Maya mathematics, Andean engineering and the lake-cities of Mexico developed with no contact with the Old World. These articles cover the civilisations of the Americas on their own terms, from the first cities to the encounters of the sixteenth century.
On December 18, 1888, two ranchers looking for cattle saw Cliff Palace. Eight collections, a Swedish dig and the Antiquities Act of June 8, 1906 followed.
· 1250About AD 1200 Moundville, Alabama, was a palisaded town around a mound-lined plaza. After 1300 most residents left and it became a burial center.
· 1250Peru's Ministry of Culture called Chan Chan a masterpiece of pre-Columbian design in 2016, the year Huaca Toledo was excavated and rain closed the site.
· 1300A 2021 Antiquity study dated Machu Picchu's occupation to about 1420, before Pachacuti's 1438 accession. Yale returned its collection to Peru by 2012.
· 1450Cortés's letter of October 30, 1520 gave Tenochtitlan four causeways and a market of 60,000 a day. Modern studies put the city near 200,000 people.
· 1519Pizarro seized Atahualpa at Cajamarca on November 16, 1532, after plague and civil war had split the Inca; the conquest itself took until 1572.
· 1532Potosí silver, found in 1545 and refined with mercury by forced mita labor, sailed to Seville and, on Manila galleons, to China, the era's silver sink.
· 1572Finished at Tlatelolco in 1577 by Sahagún and Nahua scholars, ordered to Spain by Philip II, in Medici hands by 1587, in Florence from 1783, online 2023.
· 1577John White found the word CROATOAN carved on a post at Roanoke in 1590, three years after his 1587 colonists, including newborn Virginia Dare, vanished.
· 1587Arrested runners with knotted cords moved the Pueblo Revolt from August 13 to August 10, 1680; Otermín fled Santa Fe and Spain stayed away twelve years.
· 1680A 1692 Salem warrant named Sarah Good on suspicion of witchcraft. Massachusetts cleared its last conviction from that court in 2022.
· 1692Jefferson's orders of June 20, 1803, and the journals' dated lines from Camp Dubois, May 14, 1804, to Ordway's "finis" at St. Louis, September 23, 1806.
· 1804Enslaved people rose in Saint-Domingue in 1791, outlasted Spain, Britain and Napoleon, declared Haiti in 1804, then paid former slaveholders until 1888.
· 1804Hannah Dawes Newcomb kept a parlor fire in Keene from May 1816. Tambora is the accepted cause; a 2016 paper testing the link was withdrawn.
· 1816Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that Black Americans were not citizens and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. Six justices concurred; two dissented.
· 1857Lincoln's proclamation freed the enslaved in ten rebel states, exempted 13 Louisiana parishes and 55 Virginia counties, and skipped the border states.
· 1863The Act of July 1, 1862, paid two railroads in bonds and land by the mile. On May 10, 1869, the rails met at Promontory Summit and a telegraph sent "DONE."
· 1869The South Fork Dam failed on May 31, 1889. A county commission blamed its owners, a club of Pittsburgh industrialists, but every suit against the club failed.
· 1889Mount Pelée destroyed Saint-Pierre, Martinique, on May 8, 1902, three days before an election. Two people in the city are known to have survived.
· 1902A sea-level plan, yellow fever and bankruptcy stopped the French in 1889. The United States finished a lock canal in 1914 on a treaty signed for Panama by a Frenchman.
· 1914A French munitions ship and a Norwegian steamer collided in Halifax's Narrows on December 6, 1917; the official register closed with 1,631 dead.
· 1917A molasses tank in Boston's North End burst on January 15, 1919, killing 21. In 1925 auditor Hugh W. Ogden held its owner responsible, not anarchists.
· 1919The Butler Act banned teaching evolution in Tennessee schools. The 1925 Scopes trial ended in a $100 fine, reversed in 1927 on a jury technicality.
· 1925Groves's top-secret memorandum of July 18, 1945 put the Trinity blast at 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT; Los Alamos remeasured it as 22.1 kilotons in 2016.
· 1945
