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Treaty of Paris
The Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indian War in North America, granting the Britain control of all land to the east of the Mississippi River. -
Sugar Act
The Sugar Act lowered the duty on foreign-produced molasses from six pence per gallon to 3 pence per gallon, in attempts to discourage smuggling. The act further stipulated that Americans could export many commodities, including lumber, iron, skins, and whalebone, to foreign countries, only if they passed through British ports first. The act also placed a heavy tax on formerly duty- free Madeira wine from Portugal. The terms of the act and its methods of enforcement outraged many colonists. -
Quartering Act
The Quartering Act was enacted in 1765, requiring colonial assemblies to pay for certain supplies for troops stationed within their respective colonies. In 1767, New York, the colony in which the greatest number of troops were stationed, refused to comply with the law, provoking parliament to threaten the nullification of all laws passed by the New York colonial legislature. -
Virginia Resolves
In response to the Stamp Act, Patrick Henry persuaded the Virginia House of Burgesses to adopt several strongly worded resolutions that denied Parliament's right to tax the colonies. These resolutions were known as the Virginia Resolves, and persuaded many other colonial legislatures to adopt similar positions. -
Stamp Act Congress
In response to the Stamp Act, and representing a new level of pan-colonial political organization, on October 7, 1765, representatives of nine colonial assemblies met in New York City at the Stamp Act Congress. The colonies agreed widely on the principles that Parliament could not tax anyone outside of Great Britain, and could not deny anyone a fair trial, both of which had been done in the American colonies. -
Loyal Nine
The Loyal Nine was a group of Boston merchants and artisans that formed during the Stamp Act crisis to lead the public in attempts to drive the stamp distributors from the city. This was one of the first steps toward political organization in the 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 Parliament repealed the Stamp Act because boycotts were hurting British trade and used the declaration to justify the repeal and save face. The declaration stated that Parliament's authority was the same in America as in Britain and asserted Parliament's authority to pass laws that were binding on the American col -
Townshend Duties
Parliament passed the Revenue Act of 1767 on July 2, 1767. Popularly referred to as the Townshend duties, the Revenue Act taxed glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea entering the colonies. The colonists objected to the fact that it was clearly designed more to raise revenue than to regulate trade in a manner favorable to the British Empire. -
Circular Letter Adopted by Mass. House of Reps
The circular letter, drafted by Samuel Adams and sent to all of the other colonial legislatures, condemned taxation without representation and decried British efforts to make royal governors financially independent of the elected legislatures as a further deprivation of representative government. It spurred some other legislatures to draft similar letters, but most remain apathetic. -
Massacre of St. George's Fields
After John Wilkes was denied his seat in Parliament, some 30,000 of his followers, known as Wilkesites, gathered on St. George's Fields, outside the prison where he was being held, to protest his arrest. When the protestors began throwing objects, soldiers fired into the crowd, killing eleven. The so- called Massacre of St. George's Fields emphasized the disagreement in Britain over colonial rights and spurred the movement that grew up in support of Wilkes' cause. -
Troops Being to Land in Boston
In response to growing political unrest in Massachusetts, Britain sent troops to occupy the city in the final months of 1768. Tensions mounted between the troops and the civilians. -
Boston Massacre
On March 5, 1770, a crowd led by sailor Crispus Attucks formed to demonstrate against the customs agents. When a British officer tried to disperse the crowd, he and his men were bombarded with rocks and dared to shoot by the unruly mob. After being knocked to the ground, one soldier finally did shoot, and others followed. Five people were killed, including Attucks, who is often considered the first casualty of the Revolutionary War. -
Townshend Duties are Repealed
Under financial pressure from the colonists' non-importation policy, Parliament repealed all of the Townshend duties except for the tax on tea. -
Burning of the Gaspee
In an act of open defiance against British rule, more than one hundred Rhode Island colonists burn the corrupt customs ship Gaspee to the waterline after it runs aground near Providence -
Intolerable Acts
he Coercive Acts or the Intolerable Acts (called by the colonists) are names 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. -
First Continental Congress
The Continental Congress was a convention of delegates called together from the Thirteen Colonies that became the governing body of the United States during the American Revolution. -
Salutary Neglect
Salutary neglect refers to the state of Anglo-American relations before the end of the French and Indian War. British Parliament did not interfere in the government of the colonies, and America existed in relative political isolation. -
Battles of Lexington and 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. -
Second Continental Congress
By the time the Second Continental Congress met on May 10, 1775 in Philadelphia, the Battles of Lexington and Concord had already begun in April, and while delegates were still making their way to Philadelphia, which marked the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. -
Declaration of Indepence
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.
