Timetable of English/American History & Literature

E-1500-1660 The Renaissance

1491-1547
Reign of Henry VIII (Tudor)
Age of Exploration, Columbus,  Cabot, da Gama
1517
Martin Luther begins the Protestant Reformation
1534-36
Act of Supremacy, Tyndale’s Bible, John Calvin
1543
Copernicus theory of sun-centered universe
1547-1553
Reign of Edward VI
1553-1558
Reign of Bloody Mary I, Catholic daughter of Henry
John Foxe, Book of Martyrs 

E-1558-1603 Elizabethan

1577
Holinshed, Chronicles
1588-99
Defeat of the Spanish Armada
Christopher Marlowe, Passionate Shepherd
1564-1616
E-William Shakespeare, 37 plays, sonnets
Globe Theater built

E-1603-1625 Jacobean (James)

1607-9
Jamestown founded, Hudson explores Hudson River
1611
E-King James Bible
1620
Arrival of the Mayflower at Plymouth, Covenant
1580-1631
A-Captain John Smith, Pocahontas 

E-1625-1642 Caroline(CharlesI)
beheaded

1630
John Winthrop leads the Puritan migration to Massachusetts Bay
1633-1636
Death be not Proud, John Donne
Harvard College founded

1642-9
French Mathematician and philosopher, Descartes
Theaters close
English Civil War  (Parliament verses King)
Rembrandt, Dutch painter and engraver
Brother Lawrence (c 1605-1691)

E-1649-1660 Commonwealth/Interregnum

1651
Loyalist Thom. Hobbes, Leviathon defends monarch
Spinoza, Pantheistic Dutch philosopher
Apology for the Christian Religion, Pascal (1623-62)
1660
Restoration of Charles II to the throne of England

E-1660-1800 Neoclassical/Age of Reason/Enlightenment

1667-78
A-Day of Doom, Wigglesworth
E-John Milton, Paradise Lost
A-To My dear and Loving Husband, Anne Bradstreet
E-Hudibras, Samuel Butler satirically mocks Puritans
Pilgrim’s Progress, allegory by John Bunyan
George Fox (1624-1692) preaching
1688
Glorious Revolution, James II driven from throne, seated Wm of Orange and his wife Mary (daughter of James), established supremacy of parliament
1692
Two Treatises on Government, John Locke
Salem witch trials
1700
Population of English colonies reaches 250,000
Sir Isaac Newton, Principia (Calculus, light, gravity)

E-1700-1750 Augustan Age

1702-1714
Reign of Queen Anne
A-First American newspaper
A-Cotton Mather, Puritan essays to reconcile religion & science; a clergyman, theologian, writer
Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
1729-1734
E-Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

E-Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, satirists
E-Diest Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
A- Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards
E-John Wesley, Thou Hidden God of Love hymn
E-Mark Akenside, Hymn to Science
E-Wm Cowper, A Poet’s Cat
E-Hume, Inquiry Conc. Human Understanding
A-Wesley brothers visit America
Metaphysical poets, Andrew Marvel

E-1750-1789 Age of Johnson
Birth of the novel

Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson
Rousseau (1712-1778), French philosopher 
1758
E-Jonathan Edwards dies of a smallpox inoculation
A-Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
French Voltaire, Candide, brutal mockery of Job
1754-63
French and Indian War
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
1773
Boston tea party
A-Phillis Wheatley, On being … Africa to America
E-Confessions, Rousseau
E-She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith
1775
E-Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary
E-Grub Street authors
A-Battle at Concord's North Bridge
1776
Declaration of Independence/War of Independence
E- Edward Gibbons begins The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the history of Rome 300-600AD
1781-1783
G-Immanuel Kant(1724-04), Critique of Pure Reason
E-Romantic poet Wm Cowper, A Poet’s Cat
E-Samuel Johnson dies. His position illustrates the approaching end of the era that had begun with the Restoration and the approaching swing towards individualism and Romanticism
1788-94
The Constitution ratified by the states
E-Wm Blake, artist and poet, Tyger, Tyger!

