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Stamp Act
Taxed all printed material in the colonies, including - but not limited to - stamps, legal documents, newspapers, playing cards, etc -
Proclamation Line
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued October 7, 1763, by King George III following Great Britain's acquisition of French territory in North America after the end of the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War, which forbade all settlement past a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains. -
Quartering Act
required colonists to provide food & supplies to British troops stationed in the colonies. -
Declaratory Act
declared that Parliament had the power to tax the colonies "in all cases whatsoever" & that the colonists possessed virtual representation -
Townshend Acts
The Townshend Acts were a series of acts passed. beginning in 1767 by the Parliament of Great Britain relating to the British colonies in North America. -
Boston Massacre
known as the Incident on King Street by the British, was an incident on March 5, 1770, in which British Army soldiers killed five male civilians and injured six others. -
Committee of Correspondence
The Committees of Correspondence were shadow governments organized by the Patriot leaders of the Thirteen Colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. -
Tea Act
The Tea Act: The Catalyst of the Boston Tea Party. The Tea Act, passed by Parliament on May 10, 1773, granted the British East India Company Tea a monopoly on tea sales in the American colonies.The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount 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
Boston patriots organized the Boston Tea Party to protest the 1773 Tea Act. In December 1773, Samuel Adams warned Boston residents of the consequences of the Tea Act. Following the meeting, approximately 50 young men dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships and dumped the cargo into Boston Harbor. -
Intolerable or Coercive Acts
The Intolerable Acts were the American Patriots' term 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. -
"Shot Heard Around the World"
Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. Emerson, "Concord Hymn" The phrase is originally from the opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn" and referred to the first shot of the American Revolutionary War. -
Common Sense
Thomas Paine published the pamphlet Common Sense in 1776, in which argued that the colonists should free themselves from British rule and establish an independent government based on Enlightenment ideals - one that would protect man's natural rights. Common Sense became so popular that many historians credit it with dissolving the final barriers to the fight for independence. -
Declaration of Independence
Written by Thomas Jefferson; influenced by the Enlightenment philosophers of his day.
