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Proclamation Line
The Royal Proclamation was issued by King George III following Great Britain's acquisition of French territory in North America after the end of the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War, which forbade all settlement past a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains. -
Stamp Act
The first internal tax levied directly on American colonists by the British government. The act, which imposed a tax on all paper documents in the colonies, came at a time when the British Empire was deep in debt from the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) and looking to its North American colonies as a revenue source. -
Quartering Act
The name was given to a minimum of two Acts of British Parliament in the local governments of the American colonies to provide the British soldiers with any needed accommodations and housing. It also required colonists to provide food for any British soldiers in the area. -
Townshend Act
The Townshend Acts were a series of British acts passed beginning in 1767 and relating to the British American colonies in North America. The acts are named after Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who proposed the program. -
Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre was an incident on March 5, 1770, in which British Army soldiers shot and killed people while under attack by a mob. -
Committee of Correspondence
The Committees of Correspondence rallied colonial opposition against British policy and established a political union among the Thirteen Colonies. Letter from Samuel Adams to James Warren, Massachusetts Historical Society. -
Tea Act
The Tea Act was one of several measures imposed on the American colonists by the heavily indebted British government in the decade leading up to the American Revolutionary War The act’s main purpose was not to raise revenue from the colonies but to bail out the floundering East India Company, a key actor in the British economy. The British government granted the company a monopoly on the importation and sale of tea in the colonies. -
Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party was a political protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston. The Sons of Liberty threw tea into the river. -
Intolerable or Coercive Acts
The Intolerable Acts were harsh laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774. They were meant to punish the American colonists for the Boston Tea Party and other protests. -
Declaratory Act
Declaration by the British Parliament that accompanied the repeal of the Stamp Act. It stated that the British Parliament's taxing authority was the same in America as in Great Britain. -
Declaration of Independence
The statement adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting at the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall) in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies, then at war with the Kingdom of Great Britain, regarded themselves as Thirteen American Colonies -
Shot Heard Around the World
The Shot Heard Round the World occurred during a brief battle between British troops and local minutemen at the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts during the America Revolution.
