North America: every state, empire and people from 3200 BCE to today
The North America section of the timeline follows 101 states, empires, colonies and peoples from 3200 BCE to today, in 6 areas: Arctic and Greenland, Canada and the Subarctic, Eastern Woodlands, Great Plains, Southwest and Great Basin and Pacific Coast and California. Among the most significant are Mississippian culture, Thule culture, Ancestral Puebloans, United States, New France and Thirteen Colonies.
Open North America on the interactive timeline
Arctic and Greenland
- Northern Archaic tradition
- Unangan (Aleut) peoples
- Arctic Small Tool tradition
- Saqqaq culture
- Pre-Dorset
- Independence I culture
- Norton tradition
- Dorset culture
- Birnirk culture
- Norse Greenland
- Thule culture
- Inuit peoples
- Danish Greenland
- Greenland
Canada and the Subarctic
- Maritime Archaic
- Shield Archaic
- Laurel complex
- Dene (Northern Athabaskan) peoples
- Vinland (L'Anse aux Meadows)
- Beothuk
- Cree peoples
- New France
- Acadia
- Rupert's Land (Hudson's Bay Company)
- British North America
- Province of Quebec
- Upper Canada
- Lower Canada
- Red River Colony
- Province of Canada
- Dominion of Canada
- Dominion of Newfoundland
- Canada
Eastern Woodlands
- Eastern Archaic hunter-gatherers
- Watson Brake mounds
- Poverty Point culture
- Woodland period cultures
- Adena culture
- Hopewell tradition
- Mississippian culture
- Fort Ancient culture
- Cahokia
- Moundville
- Natchez
- Coosa chiefdom
- Huron-Wendat Confederacy
- Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee)
- Cherokee
- Spanish Florida
- Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom
- Roanoke Colony
- Thirteen Colonies
- New Netherland
- New Sweden
- Muscogee (Creek) Confederacy
- French Louisiana
- United States
- Cherokee Nation
- Tecumseh's Confederacy
- Confederate States of America
Great Plains
- Plains Archaic hunters
- Plains Woodland cultures
- Caddo confederacies
- Plains Village tradition
- Oneota culture
- Mandan and Hidatsa villages
- Wichita peoples (Quivira)
- Blackfoot Confederacy
- Spanish Texas
- Lakota (Teton Sioux)
- Comanche empire (Comancheria)
- Spanish Louisiana
- Mexican Texas
- Republic of Texas
Southwest and Great Basin
- Southwestern Archaic foragers
- Early Agricultural period farmers
- Basketmaker culture
- Fremont culture
- Mogollon culture
- Hohokam
- Ancestral Puebloans
- Chaco Canyon (Chacoan system)
- Mimbres
- Numic peoples (Shoshone, Paiute, Ute)
- Pueblo peoples (Hopi, Zuni, Rio Grande)
- Apache peoples
- O'odham peoples
- Navajo (Diné)
- Santa Fe de Nuevo México
- Mexican New Mexico
Pacific Coast and California
- Early Pacific period cultures
- California Archaic hunter-gatherers
- Locarno Beach and Marpole cultures
- Pacific Northwest peoples
- Chumash
- California peoples (Ohlone, Miwok, Pomo, Tongva)
- Alta California
- Russian America
- Oregon Country
- Mexican California
- Colony of British Columbia
Key events
- Paleo-Eskimos settle the eastern Arctic. Arctic Small Tool tradition hunters cross from Alaska to Greenland in a few centuries, the first people to live in the Canadian high Arctic.
- Maize reaches the Southwest. Maize from Mexico appears in Arizona and New Mexico, and within a millennium farmers in the Tucson Basin are digging irrigation canals.
- Poverty Point earthworks built. Foragers in Louisiana raise six concentric ridges and Mound A, one of the largest earthworks in North America, without farming.
- Hopewell exchange network at its height. Ohio Hopewell earthworks such as Newark draw obsidian from Yellowstone, copper from Lake Superior and shells from the Gulf of Mexico.
- Erik the Red settles Greenland. About 14 ships of Icelandic settlers reach southwest Greenland and found the Eastern Settlement.
- Norse reach Vinland. Leif Erikson's voyages bring the first Europeans to North America, about 500 years before Columbus. The camp at L'Anse aux Meadows was found in 1960.
- Cahokia grows into a city. Within a generation Cahokia expands from a village into a planned city with a Grand Plaza and Monks Mound, the largest earthwork in the Americas.
- The Great Drought. A drought of over 20 years helps drive the Ancestral Puebloans out of Mesa Verde and the Four Corners by 1300.
- John Cabot reaches Newfoundland. Sailing for Henry VII of England, Cabot lands on the coast of Newfoundland or Cape Breton and reports cod so thick they could be caught in baskets.
- De Soto and Coronado expeditions. Hernando de Soto marches through the Southeast from 1539 to 1542 and Coronado searches the Southwest and plains for golden cities. Epidemics follow in their wake.
- Jamestown founded. The Virginia Company plants the first permanent English settlement in America inside Powhatan territory. Tobacco soon makes the colony profitable.
- Champlain founds Quebec. Samuel de Champlain builds a trading post at Quebec, the seat of New France for the next 150 years.
- Pueblo Revolt. Led by Popé of Ohkay Owingeh, the Pueblos kill about 400 colonists and drive the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve years.
- Treaty of Paris ends New France. France gives Canada and the lands east of the Mississippi to Britain and Louisiana to Spain, ending its North American empire.
- Declaration of Independence. The Continental Congress declares the Thirteen Colonies independent of Britain. The war ends with British recognition in 1783.
- Louisiana Purchase. The United States buys about 2.1 million square km west of the Mississippi from France for 15 million dollars, doubling its size.
- Trail of Tears. The US Army forces about 16,000 Cherokee from their homeland to Indian Territory. Thousands die on the way.
- Mexican Cession and California Gold Rush. Mexico cedes the Southwest and California in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, days after gold is found at Sutter's Mill.
- American Civil War begins. Confederate guns fire on Fort Sumter. Four years of war end slavery in the United States through the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865.
- Canadian Confederation and Alaska Purchase. Four British colonies unite as the Dominion of Canada on 1 July, and the United States buys Alaska from Russia in the same year.
- Battle of the Little Bighorn. Lakota and Cheyenne warriors under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse wipe out Custer's command in Montana, the high point of plains resistance.
- Apollo 11 lands on the Moon. NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first people to walk on the Moon.
- Nunavut created. Canada splits the Northwest Territories to create Nunavut, a territory of about 2 million square km with an Inuit majority.