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French-Indian War (1756-1763)
The French and Indian War was a theater of the Seven Years' War, which pitted the North American colonies of the British Empire against those of the French, each side being supported by various Native American tribes. -
Stamp Act 1765
Required the colonists to pay a tax, represented by a stamp, on various forms of papers, documents, and playing cards. -
Declaratory Act 1765
Declaration by the British Parliament that accompanied the repeal of the Stamp Act -
Townshend Acts 1767
To help pay the expenses involved in governing the American colonies, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which initiated taxes on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. -
Boston Massacre March 5 1770
British soldiers fired upon a group of rowdy colonists, killing five and wounding others. -
Boston Tea Party 1773
It was a political protest that occurred on December 16, 1773, at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts. American colonists, frustrated and angry at Britain for imposing “taxation without representation,” dumped 342 chests of tea, imported by the British East India Company into the harbor. -
Intolerable Acts (aka Coercive Acts) 1773
A series of four laws passed by the British Parliament to punish the colony of Massachusetts Bay for the Boston Tea Party. -
Quartering Act 1774
The last act passed was the Quartering Act of 1774 which applied not just to Massachusetts, but to all the American colonies, and was only slightly different than the 1765 act. This new act allowed royal governors, rather than colonial legislatures, to find homes and buildings to quarter or house British soldiers. -
Battle of Lexington & Concord 1775
The Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought on April 19, 1775, were the first military clashes of the American Revolutionary War. -
Second Continental Congress May 1775
Met on May 10, 1775, to plan further responses if the British government did not repeal or modify the acts; however, the American Revolutionary War had started by that time with the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and the Congress was called upon to take charge of the war effort. -
Common Sense 1776
A 47-page pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–1776 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies. -
Declaration of Independence 1776
By issuing the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the 13 American colonies severed their political connections to Great Britain. The Declaration summarized the colonists' motivations for seeking independence.