The first stanza of Longfellow's poem "Paul Revere's Ride" famously reads,

"Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year."

The 300,000 men and women lured to California by the prospect of gold resulted in the California Gold Rush.

Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman escaped and then committed her life to helping others escape the horrific institution.  She even served as a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War.

The abolitionist was John Brown captured Harper's Ferry and was tried and hanged for his unsuccessful raid.

Before the Transcontinental Railroad, the Oregon Trail from the Missouri River to Oregon permitted hundreds of thousands of immigrants to settle the West.

In 1871, from October 8th to the 9th, Chicago suffered a fire that left at least 90,000 people homeless and killed 300.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition was the first attempt by an American government to map and cross the entirety of the unknown West. It was commissioned by President Jefferson shortly after the purchase of the Louisiana territory. Lewis and Clark, along with many others under their command, set out from St. Louis in 1804, crossing thousands of miles of terrain before arriving at the Pacific Ocean, two years later; however, without the aid of a young Native-American woman, named Sacagawea, it likely would not have been possible. She worked as a translator for the expedition and helped broker safe passage through potentially hostile lands; her knowledge of the area they were travelling through—in Wyoming and Idaho in particular—ensured that the expedition did not get lost, and her understanding of the native plants prevented the expedition from starving during the more arduous stretches of the journey. She is now, quite rightly, commemorated on the U.S. Dollar Coin and is the symbol of the National American Women’s Suffrage Movement. 

On May 10, 1869, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford drove in a special "Golden Spike" to cermonially complete the first transcontinental railroad in North America. A collaboration of three different companies, the railroad system linked Sacramento, California with the Eastern U.S.'s rail system in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Although it was not a complete coast to coast trip, the railroad finally offered Americans a manageable overland rail trip from the East Coast to the West Coast. Throughout the later ninteenth Century, many new railroads came and provided other transcontinental routes.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the makeup of American immigrants changed significantly. Dominated by Germans, Irish, and other Western Europeans in the early-nineteenth century, immigrants in the late-nineteenth century saw a large number of southern and eastern Europeans arrive in America. In particular, a large influx came from Italy, Russia, and Poland. Additionally, large numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe arrived fleeing widespread persecution.

Immigration to the United States in total was at its highest peak in the late-nineteenth century. While German immigration was always high from the colonial period, it too peaked in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Whereas most earlier German immigrants were Protestants from Northern Germany, Southern German Catholics added to the immigration numbers in the late-nineteenth century.