1600s

• English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch compete for control of the Atlantic slave trade

1718

• New Orleans is founded and is dominated by a French population

• Here, Creoles (racially-mixed children of French slave owners and enslaved African women) co-exist with whites and slaves

• Creoles receive more privileges than black children and are often educated in the finest schools and trained as musicians

1750

• Enslaved Africans make up 20% of the population in the British colonies in North America, the majority of which were in the southern colonies

• At the same time, a small population of free blacks exists in Maryland

1764

• Spanish invaders take over New Orleans

• Creoles lose social and economic status, and many of them become traveling musicians

• Their descendants became the primary inventors of early jazz

1774

• First laws prohibiting slavery are passed in Connecticut and Rhode Island

1790s

• British slave ships bring as many as 50,000 Africans to the New World each year by this time

1807

• Britain abolishes their slave trade

• Still, an estimated 600,000 Africans had been sold into slavery in North American at this time

• The United States citizen is prohibited from exporting slaves, but the slave trade continues within the country

1830s

• Minstrel shows, in which white actors in cork face paint ridicule African Americans, become popular

1860

• By this year, it’s estimated that more than 10 million Africans had been captured and transported to the Americas, ravaging Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria

1863

• Frederick Douglass confers with Abraham Lincoln on the treatment of African soldiers fighting for the Union in the Civil War

• Lincoln declares in his Emancipation Proclamation that all slaves are now free

1867

• Black freedmen are able to cast votes in a federal election by the passing of the 15^th Amendment

1871

• The Jubilee Singers of Fisk University go on tour through the US and Europe, performing traditional work songs and spirituals and providing white audiences in both continents with their very first exposure to the lives and music of black musicians

1890s

• The earliest forms of jazz begin to emerge in New Orleans as Creole musicians combine elements of West African work songs, slave spirituals, minstrel and vaudeville shows, and rural blues expression with European brass band instruments and harmonies

1917

•  The United States enters World War I

• Colonel William Hayward, a white officer, recruits James Reese Europe, a widely-acclaimed band leader from Harlem, as an officer and regimental bandleader

• Europe recruits 60 African American and Caribbean musicians for his band and writes jazz arrangements of the music

1920s

• The Volstead Act is passed in 1920 and prohibits the sale of alcohol

• Fashionable nightspots in Harlem still distribute liquor and people of all races flock to the clubs and hear legendary bandleaders such as Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington

• Phonographs and radios are all the rage, and blues singers are recorded for the first time, including Bessie Smith

1929

• The stock market crashes, causing the Great Depression

1938

• Benny Goodman forms a racially-integrated band in the form of a jazz quartet, and they perform in Carnegie Hall

1940s

• By this time, an estimated 1,750,000 African Americans left the South as part of the Great Migration – a movement where they migrated to the northern industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York

• World War II puts a stop to the recording industry, but jazz music is still transmitted over the radio

• Bebop is a new musical revolution

1948

• Long playing records (LPs) are invented

1949

• Miles David records Birth of the Cool, opening the door for Hard Bop musicians

1954

• The Newport Jazz Festival is born

1960s

• The Vietnam war intensifies

• The Civil Rights Movement picks up steam, and jazz is the music of the movement

1969

• Duke Ellington receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Richard Nixon

1970s

• African American leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X discuss freedom and move the country to action

• United States citizens openly protest the Vietnam War

1983

• Wynton Marsalis is the first musician to receive a Grammy for a classical performance and a Grammy for a jazz performance in the same year

1987

• Ella Fitzgerald receives the National Medal of Arts from President Ronald Reagan