us history

The Triumphant Side of the American Revolution The American Revolution was a war between the thirteen colonies of America and the British that took place from 1775 to 1783. The colonies, which had not yet been unified, wanted freedom from the domineering British and their "taxation without representation". This saying, coined up twenty years prior to the beginning of the war, was a major slogan for the revolutionaries. The quote means, "If citizens are not represented in the government, then the government should not have the authority to tax them" . In the French and Indian War that lasted from 1754 to 1763, the British, ultimately victorious, fought the French over the control of territories in America that both sides claimed they owned. The war was very expensive for both sides, and the British decided to make up the money by taxing their colonies in America. Debating the validity of England's legal power to tax them like this, the colonies grew resentful of their mother country. Multiple taxes came about, and the most crippling one to the colonists was the tax on tea, which was "an entering wedge in the great dispute that was finally to wrest the American colonies from England" . The infamous Boston Tea Party in 1773 would result from the tax on tea, and the continuous conflicts escalated to a war about a year and a half later. Saving the contents of the war for the rest of the paper, the colonists, against all odds, managed to defeat the British and maintain their independence they established during the war. The answer to "How were the Americans able to fight their way to victory?" is still debated over today. Many historians claim that the group of colonists was just the mouse in between the two elephants, the French and the British, fighting and that the elephant on the mouse's side, the French, was victorious. However, this is untrue because the Americans did in fact play a major role in the gaining of American independence in the mid