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French and Indian War
The colonies of British America against those of New France. Both sides were supported by military units from their parent countries of Great Britain and France, as well as by American Indian allies. At the start of the war, the French North American colonies had a population of roughly 60,000 settlers, compared with 2 million in the British North American colonies. -
Proclamation of 1763
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. -
Sugar Act
The earlier Molasses Act of 1733, which had imposed a tax of six pence per gallon of molasses, had never been effectively collected due to colonial resistance and evasion. The law passed by the British Parliament in 1764 raising duties on foreign refined sugar imported by the colonies so as to give British sugar growers in the West Indies a monopoly on the colonial market. -
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. -
Repeal of Stamp Act
Franklin before the British House of Commons, Parliament voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766. However, the same day, Parliament passed the Declaratory Acts, asserting that the British government had free and total legislative power over the colonies. -
Boston Massacre
When British soldiers in Boston opened fire on a group of American colonists killing five men. Prior to the Boston Massacre the British had instituted a number of new taxes on the American colonies including taxes on tea, glass, paper, paint, and lead. -
Boston Tea Party
A group of colonists protest thirteen years of increasing British oppression, by attacking merchant ships in Boston Harbor. In retaliation, the British close the port, and inflict even harsher penalties. -
Intolerable Act
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 changes in taxation by the British to the detriment of Colonial goods. In Great Britain, these laws were referred to as the Coercive Acts. -
Pre-Revolution
British soldiers, called lobsterbacks because of their red coats, and minutemen the colonists' militia exchanged gunfire at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. Described as "the shot heard round the world," it signaled the start of the American Revolution and led to the creation of a new nation. -
Declaration of Independence
Is 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 independent sovereign states, no longer under British rule. These states would found a new nation the United States of America.
