The American Revolution was a 1775-1783 conflict between the 13 American colonies and Britain, resulting in the founding of the United States. The revolution began after Britain imposed new taxes and trade restrictions on the 13 colonies, fueling growing resentment and strengthening the colonists’ desire for independence from the British government and monarchy. The American Revolutionaries prevailed in their war for independence by outlasting the British, turning British liabilities into American advantages, and making the United States the new country they are today.
The American Revolution was primarily caused by colonial opposition to British attempts to impose greater control over the colonies and make them repay the crown for its defense. The 13 colonies joined together during the Revolutionary War, aiming to gain independence from the British government and monarchy. The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War, and the United States gained control of land stretching across the continent.
The major causes of the American Revolution include the British Parliament taxing the colonies for helping them escape persecution in England, and the Boston Massacre, where British soldiers fired into a Boston church. The American Revolution was a significant event in American history, as it marked the beginning of the United States as a nation. The events leading up to the American Revolution have shaped the principles of the U.S. Constitution and continue to be a significant part of American history.
📹 Tea, Taxes, and The American Revolution: Crash Course World History #28
In which John Green teaches you about the American Revolution and the American Revolutionary War, which it turns out were …
📹 Lung inflation in Science Lesson#science #teacher #biology
For those who haven’t figured it out, the reason people thought that democracy was anti-theistic was because Western religion up to that point was based around the notion that God and his creations were a monarchy, and that kings and emperors were part of that monarchical structure. Establishing a democratic society was like trying to overturn all of that.
1.) To be fair, the Brits taxed themselves first at home and thought it was logical to tax the colonists considering the residing British army remained to protect them against conflicts. So it seemed reasonable in their view. 2.) Boston Tea Party, yes the tea was cheaper, they got rid of all the other levied taxes except for tea, it was still cheap, but the British takeover of East India Co. for reasons to prevent bankruptcy made the colonists view it as monopolizing and thought the Brits could take over their industries as well. So the Brits thought they saved the tea co., and also repealed other taxes along with cheaper Tea, thinking it would lead to greater relations, but it was a big misunderstanding of two different ideologies and difference in way of thought. 3.) The revolution wasn’t only about taxes or had nothing to do with the war. The revolution was the minds of the colonists and creating their own identity. John Adams & Benjamin Rush state that the revolution is still striving today.
I’m a Swiss history student and i enjoy john’s articles which provide a nice résumé about the whole topic. Neither being British nor being American, i view the American Revolution as mostly a chain of misunderstandings and ignorance on both sides (a bit more on the english side). The UK had it’s own problems with George III, Premierminister North and it’s thousand commitees (like Board of Trade); every Duke had to be included somehow, so naturally, there had to be some trouble. Always, when the colonist did something to show their disapproval (like Gaspee), the English implement a law that makes the colonist even angrier (priviledge of East India Company). Ignorance and misunderstandings paired with bad timing. If the UK had a better organisation and would have been more understanding, they could have worked it out (my opinion). To me it’s like a family feud
John and team Crash Course: It would be great if you guys can do a more in depth episode on the relationships between the American & French Revolutions; how the philosophies, histories, politics, etc. are intertwined. For example; one interesting note I discovered from Jon Meacham’s Art of Power is the importance of per-revolutionary France on Jefferson, Revolutionary America on Lafayette, and the writing of the Les Droits..
JOHN GREEN!! Thank you!! Homeschooling a High Schooler. Struggling to garner interest in History… until today!! We found you! My DD grabbed the computer from me and willingly started to watch and was laughing a lot! THANK YOU! I owe you one! Come to Morgan Hill California, I will buy you coffee and dinner 😀 You have made my job much more enjoyable!
Fun fact: The South was more loyal to England than the North. If England won the war, I doubt they would have banned slavery at the time they actually did. It would have made more profit for them. The south made huge profits from slavery, and one of their main customers were the British empire. The British Empire even supported the Confederacy during the American civil war.
One thing to point out, Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought up of the concept of a decentralized gov’t that allowed the provincial gov’ts have more autonomy, in his 1762 work The Social Contract; which is how the US of A is organized. So yeah he did have some influence on America’s formation. Also, I find that America to be founded solely on Locke to be an oversimplification as Montesquieu, Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Epictetus, Epicurus, and Voltaire had much to do with the formation of America. Also, I kind of feel that John Green seems to misunderstand philosophy as it is not a monolithic study.
First I’d like to clarify that I am in high school and by no means a qualified expert about these subjects (please don’t bash me), but I’d argue that the claim that slaves would’ve been better off if the British won isn’t necessarily true. First of all, assuming the British actually managed to keep a hold on the colonies for the next 70 or whatever years, the British could so easily get rid of slavery because they weren’t dependent on them. There were very few slaves in Britain, and furthermore, they didn’t exactly encourage the dissolution of a slave-culture in any of their other or future colonies (cough cough India). Especially if they benefited from the slavery in the Americas, it really would’ve been an upward climb to ban it.
