America History of 1700 - 1749

1700-1704

• 1700 Massachusetts representative assembly orders all Roman Catholic priests to vacate the colony within three months, an action also taken by the New York legislature. 
  Population of the American colonies: about 275,000 people. Boston has 7,000 people and New York 5,000.   
• 1702-1713 Queen Anne's War (War of the Spanish Succession)  
• 1704 28-29 February. Deerfield, Massachusetts is destroyed and 100 residents are abducted, a consequence of Queen Anne's War

1705-1709  

• 1705. Laws restricting the travel of slaves and banning  miscegenation are enacted in New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia (Virginia Black Code of 1705).   
• 1707 Settlers in Charlestown, South Carolina successfully defend their town against an attack by French and Spanish colonists from Havana and St. Augustine.

1710-1714

• 1710 3,000 German refugees from the Palatinate settle near Livingston Manor on the Hudson River in New York to produce naval stores.  When the colony fails, the settlers go first to the Mohawk Valley (in New York) and finally to eastern Pennsylvania. 
• 1712-13 Tuscarora Indian War in North and South Carolina  
• 1713 England's South Sea Company is allowed to transport 4,800 slaves per year into the Spanish colonies of North America.  
• 1714 Cotton Mather preaches a sermon in which he states his belief in the Copernican theory of the universe, which places the sun at the center and planets in orbit around it; the traditional or Ptolemaic view at that time held  that all revolved around the earth.

1715-1719  

• 1715 Yamasee tribes attack and kill several hundred Carolina settlers.   
• 1716 South Carolina settlers and their Cherokee allies attack and defeat the Yamassee.   
• 1717 Scots-Irish immigration begins, with most settling to western Pennsylvania.  
• 1718 French found New Orleans.
  City of San Antonio founded by the Spanish.

1720-1724  

• 1720 Estimated population of colonies: 474,000.
  The French build forts on the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, and the Niagara rivers.  
• 1721. A smallpox epidemic in Boston prompts Cotton Mather and Zabdiel Boylston to experiment with inoculation against the disease. Mather had learned of the practice from Onesimus, his slave, who had himself been inoculated as a child and knew inoculation to be a widely accepted medical practice in Africa.
• 1723 Benjamin Franklin leaves Boston for Philadelphia, a trip that he chronicles in his Autobiography.  
• 1724 Jewish settlers are exiled from the Louisiana colony.

1725-1729  

• 1727 Benjamin Franklin founds the Junto Club.
• 1728 Prospective brides arrive in Louisiana for the French settlers there; they are known as "casket girls" because they have received dresses in small trunks or caskets as an incentive for immigration. 
• 1728 Col. William Byrd keeps a diary of his travels in determining the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina; it is published in 1841 as History of the Dividing Line.

1730-1734  

• 1731.Franklin's Junto club establishes the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first circulating library in the US.  
• 1732 Birth of George Washington.   
• 1734 John Peter Zenger, editor  of the New York Weekly Journal, is imprisoned in New York for upholding freedom of the press.  He is accused of libeling New York Governor William Cosby.  In 1735, Zenger is acquitted when his attorney, Andrew Hamilton, says that the charges cannot be libelous because the accusations against Cosby were true.  

•  Jonathan Edwards begins preaching fiery sermons to crowds in Northampton, Massachusetts. This begins the religious revival movement known as the Great Awakening.

1735-1739  

• 1738 British preacher George Whitefield arrives in Savannah; his sermons help to promote the "Great Awakening" throughout the 1740s. One of the thousands  impressed by his eloquence is Benjamin Franklin, who writes in his Autobiography, "I happened soon after to attend one of his Sermons, in the Course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a Collection, & I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my Pocket a Handful of Copper Money, three or four silver Dollars, and five Pistoles in Gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the Coppers. Another Stroke of his Oratory made me asham'd of that, and determin'd me to give the Silver; & he finish'd so admirably, that I empty'd my Pocket wholly into the Collector's Dish, Gold and all." Other preachers in this movement included Theodore Frelinghuysen of the Dutch Reformed Church, Gilbert Tennent (Presbyterian), and Jonathan Edwards.  
• 1739-42 War of Jenkin's Ear (against Spain in the Southern colonies)

1740-1744  

• 1741 Vitus Bering surveys the Alaskan coast  for Russian Tsar Peter the Great

1745-1749  

• 1745 French attack and burn Saratoga during King George's War (1745-8; ended by Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle)
• 1749 First American repertory acting company established in Philadelphia; it opens with Thomas Keane in Richard III. 
• 1749 Trustees of Georgia colony revoke their prohibition on slavery in the colony, marking a legal recognition of slavery there.