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English Bill of Rights
combined past grievances against the deposed king with a more general statement of basic liberties. The statute prohibited the monarch from suspending laws or levying taxes or customs duties without Parliament's consent and prohibited the raising and maintaining of a standing army during peacetime. More importantly, it proclaimed fundamental liberties, including freedom of elections, freedom of debate in Parliament, and freedom from excessive bail and from cruel and unusual punishments. -
Magna Carta
A charter of liberty and political rights obtained from King John of England by his rebellious barons at Runnymede in 1715. -
Petition of Right
Petition sent by Parliament to King Charles I complaining of a series of breaches of law. The petition sought recognition of four principles: no taxation without the consent of Parliament, no imprisonment without cause, no quartering of soldiers on subjects, and no martial law in peacetime. To continue receiving subsidies for his policies, Charles was compelled to accept the petition, but he later ignored its principles. -
Albany Plan of Union
a meeting of delegates from seven American colonies, held in 1754 at Albany, New York, at which Benjamin Franklin proposed a plan (Albany Plan of Union) for unifying the colonies. -
Boston Massacre
a riot in Boston arising from the resentment of Boston colonists toward British troops quartered in the city, in which the troops fired on the mob and killed several persons. -
Boston Tea Party
a raid on three British ships in Boston Harbor (December 16, 1773) 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 and against the monopoly granted the East India Company. -
First Continental Congress
a convention of delegates from twelve British North American colonies that met on September 5, 1774, at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, early in the American Revolution. It was called in response to the passage of the Coercive Acts (also known as Intolerable Acts by the Colonial Americans) by the British Parliament. The Intolerable Acts had punished Boston for the Boston Tea Party. -
Second Continental Congress
The Second Continental Congress was a convention of delegates from the Thirteen Colonies that started meeting on May 10, 1775, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, soon after warfare in the American Revolutionary War had begun. It succeeded the First Continental Congress, which met between September 5, 1774 and October 26, 1774, also in Philadelphia. The second Congress managed the colonial war effort, and moved incrementally towards independence, adopting the United States Declaration of Independence -
Declaration of Independence
A document declaring the US to be independent of the British Crown, signed on July 4, 1776, by the congressional representatives of the Thirteen Colonies, including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams -
Articles of Confederation
The original constitution of the United States, ratified in 1781, which was replaced by the US Constitution in 1789. -
Shay's Rebellion
The rebellion started on August 29, 1786. It was precipitated by several factors: financial difficulties brought about by a post-war economic depression, a credit squeeze caused by a lack of hard currency, and fiscally harsh government policies instituted in 1785 to solve the state's debt problems. Protesters, including many war veterans, shut down county courts in the later months of 1786 to stop the judicial hearings for tax and debt collection. -
Philadelphia Convention
took place from May 14 to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to address problems in governing the United States of America, which had been operating under the Articles of Confederation following independence from Great Britain. Although the Convention was intended to revise the Articles of Confederation, the intention from the outset of many of its proponents, chief among them James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, was to create a new government rather than fix the existing one. -
Virginia Plan
a plan, unsuccessfully proposed at the Constitutional Convention, providing for a legislature of two houses with proportional representation in each house and executive and judicial branches to be chosen by the legislature. -
New Jersey Plan
a plan, unsuccessfully proposed at the Constitutional Convention, providing for a single legislative house with equal representation for each state.
