American Revolution

The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution based on the principles of the American Enlightenment that generally occurred in British America between 1765 and 1789. It created the environment for the American Revolutionary War, which lasted from 1775 to 1783, whereby the Thirteen Colonies secured their independence from the British Crown and consequently established the United States as the first sovereign nation state founded on Enlightenment principles of the consent of the governed, constitutionalism and liberal democracy. American colonists objected to being taxed by the British Parliament, a body in which they had no direct representation. Prior to the 1760s, British colonial authorities afforded the colonies a relatively high level of autonomy in their internal affairs, which were locally governed by colonial legislatures. During the 1760s, however, the British Parliament passed acts that were intended to bring the American colonies under more direct rule by the British monarchy and intertwine the economies of the American colonies with Britain in ways that benefited the British monarchy and increased the colonies' dependence on it. In 1765, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which imposed taxes on official documents, newspapers and magazines, and most things printed in the colonies, leading to colonial protest and resulting in representatives from several colonies convening the Stamp Act Congress in New York City to plan a response. The British repealed the Stamp Act, alleviating tensions briefly but they flared again in 1767 with Parliament's passage of the Townshend Acts, a group of new taxes and regulations imposed on the thirteen colonies. In an effort to quell a mounting rebellion in the colonies, which was particularly severe in the colonial-era Province of Massachusetts Bay, King George III deployed troops to Boston, resulting in the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. The British government then repealed most of the Townshend duties in 1770, but it retained its tax on tea in order to symbolically assert Parliament's right to tax the colonies. The thirteen colonies responded assertively, first burning the Gaspee in Rhode Island in 1772 and then launching the Boston Tea Party in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773, which vastly escalated tensions. The British responded by closing Boston Harbor and enacting a series of punitive laws, which effectively rescinded Massachusetts' governing autonomy.