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French and Indian war
Disputes over subsequent frontier policy and paying the war's expenses led to colonial discontent, and ultimately to the American Revolution -
Albany Plan of Union
A plan to place the British North American colonies under a more centralized government. -
George III becomes king of Great Britain
In 1760 following his grandfather George II's death. In his accession speech to Parliament, the 22-year-old monarch played down his Hanoverian connections. “Born and educated in this country,” he said, “I glory in the name of Britain.” New taxes were imposed, mostly to support British troops in North America. -
Stamp Act Congress
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
An act of the British Parliament in 1765 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 Crown. -
Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre was a street fight that occurred on March 5, 1772. between a "patriot" mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks, and a squad of British soldiers. Several colonists were killed and this led to a campaign by speech-writers to rouse the ire of the citizenry. -
Committees of Correspondence
The Committees of Correspondence were the American colonies' means for maintaining communication lines in the years before the Revolutionary War. -
Boston Tea Party
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. -
Coercive Acts
A series of British measures passed in 1774 and designed to punish the Massachusetts colonists for the Boston Tea Party. For example, one of the laws closed the port of Boston until the colonists paid for the tea that they had destroyed. -
First continental congress
A compact among the colonies to boycott British goods beginning on December 1, 1774, unless parliament should rescind the Intolerable Acts. -
Lexington and Concord
Famous 'shot heard 'round the world', marked the start of the American War of Independence. Politically disastrous for the British, it persuaded many Americans to take up arms and support the cause of independence. -
Second Continental Congress
It took the momentous step of declaring America's independence from Britain. The British government continued to refuse to compromise, let alone reverse, its colonial polices. -
Resolution of independence
Richard Henry Lee wrote and resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved. -
Declaration of Independence
Thomas Jefferson wrote the declaration of independence. A name given to the Second Continental Congress's public act of declaring the American colonies independent from Great Britain on July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence was the formal proclamation that the colonies would now be an independent country separate from Great Britain.