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French-Indian War (1756-1763)
It was the North American conflict in a larger imperial war between Great Britain and France known as the seven Years' War. Because of this England owed a huge amount of money and taxed the colonies. -
Navigation Acts (1763)
laws or acts passed by parliament to restrict colonial trade. -
Stamp Act
First British parliamentary attempt to raise revenue through direct taxation of all colonial commercial and legal papers, newspapers, pamphlets, cards, alamance and dice. -
Quartering Act
Required colonial authorities to provide food, drink, quarters, fuel, and transportation to British forces stationed in their towns or villages. -
Townshend Acts
This taxed goods imported to the American Colonies. -
Boston Massacre
It was a patriot mob attacked on British loyalist. -
Boston Tea Party
An act of protest in which a group of 60 American colonists threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor to agitate against both tax on tea and the perceived monopoly of the Eat India Company. -
Intolerable Acts (aka Coercive Acts)
A series of British measures passed in 1774 and designed to punish the Massachusetts colonists for the Boston Tea Party. -
Olive Branch Petition
This was a final attempt by the colonists to avoid going to war with Britain during the American Revolution. -
Battle of Lexington & Concord (aka "The Shot Heard Around the World)
This signaled the start of the American Revolutionary War. The British Army set out from Boston to capture rebel leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock in Lexington as well as to destroy the Americans store of weapons and ammunition in Concord. -
Second Continental Congress
This was the representative government that brought the American colonies together as they prepared for their revolution. -
Common Sense
This was advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the 13 Colonies. -
Declaration of Independence
This is the name given to the Second Continental Congress's public act of declaring the American colonies independent from Great Britain on July 4, 1776. -
Articles of Confederation
This is the first constitution of the 13 independent American colonies. -
Daniel Shays' Rebellion
Uprising in western Massachusetts in opposition to high taxes and stringent economic conditions. -
Constitutional Convention (aka Philadelphia Convention)
A formal meeting held in 1787 for the purpose of creating a constitution for the United States.