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French/Indian War
The French and Indian War was the North American conflict in a larger imperial war between Great Britain and France known as the Seven Years' War. The French and Indian War began in 1754 and ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. -
Stamp Act
The new tax imposed on all American colonists and required them to pay a tax on every piece of printed paper they used. Ship's papers, legal documents, licenses, newspapers, other publications, and even playing cards were taxed. -
Townshend Act
Imposed taxes on glass, lead, paints, tea and paper brought into the colonies. -
Boston Massacre
The killing of five colonists by British regulars on March 5, 1770. It was culmination of strains in the American colonies that had been growing since Royal troops first appeared in Massachusetts in October 1768 to demand the heavy tax burden appointed by the Townshend Acts. -
Tea Act
A legislative maneuver by the British ministry of Lord North to make English tea marketable in America. -
Boston Tea Party
The day American rebels dressed up as Indians and threw 342 chests of British Tea into the Boston Harbor, making the way for the American Revolution. -
Intolerable Acts
The American Patriots' term for a series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea Party. They were meant to affect the Massachusetts colonists for their defiance in throwing a large tea shipment into the Boston Harbor. -
1st Continental Congress
Where fifty-six delegates from all the colonies except Georgia drafted a declaration of rights and grievances and elected Virginian Peyton Randolph as the first president of Congress. -
Lexington and Concord
First military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. -
2nd Continental Congress
In 1776, it took the big step of declaring America's independence from Britain. -
Publishing of Common Sense
A pamphlet written by Thomas Paine defending independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies.
