, in the longest single day of combat of the war.
- 1783🕊️ American and British diplomats sign a treaty in a Left Bank Paris hotel, formally ending the war and recognizing the United States as an independent nation.
- 1787🖋️ Delegates in Philadelphia complete their summer-long secret deliberations and sign the new Constitution of the United States.
- 1790🏝️ Under threat of a trade embargo, Rhode Island's convention narrowly ratifies the Constitution, becoming the last of the original states to join the union it created.
- 1793📯 George Washington takes the oath of office for a second term in Philadelphia, delivering the shortest inaugural address in presidential history.
- 1798🚫 President Adams signs a law making it a crime to publish 'false, scandalous, and malicious' criticism of the federal government.
- 1804🛶 Captain William Clark and roughly forty men push off from Camp Dubois into the Missouri River, launching a cross-continental expedition of discovery.
- 1812⛵ Captain Isaac Hull's frigate battles the British warship Guerriere off the Atlantic coast, and cannonballs bouncing off her oak hull earn her a lasting nickname.
- 1820⚖️ President James Monroe signs legislation admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state while drawing a line across the western territories to divide future slave and free soil.
- 1832🏛️ The Supreme Court rules that a Georgia law restricting non-Native residents on Cherokee land is unconstitutional, affirming tribal sovereignty even though the ruling goes unenforced.
- 1836🏰 After a thirteen-day siege, Mexican forces under Santa Anna overrun a mission-fortress in San Antonio, killing every defender including Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie.
- 1848⛏️ Carpenter James Marshall spots flecks of gold glinting in a sawmill's tailrace on California's American River, a find that will draw tens of thousands of fortune seekers west.
- 1852📖 Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel appears in bookstores after a magazine serialization, selling ten thousand copies in its first week and reshaping the national debate over slavery.
- 1860🐎 Riders on horseback simultaneously depart from Missouri and California carrying the first mail pouches of a relay service that will slash cross-country delivery time to about ten days.
- 1862🩸 Union and Confederate forces clash along a creek in Maryland in what becomes the single bloodiest day of the Civil War.
- 1864🏙️ Union General William Tecumseh Sherman occupies a vital Georgia rail hub after Confederate forces evacuate it.
- 1869🚂 Railroad officials drive a ceremonial golden spike at Promontory Summit, completing the first transcontinental railroad.
- 1876☎️ Inventor Alexander Graham Bell is granted a patent for his device for transmitting speech electrically.
- 1881🎓 Booker T. Washington opens a school for Black students in a one-room church in Alabama that becomes Tuskegee Institute.
- 1886🥤 A pharmacist in Atlanta sells the first glass of a new syrup-based fountain drink soon named Coca-Cola.
- 1890🕊️ U.S. Army troops kill hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children at a creek in South Dakota, ending the era of the Plains Indian Wars.
- 1898⚓ An explosion of disputed cause destroys an American battleship in Havana harbor, killing over two hundred sailors.
- 1909✊ A group of Black and white reformers, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York.
- 1914🛳️ The Panama Canal opens to commercial traffic as the cargo ship SS Ancon makes the first official transit.
- 1920📻 Pittsburgh station KDKA airs the first scheduled commercial radio broadcast, reporting live presidential election returns.
- 1929🔫 Gangsters disguised as police gun down seven members of Bugs Moran's crew in a Chicago garage, a hit widely blamed on Al Capone.
- 1933🌲 Congress creates the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program that will put unemployed young men to work planting trees and building parks.
- 1937🎈 The German airship Hindenburg bursts into flames while attempting to dock at Naval Air Station Lakehurst in New Jersey, killing 36 people.
- 1941⚓ Japanese aircraft launch a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, drawing America into the Second World War.
- 1945☢️ A U.S. B-29 drops the atomic bomb 'Little Boy' on Hiroshima, Japan, instantly devastating the city.
- 1949🛡️ Twelve nations sign a treaty in Washington creating a mutual-defense alliance to counter Soviet expansion in Europe.
- 1959🌺 Hawaii becomes the 50th and final state admitted to the Union.
- 1963⛪ Klansmen bomb a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls attending Sunday school.
- 1967💍 The Supreme Court strikes down state laws banning interracial marriage in a unanimous ruling.
- 1969🎸 Hundreds of thousands of young people gather on a dairy farm in upstate New York for a three-day music festival that comes to define a generation.
- 1975🚁 North Vietnamese tanks roll into Saigon as the last Americans are evacuated by helicopter, ending the Vietnam War.
- 1986💫 A space shuttle breaks apart 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven crew members including a schoolteacher, live on television.
- 1992🔥 Los Angeles erupts in days of rioting after a jury acquits police officers filmed beating a Black motorist.
Think you can put these in order?
That’s Whensly — a new daily puzzle of real moments on the timeline.
Play today’s puzzle — free on the App Store