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First form of a rule of law ever established.
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First governing document of Plymouth Colony
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Sets out specific liberties of the subject that the king is prohibited from infringing.
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An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown.
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Legislation that requires a tax to be paid on the transfer of certain documents. Those that pay the tax receive an official stamp on their documents, making them legal documents.
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First gathering of elected representatives from several of the American colonies to devise a unified protest against new British taxation.
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Document that declared that taxes imposed on British colonists without their formal consent were unconstitutional.
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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.
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Series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 relating to Massachusetts after the Boston Tea party. The acts stripped Massachusetts of self government and historic rights, triggering outrage and resistance in the Thirteen Colonies. They were key developments in the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775.
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The Congress met briefly to consider options, including an economic boycott of British trade; rights and grievances; and petitioned King George III for redress of those grievances.
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Managed the colonial war effort, and moved incrementally towards independence, adopting the United States Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. By raising armies, directing strategy, appointing diplomats, and making formal treaties, the Congress acted as the de facto national government of what became the United States.
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Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the 13 American colonies, then at war with Great Britain, regarded themselves as independent states, and no longer a part of the British Empire. Instead they formed a union that would become a new nation—the United States of America.
