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Stamp Act
An act of the British Parliament in 1756 that exacted revenue from the American colonies by imposing a stamp duty on newspapers and legal and commercial documents. Colonial opposition led to the act's repeal in 1766 and helped encourage the revolutionary movement against the British Crown. -
Regulation of Taxes by Britain
Great Britain regulates colonial trade and levies new taxes on colonists. -
The Quartering Act
Quartering Act is a name given to a minimum of two Acts of British Parliament in the local governments of the American colonies to provide the British soldiers with any needed accommodations or housing. -
The 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. -
Tea Act Act
The Tea Act of 1773 (13 Geo 3 c 44) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. Its principal overt objective was to reduce the massive surplus of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive. -
Boston Tea Party
An act of defiance toward the British government by American colonists; it took place in 1773, before the Revolutionary War. The government in London had given a British company the right to sell tea directly to the colonies, thereby undercutting American merchants. -
Intolerable Acts
The Intolerable Acts was the American Patriots' name for a series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea party. They were meant to punish the Massachusetts colonists for their defiance in throwing a large tea shipment into Boston harbor. -
Revolutionary War begins
The war for American independence from Britain. The fighting began with the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775, and lasted through the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. -
Battle of Bunker Hill
The first great battle of the Revolutionary War; it was fought near Boston in June 1775. The British drove the Americans from their fort at Breed's Hill to Bunker Hill, but only after the Americans had run out of gunpowder. -
Virginia Declaration of Rights
The Virginia Declaration of Rights is a document drafted in 1776 to proclaim the inherent rights of men, including the right to rebel against "inadequate" government. -
Declaration of Independence
The fundamental document establishing the United States as a nation, adopted on July 4, 1776. The declaration was ordered and approved by the Continental Congress and written largely by Thomas Jefferson. -
Battle of Saratoga
The Battle of Saratoga was the turning point of the Revolutionary War. The scope of the victory is made clear by a few key facts: On October 17, 1777, 5,895 British and Hessian troops surrendered their arms. -
French Alliance
The Treaty of Alliance with France: Franco-American Treaty, was the defensive alliance between France and the United States of America, formed in the midst of the American Revolutionary War, which promised military support in case of attack by British forces indefinitely into the future. -
Surrender of Yorktown
The last battle of the Revolutionary War, fought in 1781 near the seacoast of Virginia. There the British general Lord Cornwallis surrendered his army to General George Washington. -
End of Revolutionary War
On this day the Untied States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris and ended the American Revolution.
