-
Proclamation Line
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued 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. -
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. -
Quartering Act
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. It also required colonists to provide food for any British soldiers in the area. -
declaratory act
The Declaratory Act, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, which accompanied the repeal of the Stamp Act 1765 and the changing and lessening of the Sugar Act. -
Townhend act
The Townshend Acts is a series of acts passed by the Parliament of Great Britain relating to the British colonies in North America. The acts is named after Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who proposed the program. -
Boston Massacre
This was the killing of five colonists by British regulars. It was the culmination of tensions in the American colonies that had been growing since Royal troops first appeared in Massachusetts in October 1768 to enforce the heavy tax burden imposed by the Townshend Acts. -
Committee of Correspondence
rallied colonial opposition against British policy and established a political union among the Thirteen Colonies. Letter from Samuel Adams to James Warren, 4 November 1772. Massachusetts Historical Society. -
Tea Act
This was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. 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
This was initially referred to by John Adams as "the Destruction of the Tea in Boston" was a political protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, on December 16, 1773. -
Intolerable or Coercive Acts
This is 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
Hand drawn depiction of the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the Siege of Boston, by J. DeCosta July 29, 1775. The first shots were fired just after dawn in Lexington, Massachusetts the morning of the 19th. -
common sense
Common Sense made public a persuasive and impassioned case for independence, which before the pamphlet had not yet been given serious intellectual consideration. He connected independence with common dissenting Protestant beliefs as a means to present a distinctly American political identity, structuring Common Sense as if it were a sermon.Historian Gordon S. Wood described Common Sense as "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era". -
Declaration of independence
is the statement adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies,[2] then at war with the Kingdom of Great Britain.
