The Age of Reason

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.

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, ended the American Revolutionary War.

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.

A series of measures introduced into the English Parliament by Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend in 1767, the Townshend Acts imposed duties on glass, lead, paints, paper and tea imported into the colonies.

The Boston Massacre, known as the Incident on King Street by the British, was an incident on March 5, 1770, in which British Army soldiers shot and killed people while under attack by a mob.

The colonists had never accepted the constitutionality of the duty on tea, and the Tea Act rekindled their opposition to it. Their resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, in which colonists boarded East India Company ships and dumped their loads of tea overboard.

To punish the Massachusetts colony for the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts:

The Boston Port Act, the first law passed, closed the port of Boston until the colonists paid for all the tea they had destroyed.

The Massachusetts Government Act revoked the colony's charter and reduced the colonists’ political rights.

The Administration of Justice Act allowed British officials accused of a crime in the colonies to be tried in Britain.

The Quartering Act required colonists to provide housing for British soldiers.

The First Continental Congress was a meeting of delegates from twelve of the Thirteen Colonies who met from September 5 to October 26, 1774 at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania early in the American Revolution.

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 (present-day Arlington), and Cambridge.