Doranda Chambers
U S history to 1877
2110-240
Assignment: Extra Credit Critical Essay

The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783)

The American Revolutionary War was one of the most crucial events of history.

The American Revolution (1775-83) is also known as the American Revolutionary War

and the U.S. War of Independence. The conflict arose from growing tensions between

residents of Great Britain's 13 North American colonies and the colonial government,

which represented the British crown. Skirmishes between British troops and colonial

militiamen in Lexington and Concord in April 1775 kicked off the armed conflict, and by

the following summer, the rebels were waging a full-scale war for their independence.

France entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists in 1778, turning

what had essentially been a civil war into an international conflict. After French

assistance helped the Continental Army force the British surrender at Yorktown,

Virginia, in 1779, the Americans had effectively won their independence, though fighting

would not formally end until 1783. For more than a decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities. Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies with the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Tariffs of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773 caused great tension and resulted in a heated protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in
Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects. Colonial resistance

led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing

five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre. After December 1773, when a band

of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians