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Stamp Act
an act of the British parliament that exacted revenue from the American colonies by imposing a stamp act duty on newspaper and legal and commercial documents. Colonial opposition led to the act's repeal in 1766 and helped encourage the revolutionary movements against the crown. -
Townsend Act
was a raise revenue in the colonies to pay the salaries of governors and judges so that the would remain loyal to Great Britain, to create a more effective means of enforcing compliance with trade regulations to punish the province of new York -
Boston Massacre
was a street fight that occurred, 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 -
Gaspee Affairs
The British has sent HMS Gaspee into Narragansett Bay to enforce maritime trade laws. Rhode Island citizens had long avoided such regulation by simply smuggling their shipped goods into and out of our local ports. -
Tea Act
this would launch the final spark to the revolutionary movement in Boston. The act was not intended to raise revenue in the American colonies, and in fact imposed no new taxes -
Intolerable Acts
was the term used by American Patriots for a series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament after the Boston Tea Party -
First Continental Congress
delegates from each of the 13 colonies except for Georgia (which was fighting a Native- American uprising and was dependent on the British for military supplies) met in Philadelphia as the first continental congress to organize colonial resistance to Parliaments Coercive Acts -
The Revolutionary War
The American Revolution, arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain's 13 North American colonies and the colonial governments, which represented the British crown -
Independence Day
the thirteen colonies claimed their independence from England, an event which eventually led to the formation of the United States. It's when the Declaration of Independence was formed. -
Religious freedom ordinance drafted
Thomas Jefferson completes his first draft of a Virginia state bill for religious freedom, which states: “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever.” The bill later becomes the famous Virginia Ordinance for Religious Freedom -
Bill of Rights
the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, ratified in 1791 and guaranteeing such rights as the freedoms of speech, assembly and worship -
Barron v. Baltimore
supreme court rules, in Barron v. Baltimore, that Bill of Rights applies only to US governments, not to the states. The fighting helped define the concept of federalism in US constitutional law.
