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1754-1763
The Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indain war, the American phase of a worldwide nine years' war fought between France and Great Britain. -
March 22,1765
Like the Sugar act (1764), the stamp act was imposed to provide increased revenues to meet the costs of defending the enlarged British empire -
June 15-July 2, 1767
A series of four acts, the Townshend Acts were passed by the British parliament in an attempt to assert what is considered to be its historic right to exert authority over the colonies through suspension of a recalcitrant representative assembly and through strict provisions for the collection of revenues duties. -
March 5, 1770
In Boston, a small British army detachment that threatened by mob harassment opened fire and killed five people an incident soon known as the Boston Massacre -
December 16, 1773
Protesting both a tax on tea and the perceived monopoly of the East India Company, a party of Bostonian's thinly disguised as Mohawk people boarded ships at anchor and dumped some $10,000 worth of tea into the harbor. -
March-June 1774
In retaliation for colonial resistance to British rule during the winter of 1773–74, the British Parliament enacted four measures that became known as the Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts -
September 5, 1774
Called by the Committees of Correspondence in response to the Intolerable Acts, the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. Fifty-six delegates represented all the colonies except Georgia -
March 23, 1775
convinced that war with Great Britain was inevitable, Virginian Patrick Henry defended strong resolutions for equipping the Virginia militia to fight against the British -
April 18–19, 1775
On the night of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere rode from Charlestown to Lexington (both in Massachusetts) to warn that the British were marching from Boston to seize the colonial armory at Concord. -
June 17, 1775
Breed’s Hill in Charlestown was the primary locus of combat in the misleadingly named Battle of Bunker Hill, which was part of the American siege of British-held Boston, -
January 1776
In late 1775 the colonial conflict with the British still looked like a civil war, not a war aiming to separate nations; however, the publication of Thomas Paine’s irreverent pamphlet Common Sense abruptly put independence on the agenda -
July 4, 1776
After the Congress recommended that colonies form their own governments, the Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson and revised in committee -
September 22, 1776
On September 21, 1776, having penetrated the British lines on Long Island to obtain information, American Capt. -
December 25–26, 17761
Having been forced to abandon New York City and driven across New Jersey by the British, George Washington and the Continental Army struck back on Christmas night by stealthily crossing the ice-strewn Delaware River, surprising the Hessian garrison at Trenton at dawn, and taking some 900 prisonersjk -
October 17, 1777
Moving south from Canada in summer 1777, a British force under Gen. John Burgoyne captured Fort Ticonderoga (July 5) before losing decisively at Bennington, Vermont (August 16), and Bemis Heights, New York (October 7). His forces depleted, Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga. -
