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French-Indian War (1756-1763)
The french and Indian war was a conflict primarily fought between Britain and French over new world territory. It began in 1754 and ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The war provided Great Britain enormous territorial gains in North America, but disputes over subsequent frontier policy and paying the war's expenses led to colonial discontent, and ultimately to the American Revolution. -
Navigation acts (1763)
The Navigation Acts were a series of laws passed by the British Parliament that imposed restrictions on colonial trade. British economic policy was based on mercantilism, which aimed to use the American colonies to bolster British state power and finances. -
Stamp Act
The Stamp Act was a law passed by the British government in 1765. It meant that all legal documents and printed papers used in the American colonies had to have an official stamp. -
Quatering act
Quartering Act, (1765), in American colonial history, the British parliamentary provision (actually an amendment to the annual Mutiny Act) requiring colonial authorities to provide food, drink, quarters, fuel, and transportation to British forces stationed in their towns or villages. -
Townshend Act
The Townshend Acts were a series of measures, passed by the British Parliament in 1767, that taxed goods imported to the American colonies. -
Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre was a street fight that occurred on March 5, 1770, between a "patriot" mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks, and a squad of British soldiers. Several colonists were killed and this led to a campaign by speech-writers to rouse the ire of the citizenry. -
Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party 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
The Coercive Acts of 1774, known as the Intolerable Acts in the American colonies, were a series of four laws passed by the British Parliament to punish the colony of Massachusetts Bay for the Boston Tea Party -
Battle of Lexington and Concord
The Battles of Lexington and Concord, fought on April 19, 1775, kicked off the American Revolutionary War (1775-83). ... On the night of April 18, 1775, hundreds of British troops marched from Boston to nearby Concord in order to seize an arms cache. -
Second continental congress
The Second Continental Congress assumed the normal functions of a government, appointing ambassadors, issuing paper currency, raising the Continental Army through conscription, and appointing generals to lead the army -
Olive Branch Petition
The Olive Branch Petition was a final attempt by the colonists to avoid going to war with Britain during the American Revolution. It was a document in which the colonists pledged their loyalty to the crown and asserted their rights as British citizens. -
Common Sense
Common Sense is a 47-page pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–1776 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies. Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine marshaled moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government. -
Declaration of Independence
The introductory sentence states the Declaration's main purpose, to explain the colonists' right to revolution. In other words, “to declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Congress had to prove the legitimacy of its cause. -
Articles of Confederation
The Articles of Confederation served as the written document that established the functions of the national government of the United States after it declared independence from Great Britain. -
Constitutional Convention
The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia met between May and September of 1787 to address the problems of the weak central government that existed under the Articles of Confederation. -
Daniel Shays' Rebellion
Shays's Rebellion exposed the weakness of the government under the Articles of Confederation and led many—including George Washington—to call for strengthening the federal government in order to put down future uprisings.