American Revolution

The American Revolution was the broader political and social movement, spanning roughly 1765 to 1791, by which thirteen British colonies in North America rejected British rule and established the independent United States. Colonial resistance escalated over taxation without representation, from the Stamp Act of 1765 through the Townshend Acts and the 1773 Boston Tea Party, hardening into organized political opposition through committees of correspondence and the First Continental Congress of 1774. The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, articulating Enlightenment principles of natural rights and popular sovereignty that framed the movement's ideological core, while the concurrent Revolutionary War of 1775 to 1783 secured independence on the battlefield with French assistance, formalized by the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The revolution's political culmination came with the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, establishing a federal constitutional republic whose ideas of representative government and written constitutional rights influenced later revolutionary movements in France and Latin America.