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First Navigation Acts Passed
Navigation Acts were a series of laws that restricted the use of foreign ships for trade between Britain and its colonies. They began in 1651 and ended 200 years later. They reflected the policy of mercantilism, which sought to keep all the benefits of trade inside the Empire, and minimize the loss of gold and silver to foreigners. They prohibited the colonies from trading directly with the Netherlands, Spain, France, and their colonies. -
Boston Newsletter First Published
First published on April 24, 1704, The Boston News-Letter is regarded as the first continuously published newspaper in British North America. It was heavily subsidized by the British government, with a limited circulation. The colonies’ first newspaper was Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, which published its first and only issue on September 25, 1690. In 1718, the Weekly Jamaica Courant followed in Kingston. In 1726 the Boston Gazette began publishing with Bartholomew Green, Jr., -
The Great Awakening
The Great Awakening, called by historians the First Great Awakening, was an evangelical and revitalization movement that swept Protestant Europe and British America, and especially the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American Protestantism. -
Molasses Act Passed
The Molasses Act of March 1733 was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain (citation 6 Geo II. c. 13), which imposed a tax of six pence per gallon on imports of molasses from non-British colonies. Parliament created the act largely at the insistence of large plantation owners in the British West Indies.[1] The Act was not passed for the purpose of raising revenue, but rather to regulate trade by making British products cheaper than those from the French West Indies. -
French And Indian War Begins
The war formally started on July 3, 1754, It all srated when the French and Indians attacked Fort Neccissity. -
The Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment, or Age of Reason) is an era from the 1650s to the 1780s in which cultural and intellectual forces in Western Europe emphasized reason, analysis and individualism rather than traditional lines of authority. -
Writs of Assistance Passed
Writs of assistance were court orders that authorized customs officers to conduct general (non-specific) searches of premises for contraband. The exact nature of the materials being sought did not have to be detailed, nor did their locations. The writs were first introduced in Massachusetts in 1751 to strictly enforce the Acts of Trade, the governing rules for commerce in the British Empire. Merchants in much of New England were skillful at evading the system and many had become masters of smug. -
Sugar Act Passed
The Sugar Act, also known as the American Revenue Act or the American Duties Act, was a revenue-raising act passed by the Parliament of Great Britain on April 5, 1764.[1] The preamble to the act stated: "it is expedient that new provisions and regulations should be established for improving the revenue of this Kingdom ... and ... it is just and necessary that a revenue should be raised ... for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same." -
Currency Act Passed
The Currency Act of 1764 was a British Law, passed by the Parliament of Great Britain on September 1, 1764, that was designed to control the colonial currency system. -
Stamp Act Passed
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. -
Quartering Act Passed
On May 3, 1765 the British Parliament met and finally passed a Quartering Act for the Americans. The act stated that troops could only be quartered in barracks and if there wasn't enough space in barracks then they were to be quartered in public houses and inns. -
Sons Of Liberty Formed
The Sons of Liberty was an organization of patriots that was created in the Thirteen American Colonies. The secret society was formed to protect the rights of the colonists and to fight the abuses of taxation by the British government. -
Stamp Act Congress Meets
The Stamp Act Congress, or First Congress of the American Colonies, was a meeting held between October 7 and 25, 1765 in New York City, consisting of representatives from some of the British colonies in North America; it was the first gathering of elected representatives from several of the American colonies to devise a unified protest against new British taxation. Parliament had passed the Stamp Act, which required the use of specially stamped paper for virtually all business in the colonies, a -
Declaratory Act Passed
The American Colonies Act 1766 (6 Geo 3 c 12), commonly known as the Declaratory Act, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, which accompanied the repeal of the Stamp Act 1765 and the changing and lessening of the sugar act. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act because boycotts were hurting British trade and used the declaration to justify the repeal and save face. The declaration stated that the Parliament's authority was the same in America as in Britain and asserted Parliament's authorit -
Townshend Act Passed
The Townshend Acts were a series of acts passed, beginning in 1767, by the Parliament of Great Britain relating to the British colonies in North America. The acts are named after Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who proposed the programme. -
The Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre, known as the Incident on King Street by the British,[2] was an incident on March 5, 1770, in which British Army soldiers killed five male civilians and injured six others. The incident was heavily propagandized by leading patriots, such as Paul Revere and Sam Adams to fuel animosity toward the British authorities.[3][4][5] British troops had been stationed in Boston, capital of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, since 1768 in order to protect and support crown-appointed colo -
Boston Tea Party
The Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party. In 1771, 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. -
Tea Act Passed
The Tea Act. The Tea Act, passed by Parliament on May 10, 1773, would launch the final spark to the revolutionary movement in Boston. The act was not intended to raise revenue in the American colonies, and in fact imposed no new taxes. -
Minutemen Formed
Minutemen were private colonists who independently organized to form well-prepared militia companies self-trained in weaponry, tactics and military strategies from the American colonial partisan militia during the American Revolutionary War. They provided a highly mobile, rapidly deployed force that allowed the colonies to respond immediately to war threats, hence the name. -
Quebec Act Passed
Quebec Act, 1774, passed by the British Parliament to institute a permanent administration in Canada replacing the temporary government created at the time of the Proclamation of 1763. It gave the French Canadians complete religious freedom and restored the French form of civil law. -
Committee Of Correspondence
The committees of correspondence were shadow governments organized by the Patriot leaders of the Thirteen Colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. -
"Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death" Spoken
"Give me liberty, or give me death!" is a quotation attributed to Patrick Henry from a speech he made to the Virginia Convention in 1775, at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia, he is credited with having swung the balance in convincing the convention to pass a resolution delivering Virginian troops for the Revolutionary War. Among the delegates to the convention were future U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. -
Second Continental Congress Begins
The Second Continental Congress was a convention of delegates from the Thirteen Colonies that started meeting in the summer of 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. -
Common Sense Published
Common Sense is a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–76 that inspired people in the Thirteen Colonies to declare and fight for independence from Great Britain in the summer of 1776.
