AP US History cheat sheet

Maize cultivation spread north from Mesoamerica after roughly 800 CE, supporting sedentary societies such as the Pueblo in the Southwest, the Mississippian mound-builders at Cahokia, and the Iroquois Confederacy in the Northeast.

The Columbian Exchange began in 1492: maize, potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco moved to Afro-Eurasia while wheat, sugar, horses, and cattle moved to the Americas; smallpox and measles killed an estimated 80–90 percent of Indigenous peoples.

Spanish colonization rested on the encomienda grant of 1503 and, in Peru, the mita labor draft; the casta system ranked peninsulares above criollos, then mestizos, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans.

The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) divided non-European lands between Spain and Portugal along an Atlantic meridian, leaving Portugal with Brazil and Spain with most of the Americas.

French colonies such as Quebec (1608) depended on the fur trade and kinship alliances with Algonquian and Huron peoples and attracted few permanent settlers.

Dutch New Netherland centered on the Hudson River fur trade and tolerated religious diversity, while English ventures relied on joint-stock companies and chartered self-government.

Indigenous peoples responded to colonization through flight, diplomacy, religious revitalization, and armed resistance; European metal goods and diseases reshaped Native economies and warfare before 1607.

Decision rule: pre-1607 English activity means exploration and the failed Roanoke colony (1587) only; permanent English settlement begins at Jamestown in 1607 and belongs to Period 2.

Jamestown (1607) survived once tobacco became a cash crop under John Rolfe (1612); the House of Burgesses (1619) became the first elected colonial assembly.

Bacon's Rebellion (1676) in Virginia pushed planters toward African chattel slavery, which replaced indentured servitude as the dominant Chesapeake labor system by the early 1700s.

Massachusetts Bay (1630) under John Winthrop was a Puritan Bible commonwealth; the Half-Way Covenant (1662) responded to declining conversion among the second generation.

The middle colonies mixed ethnic and religious groups; Pennsylvania (1681), founded by William Penn, combined Quaker toleration with proprietary government and attracted diverse immigrants.

Mercantilism operated through the Navigation Acts (1651–1673), which required English ships and enumerated goods; enforcement was lax under the policy known as salutary neglect until 1763.

Indentured servants supplied most Chesapeake labor before 1700; the transatlantic slave trade and the Royal African Company expanded African slavery sharply after 1670.

Metacom's (King Philip's) War of 1675–1676 destroyed Indigenous power in New England, while the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 temporarily expelled the Spanish from New Mexico.

The Great Awakening of the 1730s–1740s and Enlightenment thought both weakened deference to established authority, preparing cultural ground for Revolutionary ideas.

Decision rule for colonial sections: Chesapeake equals staple crops and slavery; New England equals family farms, towns, and shipping; middle colonies equal grain and pluralism.

The French and Indian War (1754–1763) ended with the Treaty of Paris of 1763; Britain gained Canada and territory east of the Mississippi, doubling its North American empire and its debt.

The Proclamation of 1763 barred colonial settlement west of the Appalachians after Pontiac's Rebellion; colonists resented it as a check on westward expansion.

Tax sequence to memorize: Sugar Act 1764, Stamp Act 1765 (repealed 1766 with the Declaratory Act), Townshend Acts 1767, Tea Act 1773, Coercive or Intolerable Acts 1774.

Resistance escalated through the Stamp Act Congress (1765), Sons of Liberty, Boston Massacre (1770), Boston Tea Party (1773), First Continental Congress (1774), and Lexington and Concord in April 1775.

Independence timeline: Common Sense in January 1776, Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Saratoga in 1777 (which brought the French alliance), Yorktown in 1781, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

The Articles of Confederation created a unicameral Congress with no power to tax or regulate commerce and a unanimous amendment rule; Shays' Rebellion (1786) exposed these weaknesses.

Constitutional compromises included the Great Compromise (bicameral Congress), the Three-Fifths Compromise, protection of the slave trade until 1808, and the Electoral College; ratification required nine states, with the Bill of Rights added in 1791.

Hamilton's program combined assumption of state debts, a national bank (1791), excise taxes, and tariffs; opposition produced the Democratic-Republican Party and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.