1798-1832 Romantic/Pantheism
Cult of nature, stop thinking, start feeling

George Washington elected first president of the United States
1791
The Bill of Rights ratified by the states
1798
E-The Prelude, 8,000 lines by Wm Wordsworth
E-Tintern Abbey, Wm Wordsworth
E-Kubla Khan fragment, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1800
Biology becomes a recognized area of study
Thomas Jefferson elected president
E-I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Wordsworth
1803-6
Lewis & Clark expedition
Dictionary, Noah Webster
1807-8
Tales From Shakespeare, Charles Lamb
James Madison elected president
Wm Blake illustrates Paradise Lost
Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
1811-1825
Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Jane Austen
E-She Walks in Beauty, Byron
The World as Will, Schopenhauer
A-Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, John Keats
Wilhelm Hegel(1770-1831), The Philosophy of Right
Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
1831-1836
Darwin sails on the Beagle to the Galapagos Islands
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Faust
Siege of the Alamo; Texas declares its independence
A-Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

1837-1901 Victorian/Realism/Naturalism
Romantic/Neoclassic/Socialism/Communism

1837
Birds of America, John James Audubon (1785-1851)
A-Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne
1840
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque by Edgar Allan Poe (occultic)
1841
Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
1844
Samuel Morse invents the telegraph
The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
1845
United States annexes Texas
Hard Times, Charles Dickens
Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, by Frederick Douglass
1830-47
Mormon trek westward
A-Evangeline, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte.
1848
Gold discovered in California
1850
E-How do I Love Thee?, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Charles G Finney (1792-1875) preaching
1851
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1819-1891)
1852
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Idylls of the King, Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
1854-1859
A-Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Origin of Species, Darwin
1855
A-Leaves of Grass, first edition, by Walt Whitman
1857-1859
The Dred Scott decision
Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
1860
Abraham Lincoln elected president
1861
Outbreak of the Civil War; first battle of Bull Run
1863
Emancipation Proclamation
Battles of Vicksburg & Gettysburg
1865
Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox Court House
end of the Civil War
Assassination of President Lincoln
1867
Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens (1835-1910)
United States purchases Alaska
C H Spurgeon (1834-1892) preaching
1868
A-Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Edward M Bounds (1835-1913) preaching
1869
completion of the first transcontinental railroad
John D. Rockefeller forms the Standard Oil Company
At The Back of the North Wind, George MacDonald
1876
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell
1877
phonograph invented by Thomas Edison
incandescent bulb invented by Edison

1880
population exceeds 50 million
1881-1884
Emily Dickinson (1830-86), various poetry
The Joyful Knowledge, Nietzsche, God is dead!
A-The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twian
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94)
1886-1893
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Fried. Nietzsche(1844-1900) 
Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoi
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane
Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
Chicago World's Fair
1895
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Time Machine, H G Wells (1866-1945)
invention of motion picture
1898
Spanish-American War

1901-1914 Edwardian

1903
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
the Wright brothers' first flight
1904
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
1909
first Model T Ford produced
1911
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
1913
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

1914-1965 Modern/Agnostic

North of Boston by Robert Frost
outbreak of World War I
completion of the Panama Canal
1915
German submarine sinks Lusitania
Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity
Pygmalion, Bernard Shaw (English class system)
1917
United States enters into World War I
1919-1922
Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Prohibition enacted
population exceeds 100 million
Ulysses, James Joyce (1882-1941)
1925-1926
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
Scopes Trial
My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D H Lawrence 
Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic
1929
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
A-A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Stock Market Crash

1930
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
E E  Cummings (1894-1962) experimental poetry
television broadcasting begins
1937
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1902-68)
The Hobbit, J R R Tolkien (1892-1973)
outbreak of World War II in Asia
1938
Orson Welles' radio broadcast "War of the Worlds" Our Town, Thornton Wilder (1897-1975)
1939-1942
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Collected Poems, A E Housman (1859-1936)
outbreak of World War II in Europe
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
United States enters World War II
E- The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
1945
atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
1949
Dr Faustus, Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
A-Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, realism
1984, George Orwell 
1951
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C S Lewis
Ideas and Men, Crane Brinton
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
A-Complete Poems, Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
1952
A-The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
A-East of Eden, John Steinbeck
1953
end of Korean War
A-Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
A-On Poets and Poetry, T S Eliot (1888-1965)
1961
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
1963
assassination of President John F. Kennedy

1965-	Post-Modern/Atheistic
Nihilistic, anti-Christian, fully subjective

1968
Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated
Robert Kennedy assassinated
Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll
1969
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Neil Armstrong becomes first man on the moon
Woodstock, the event and the poem by Joni Mitchell
1973
Vietnam Peace Agreement
1974
resignation of President Nixon over Watergate scandal
1989
end of the Cold War

Permission is granted to photocopy this Timetable without the prior permission of the author.  Please contact Thelma English at the website below to report errors or to contact Thelma.