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Proclamation Act
The Proclamation of 1763 was issued by the British Board of Trade under King George III of England after the French and Indian War in order to accomplish several main goals, which were to establish governments for their new territories, encourage peace between colonists and remaining Indians tribes and to keep colonists confined to the coasts for purposes of easier taxation and trade with the mother country. The act infuriated colonists who saw the vast new territory between the Appalachians and -
Sugar Act
The American Revenue Act of 1764, so called Sugar Act, was a law that attempted to curb the smuggling of sugar and molasses in the colonies by reducing the previous tax rate and enforcing the collection of duties. It added several products such as hides, skins and potash to the list of enumerated commodities that could be legally exported under the Navigation Acts. -
Stamp Act
There were twelve years between the signing of the Treaty of Paris on February 1763 and the ride of Paul Revere on April 1775. Tension and anger between colonists and the empire increasingly rose to the point of no return. During the short period of 1762-1770 the causing disruption in its colonial policy. Furthermore, it found itself fighting wars in Europe, West Indies and Asia which drastically increased the cost of servicing its national debt. -
Quartering Act
one of the Coercion Acts, was passed in Parliament after the Boston Tea Party in 1773. The Quartering Act provided that local authorities must provide quarters for British troops. If they failed to do so, the governor might compel the use of occupied buildings. Though two previous quartering acts had passed in the 1760s, this third act engendered greater opposition as tensions mounted between Parlaiment and Boston Whigs. -
Stamp Act Congress
he members of this Congress, sincerely devoted, with the warmest sentiments of affection and duty to His Majesty's Person and Government, inviolably attached to the present happy establishment of the Protestant succession, and with minds deeply impressed by a sense of the present and impending misfortunes of the British colonies on this continent; having considered as maturely as time will permit the circumstances of the said colonies. -
Declaratory Act
The American Colonies Act 1766 (6 Geo 3 c 12), commonly known as the Declaratory Act, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, which accompanied the repeal of the Stamp Act 1765. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act because boycotts were hurting British trade and used the declaration to justify the repeal and save face. -
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. The acts are named after Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who proposed the program. Historians vary slightly in which acts they include under the heading "Townshend Acts". -
Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre, called the Incident on King Street by the British, was an incident on March 5, 1770, in which British Army soldiers killed five civilian men and injured six others. British troops had been stationed in Boston, capital of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, since 1768 in order to protect and support crown-appointed colonial officials attempting to enforce unpopular Parliamentary legislation. -
Tea Act
The Tea Act 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. A related objective was to undercut the price of tea smuggled into Britain's North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to ac -
Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party (referred to in its time simply as "the destruction of the tea" or by other informal names and so named until half a century later,[2]) was a political protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, a city in the British colony of Massachusetts, against the tax policy of the British government and the East India Company that controlled all the tea imported into the colonies. On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, -
Coercive Acts
The Intolerable(Coercive) Acts was a name used to describe a series of laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 relating to Britain's colonies in North America. The acts triggered outrage and resistance in the Thirteen Colonies that later became the United States, and were important developments in the growth of the American Revolution. -
Quebec Act
The Act had wide-ranging effects, in Quebec itself, as well as in the Thirteen Colonies. In Quebec, English-speaking immigrants from Britain and the southern colonies objected to a variety of its provisions, which they saw as a removal of certain political freedoms. French-speaking Canadians varied in their reaction; the land-owning seigneurs and clergy were generally happy with its provisions although the populace resented their loss of liberties. -
1st Continental Congress
The First Continental Congress was a convention of delegates from twelve British North American colonies that met on September 5, 1774, at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, early in the American Revolution. It was called in response to the passage of the Coercive Acts (also known as Intolerable Acts by the Colonial Americans) by the British Parliament. The Intolerable Acts had punished Boston for the Boston Tea Party. -
Battles of Lexington/Concord
The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War.[9][10] They were fought on April 19, 1775, in Middlesex County, Province of Massachusetts Bay, within the towns of Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Menotomy (present-day Arlington), and Cambridge, near Boston. The battles marked the outbreak of open armed conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain and its thirteen colonies in the mainland of British North America. -
2nd Continental Congress
The Second Continental Congress was a convention of delegates from the Thirteen Colonies that started meeting on May 10, 1775, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, soon after warfare in the American Revolutionary War had begun. It succeeded the First Continental Congress, which met between September 5, 1774 and October 26, 1774, also in Philadelphia. The second Congress managed the colonial war effort, and moved incrementally towards independence, adopting the United States Declaration of Independence -
Olive Branch Petition
The Olive Branch Petition was adopted by the Continental Congress in July 1775 in an attempt to avoid a full-blown war with Great Britain. The petition affirmed American loyalty to Great Britain and entreated the king to prevent further conflict. In August 1775 the colonies were formally declared in rebellion by the Proclamation of Rebellion, and the petition was rejected de facto, although not having been received by the king before declaring the colonists traitors. -
Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence was a statement adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies, then at war with Great Britain, regarded themselves as independent states, and no longer a part of the British Empire. John Adams had put forth a resolution earlier in the year, making a subsequent formal declaration inevitable. A committee was assembled to draft the formal declaration, to be ready when congress voted on independence.
