UNIT 2

The Grenville government built up British troop strength in colonial North America at the end of the French and Indian War to protect the colonies against threats posed by remaining Frenchmen and Indians.

As November 1*, 1765 approached — the effective date for the enforcement of the Stamp Act — opposition to the new form of taxation spread through the colonies. Demonstrations in Boston convinced the royally appointed stamp distributor that he should resign his position rather than risk life and limb.

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.

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 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.

The Intolerable Acts were 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 in throwing a large tea shipment into Boston Harbor. In Great Britain, these laws were referred to as the Coercive Acts.

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 Boston Tea Party (initially referred to by John Adams as "the Destruction of the Tea in Boston")^[2] was a political protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, on December 16, 1773. The demonstrators, some disguised as Native Americans, in defiance of the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company.

The Committees of Correspondence were shadow governments organized by the Patriot leaders of the Thirteen Colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. They coordinated responses to England and shared their plans; by 1773 they had emerged as shadow governments, superseding the colonial legislature and royal officials.

Thomas Paine (or Pain;^[1] February 9, 1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736]^{[Note 1]} – June 8, 1809) was an English-American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he inspired the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain.

Salutary neglect is an American history term that refers to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Crown policy of avoiding strict enforcement of parliamentary laws meant to keep American colonies obedient to England. The term comes from Edmund Burke's "Speech on Conciliation with America" given in the House of Commons March 22, 1775.

The Sons of Liberty was an organization of American colonists that was created in the Thirteen American Colonies. The secret society was formed to protect the rights of the colonists and to fight taxation by the British government.

The Olive Branch Petition was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 5, 1775 in a final attempt to avoid a full-on war between Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies, which the Congress represented. Congress had already authorized the invasion of Canada over a week previously, but the petition affirmed American loyalty to Great Britain and beseeched the king to prevent further conflict.

The 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,^[2] then at war with the Kingdom of Great Britain, regarded themselves as thirteen newly independent sovereign states, and no longer under British rule.

The Continental Congress, also known as the Philadelphia Congress, was a convention of delegates called together from the Thirteen Colonies which became the governing body of the United States (USA) during the American Revolution.