The American Revolution

1763-1783: Library of Congress

Until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, few colonists in British North America objected to their place in the British Empire. Colonists in British America reaped many benefits from the British imperial system and bore few costs for those benefits. Indeed, until the early 1760s, the British mostly left their American colonies alone. The Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War) changed everything. Although Britain eventually achieved victory over France and its allies, victory had come at great cost. A staggering war debt

This is from Wikipedia:

American Revolutionary War, April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783

• Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775
• The Province of New Hampshire adopts a constitution for an independent State of New Hampshire, January 5, 1776
• The Province of South Carolina adopts a constitution for an independent State of South Carolina on March 15, 1776
• The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations declares its independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain on May 4, 1776
• The Colony of Connecticut declares its independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain on June 18, 1776
• The Colony

Excerpts from These Truths, pages 80-91:

But the [Seven Years] war had left Britain nearly bankrupt. The fighting had nearly doubled Britain's debt, ...  the king’s ministers determined that defending the empire’s new North American borders would require ten thousand troops or more, especially after a confederation of Indians led by an Ottawa chief named Pontiac captured British forts in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. 

Fearing the cost of suppressing more Indian uprisings, George III issued a proclamation decreeing that no colonists could settle west of the Appalachian Mountains, a line that

From These Truths, pages 91-108

THE CONTINENTAL Congress neither suffered the disunion and chaos of the Albany Congress nor undertook the deferential pleading of the Stamp Act Congress. Preparing for the worst, this new, more ambitious, and more expansive—continental—Congress urged colonists to muster their militias and stockpile weapons. It also agreed to boycott all British imports and to ban all trade with the West Indies, a severing of ties with the islands.

...

The Declaration that Congress did adopt was a stunning rhetorical feat, an act of extraordinary political courage. It also marked a