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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.
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The Stamp Act was a law passed by the British government in 1765. It meant that all legal documents and printed papers used in the American colonies had to have an official stamp. The result was that every piece of paper the colonists used was taxed by the British.
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The Townshend Acts or Townshend Duties refers to a series of British acts of Parliament passed during 1767 and 1768 relating to the British colonies in America. They are named after Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who proposed the program.
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The Boston Massacre was a deadly riot that occurred on March 5, 1770, on King Street in Boston. It began as a street brawl between American colonists and a lone British soldier but quickly escalated to a chaotic, bloody slaughter.
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The Gaspee Affair was a significant event in the lead-up to the American Revolution. HMS Gaspee was a British customs schooner that had been enforcing the Navigation Acts in and around Newport, Rhode Island in 1772.
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The Boston Tea Party was an American political and mercantile protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1773.
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The Intolerable Acts 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.
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The First Continental Congress was a meeting of delegates from 12 of the 13 British colonies that became the United States.
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The Battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. The battles were fought on April 19, 1775, in Middlesex County, Province of Massachusetts Bay, within the towns of Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Menotomy, and Cambridge.
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The Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on June 17, 1775, during the Siege of Boston in the first stage of the American Revolutionary War. The battle is named after Bunker Hill in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
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The United States Declaration of Independence is the pronouncement adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 1776.
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In New York City on September 22, 1776, Nathan Hale, a Connecticut schoolteacher and captain in the Continental Army, is executed by the British for spying.
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The Battles of Saratoga marked the climax of the Saratoga campaign, giving a decisive victory to the Americans over the British in the American Revolutionary War.
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The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was an agreement among the 13 original states of the United States of America that served as its first constitution. It was approved after much debate by the Second Continental Congress on November 15, 1777.
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The Franco-American alliance was the 1778 alliance between the Kingdom of France and the United States during the American Revolutionary War. Formalized in the 1778 Treaty of Alliance, it was a military pact in which the French provided many supplies for the Americans.
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The Battle of Monmouth was fought near Monmouth Court House on June 28, 1778, during the American Revolutionary War. It pitted the Continental Army, commanded by General George Washington, against the British Army in North America, commanded by General Sir Henry Clinton.
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The "Baylor Massacre" was a surprise British attack on September 27, 1778, against the 3rd Regiment of Continental Light Dragoons under the command of Colonel George Baylor during the American Revolutionary War. It occurred in the present-day town of River Vale, New Jersey.
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Siege of Yorktown joint Franco-American land and sea campaign that entrapped a major British army on a peninsula at Yorktown, Virginia, and forced its surrender. The siege virtually ended military operations in the American Revolution.
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The Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris by representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States of America on September 3, 1783, officially ended the American Revolutionary War.