Foreign policy precedents: Neutrality Proclamation (1793), Jay's Treaty (1794), Pinckney's Treaty (1795), Washington's Farewell Address (1796), and the XYZ Affair with the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) under Adams.

Marbury v. Madison (1803) established judicial review, and McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) upheld implied federal powers and federal supremacy over state taxes on the national bank.

The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled U.S. territory, and the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804–1806) mapped a route up the Missouri River toward the Pacific.

War of 1812 causes included impressment, seizures of neutral shipping, and frontier pressure; results included the Treaty of Ghent (1814), the collapse of Federalist influence after the Hartford Convention, and heightened nationalism.

The Market Revolution combined the cotton gin (1793), the Erie Canal (1825), railroads and telegraph lines, Lowell textile mills, and commercial agriculture tying western farmers to national and European markets.

The Missouri Compromise (1820) admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as free, banned slavery north of 36°30′ in the Louisiana Purchase, and preserved sectional balance; the Monroe Doctrine (1823) warned Europe against new colonization in the Americas.

Andrew Jackson's policies: Indian Removal Act (1830), disregard of Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Trail of Tears (1838), and the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833 settled by the Force Bill and a compromise tariff.

The Second Party System pitted Democrats (Jackson, states' rights, limited government) against Whigs (Clay, internal improvements, tariffs, moral reform); the Bank War and the Panic of 1837 followed.

The Second Great Awakening fueled abolitionism (Garrison's Liberator, 1831), temperance, Horace Mann's public schools, Seneca Falls (1848), and utopian communities such as Brook Farm.

Manifest Destiny produced Texas independence in 1836 and annexation in 1845, the Oregon boundary settlement of 1846, and the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 ending in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding California and the Southwest; the Wilmot Proviso (1846) tried and failed to ban slavery in those territories.

The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as free, applied popular sovereignty to Utah and New Mexico, ended the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) repealed the Missouri Compromise line and produced 'Bleeding Kansas'; it destroyed the Whig Party and helped create the Republican Party.

Sectional escalation ran from Dred Scott (1857) to the Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858), John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (1859), and Lincoln's election in 1860, which triggered secession of seven states before April 1861.

Civil War turning points: Fort Sumter (April 1861), Antietam (1862, which enabled the Emancipation Proclamation), Gettysburg and Vicksburg (July 1863), Sherman's March (1864), and Appomattox (April 1865).

Wartime legislation included the Homestead Act (1862), the Morrill Act (1862), the Pacific Railway Act (1862), and the Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863.

Reconstruction amendments: Thirteenth (1865, abolished slavery), Fourteenth (1868, citizenship, equal protection, due process), and Fifteenth (1870, voting rights regardless of race).

Radical Reconstruction imposed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and military districts, alongside the Freedmen's Bureau; Black Codes, KKK violence, and the Compromise of 1877 ended federal enforcement.

Industrial consolidation: Andrew Carnegie in steel used vertical integration; John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil through horizontal integration and trusts; J.P. Morgan organized finance and holding companies.

'New' immigration from southern and eastern Europe accelerated after 1880; nativism produced the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the Immigration Restriction League, and Ellis Island opened in 1892.

Labor conflict: the Great Railroad Strike (1877), Haymarket (1886), Homestead (1892), and Pullman (1894); the Knights of Labor (1869) gave way to the skilled-workers' AFL (1886) under Samuel Gompers.

The West: transcontinental railroad (1869), buffalo extermination, the Indian Wars (Little Bighorn 1876, Wounded Knee 1890), and the Dawes Act (1887) allotment and assimilation policy.

Agrarian protest: the Grange and Farmers' Alliances produced the Populist Party and its 1892 Omaha Platform (free silver, income tax, railroad regulation); William Jennings Bryan lost in 1896 to McKinley.

Federal regulation: the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), the latter narrowed by United States v. E.C. Knight (1895).

Segregation: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) sanctioned 'separate but equal'; Jim Crow laws, disfranchisement, and lynching prompted Booker T. Washington's accommodationism versus W.E.B. Du Bois's protest strategy.

