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'Magna Carta' is Latin and means “Great Charter”. The document was a series of written promises between the king and his subjects that the king would govern England and deal with its people according to the customs of feudal law.
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In 1607, 104 English men and boys arrived in North America to start a settlement. On May 13 they picked Jamestown, Virginia for their settlement, which was named after their King, James I. The settlement became the first permanent English settlement in North America.
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An agreement reached by the Pilgrims on the ship the Mayflower in 1620, just before they landed at Plymouth Rock. The Mayflower Compact bound them to live in a civil society according to their own laws.
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The Petition of Right of 1628 is one of England's most famous Constitutional documents. It was written by Parliament as an objection to an overreach of authority by King Charles I. During his reign, English citizens saw this overreach of authority as a major infringement on their civil rights.
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The English Bill of Rights is an act that the Parliament of England passed on December 16, 1689. The Bill creates separation of powers, limits the powers of the king and queen, enhances the democratic election and bolsters freedom of speech
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The Albany Plan of Union was a plan to create a unified government for the Thirteen Colonies, suggested by Benjamin Franklin.
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The Stamp Act was passed by the British Parliament on March 22, 1765. The new tax was 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.
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The Boston Massacre was the killing of five men by British soldiers. This was the culmination of civilian-military tensions that had been growing since royal troops first appeared in Massachusetts in October 1768
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A raid on three British ships in Boston Harbor in which Boston colonists, disguised as Indians, threw the contents of several hundred chests of tea into the harbor as a protest against British taxes on tea.
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The Intolerable Acts were 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 punish the Massachusetts colonists for their defiance of throwing a large tea shipment into Boston Harbor in reaction to being taxed by the British.
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The First Continental Congress was a meeting of delegates from twelve of the Thirteen Colonies that met on September 5 to October 26, 1774, at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, early in the American Revolution.
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The American Revolution was a political upheaval that took place between 1765 and 1783 during which colonists in the Thirteen American Colonies rejected the British monarchy and aristocracy, overthrew the authority of Great Britain, and founded the United States of America.
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The Second Continental Congress was a convention of delegates from the Thirteen Colonies that started meeting in the spring of 1775, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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The Declaration of Independence is defined as the formal statement written by Thomas Jefferson declaring the freedom of the thirteen American colonies from Great Britain.
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An agreement among the thirteen original colonies, approved in 1781, that provided a loose federal government before the Constitution went into effect in 1789.
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An uprising led by a former militia officer, Daniel Shays, which broke out in western Massachusetts in 1786. Shays's followers protested the foreclosures of farms for debt and briefly succeeded in shutting down the court system.
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In September 1786, at the Annapolis Convention, delegates from five states called for a Constitutional Convention in order to discuss possible improvements to the Articles of Confederation. The Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia on May 14, 1787
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The Connecticut Compromise was an agreement that large and small states reached during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that in part defined the legislative structure and representation that each state would have under the United States Constitution.
