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Albany Plan of Union
The main purpose of the meeting was to discuss the problems of the colonial trade and the danger attacks by the French and their Native American allies. Here, Benjamin Franklin offered what came to be known as the Albany plan of union. Although never carried out, the Albany Plan was the first important proposal to conceive of the colonies as a collective whole united under one government. -
French and Indian War
1754-1763 They saw little need for the costly presence of British troops on North American Soil, since the French had been defeated and their power broken. The war provided Great Britain enormous territorial gains in North America, but disputes over subsequent frontier policy and paying the war's expenses led to colonial discontent, and ultimately to the American Revolution. -
George III becomes king of Great Britain
Britian began to deal more firmly with its colonies. Restrictive trading acts were expanded and enforced -
Stamp Act
The Stamp Act of 1765 was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which imposed a direct tax on the British colonies in America and required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London, carrying an embossed revenue stamp. -
Stamp Act Congress
The Stamp Act Congress passed a "Declaration of Rights and Grievances," which claimed that American colonists were equal to all other British citizens, protested taxation without representation, and stated that, without colonial representation in Parliament, Parliament could not tax colonists. Stamp Act Repealed after Stamp Act Congress. -
Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre was a confrontation on March 5, 1770, in which British soldiers shot and killed several people while being harassed by a mob in Boston. The event was heavily publicized by leading Patriots such as Paul Revere and Samuel Adams. -
Committees of Correspondence
Committees of Correspondence were the American colonies' first institution for maintaining communication with one another. They were organized in the decade before the Revolution, when the deteriorating relationship with Great Britain made it increasingly important for the colonies to share ideas and information. -
Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party was a political protest that occurred on December 16, 1773, at Griffin's Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts. American colonists, frustrated and angry at Britain for imposing “taxation without representation,” dumped 342 chests of tea, imported by the British East India Company into the harbor. -
Intolerable Acts
The Intolerable Acts (passed/Royal assent March 31–June 22, 1774) were punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea Party. The laws were meant to punish the Massachusetts colonists for their defiance in the Tea Party protest in reaction to changes in taxation by the British Government. -
First Continental Congress
The First Continental Congress was a meeting of delegates from 12 of the 13 British colonies that became the United States. One of the Congress's first decisions was to endorse the Suffolk Resolves passed in Suffolk County, Massachusetts. The Suffolk Resolves ordered citizens to not obey the Intolerable Acts, to refuse imported British goods, and to raise a militia. -
Lexington and Concord
The battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. -
Second Continental Congress
The Second Continental Congress was a meeting of delegates from the Thirteen Colonies in America that united in the American Revolutionary War. All thirteen colonies were represented by the time the Congress adopted the Lee Resolution which declared independence from Britain on July 2, 1776, and the congress agreed to the Declaration of Independence two days later. -
Resolution of Independence
the resolution of independence, was an act of the Second Continental Congress declaring the Thirteen Colonies to be independent of the British Empire. -
Declaration of Independence
Thomas Jefferson Selected as the Author Because Richard H. Lee Was Absent — The 141st Anniversary Next Wednesday. The United States Declaration of Independence is the pronouncement adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Declaration of Independence announced the United States' independence from Britain.