Urbanization brought political machines, settlement houses such as Hull House (1889), the Social Gospel, and mass consumption through department stores and mail-order catalogs.

Progressive amendments: Sixteenth (1913, federal income tax), Seventeenth (1913, direct election of senators), Eighteenth (1919, Prohibition), and Nineteenth (1920, women's suffrage).

Progressive regulation: Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act (1906), Federal Reserve Act (1913), Clayton Antitrust Act and Federal Trade Commission (1914).

Imperialism: the Spanish-American War (1898) yielded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; add the Open Door notes (1899–1900), Panama Canal (1914), Roosevelt Corollary (1904), and dollar diplomacy.

U.S. entry into World War I in April 1917 followed unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram; the Espionage and Sedition Acts and Schenck v. United States suppressed dissent.

The Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, so the United States never joined the League of Nations; the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922) pursued disarmament instead.

The 1920s brought the First Red Scare, the Emergency Quota Act (1921) and Johnson-Reed Act (1924), consumer credit, the Harlem Renaissance, the Scopes Trial (1925), and failed Prohibition enforcement.

The Great Depression followed the 1929 crash, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930), and bank failures; the New Deal created the FDIC, SEC, Social Security (1935), the Wagner Act, and the AAA, while the 1937 court-packing plan failed.

World War II: Neutrality Acts, cash-and-carry, Lend-Lease (1941), Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese internment upheld in Korematsu (1944), and the Yalta and Potsdam conferences shaping the postwar order.

Containment took shape through the Truman Doctrine (1947, Greece and Turkey), the Marshall Plan (1948), NATO (1949), and NSC-68 (1950), which militarized the Cold War.

Cold War crises: Berlin Airlift (1948–1949), Korean War (1950–1953), Sputnik (1957), Bay of Pigs (1961), Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and Vietnam escalation after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964).

The Second Red Scare involved HUAC, the Alger Hiss case, the Rosenberg executions (1953), McCarthy's accusations (1950–1954), and the Army-McCarthy hearings.

Postwar society: the GI Bill, baby boom, suburbanization, the Interstate Highway Act (1956), Sun Belt growth, and early civil rights victories in Brown (1954) and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955).

Civil rights legislation: Civil Rights Act (1964), Twenty-Fourth Amendment (1964, abolished poll taxes), and Voting Rights Act (1965); Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence competed with Black Power.

Great Society programs included Medicare and Medicaid (1965), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), and War on Poverty initiatives.

Vietnam: the Tet Offensive (1968), Vietnamization, the Paris Accords (1973), and the War Powers Act (1973); 1968 also brought the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy and Chicago convention unrest.

The 1970s brought stagflation, the OPEC oil embargo (1973), Roe v. Wade (1973), Title IX (1972), Nixon's opening to China (1972), détente, and Watergate, ending in resignation in 1974.

Reagan (1981–1989) pursued supply-side tax cuts (1981), deregulation, and a military buildup that raised deficits; Iran-Contra (1986) and the INF Treaty (1987) marked his second term, and the Cold War ended with the Berlin Wall (1989) and Soviet dissolution (1991).

The conservative coalition rested on the Moral Majority and religious right, Sun Belt suburban voters, and the realignment of white southerners toward the Republican Party.

Post-Cold War policy: Gulf War (1991), Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), NAFTA (1994), welfare reform (1996), and Clinton's impeachment (1998).

Globalization and technology: commercial internet growth in the 1990s, the dot-com boom and bust (2000–2001), and smartphones and social media after 2007.

The War on Terror followed the September 11, 2001 attacks: USA PATRIOT Act (2001), war in Afghanistan (2001), invasion of Iraq (2003), and continuing debates over surveillance and civil liberties.

Domestic policy in the 2000s: No Child Left Behind (2001), Medicare Part D (2003), the Hurricane Katrina response (2005), and the 2008 financial crisis met with TARP and later Dodd-Frank (2010).

Obama (2009–2017) signed the Affordable Care Act (2010) and an economic stimulus package; partisan polarization intensified over immigration, trade, and entitlement spending.

Demographic change includes rising Latino and Asian immigration, Sun Belt electoral growth, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), which legalized some undocumented immigrants.