What was interesting was that in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence there was a section written that would free the slaves. The council assigned to write the document, which then promptly put it on Jefferson, said that not all of the people at the convention would agree to this and would make the convention longer than it already was. Jefferson “fixed” this after a heated argument with the rest of the council and thus we have our Declaration, also the original draft cussed a lot.
The deceleration of Arbroath was penned 500 years before the American declaration of independence and was the first to advocate that the government was subject to the will of the people. It also bears a striking visual resemblance to the deceleration of independence and its no coincidence that many of those who signed the latter were of Scottish extraction.
Really loving the the world and US history series. So refreshing to get a more balanced view of US history that isn’t so steeped in mythology and irrational patriotism. Though I’m real surprised that you don’t have an episode on the English civil war and revolution, as it’s probably the biggest influence on powers in america and is a precursor to the american revolution i.e. much of the powerful american elite who went on to start the US are of the same stock as those who over threw the English crown over 100 years previously. Plus you shouldn’t miss out the story of the world’s first Republican Democracy in a series on world history, even if it did only last a decade.
Every comment on this article is just degrading “americans”. It is just a title and no person can make such a general statement to say that Americans are ignorant or would have been better of as British. I agree America is not the greatest place but as a matter of fact no place is. So please direct your comment to the historical side instead of the opinionated side.
In presenting that the British were so anti-slavery John kind-of ignores a few important facts. The anti-slavery movement didn’t gain any significant force until the 1780’s. They didn’t stop the slave trade until 1807 and then didn’t free slaves across the empire until 1833. This was definitely before the US, but to say that the British saying they would free the slaves meant that they were being beneficent is reading a little too much into it. There were a lot of slaves in the Americas, and the British wanted allies. This is like the Emancipation Proclamation that DID NOT free the slaves. It only freed slaves in states that continued to rebel (meaning the Confederacy) but didn’t address at all those from states in the Union, like Delaware.
Hello, I’m really enjoying these articles! Thank you so much for all of the work that has gone into them. I see that you sometimes put up banners in the articles to correct mistakes, so in the spirit of contributing to an excellent resource, I thought I should draw your attention to a mistake you made in this episode. You say that Kant claimed: “Human reason rendered a belief in God unnecessary… Any belief in divine intervention or a divine plan for humanity was just superstition.” I spend quite a lot of time studying Kant’s works, and I would have to say that this is a serious misrepresentation of his views. True, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/7), Kant argued that there cannot be any proof for the existence of God. But in the introduction to that book, he summed up what he was doing as “denying knowledge, in order to make room for faith”. And in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues that for rational, moral beings, it is necessary to postulate a belief in God. So Kant explicitly argues that human reason renders a belief in God necessary. Kant makes a lot of the distinction between ‘cognition’/’knowledge’ (Erkenntniss) and ‘faith’/’belief’ (Glaube), but it’s wrong to characterise the latter as “superstition”. He thinks that there is a difference between ‘rational faith’, which is based on things like our experience of moral agency, and ‘enthusiasm’ (Schwärmerei), which is baseless. He spends a lot of effort trying to show that there is such thing as “rational religion”, which falls into the former category.
I’d like to share a little history about my small home-state because it is related to this article. I see John spoke correctly that the quintessential British Tea wasn’t English, but he says they were Chinese or Burmese or Indian, which should actually mean the region between these three regions, where my home-state of Assam and nearby Arunachal lies which are among the oldest tea growing states of the world and one of the first regions exploited for oil (Google “Digboi”), they are still contested by India and China. We still maintain the East India company plantations as heritage sites and they have records of the sales made for transportation to the new world colonies. But these facts are still hushed up and are not very well known because both India and Britain commercially benefited from exploitation of the region. Here is where it would be called a comedy of errors if it weren’t for all the lives destroyed: Historically, mainland Mughal India could never conquer its north eastern states (Google “The Battle of Saraighat”) coz we were sort of like Dorne ;), Comically, when the British charged the mainland kingdoms for their services, the idiot kings who had spent away everything said they couldn’t pay them because their profits of operations in north eastern India (non existent) were recently captured by the Burmese and they goaded the British into attacking them, which the British gladly did because they were greedy enough to want Burma too beginning the costliest Anglo Indian war, Meanwhile Burma didn’t know their motives, so when they lost, the British were like “Hey, you can keep your own heads of state, but we want the north eastern state operations” to which the Burmese were “Uh, ok ?
Green totally brushes over how profoundly important and unique the revolution was and just goes with the typical “hey they were white” line. It’s facile. It’s a willingness to overlook all of the important and incredible aspects of something because “hey their race was the same race that I like to gripe about.”
It is so annoying to me when people judge history and people of the past by the current ideas and knowledge. Even now in our culture we have thing happening that are appalling to humanity. We have no right to judge the people of the past too unkindly. And besides all of the principle founders, even those who inherited slaves and therefore were slave owners, were opposed to slavery, Thomas Jefferson purposed an antislavery plan that would have eliminated slavery within one generation. Our founding fathers were very wise in not pushing the slavery issue at the time. You have to learn to pick the most important battle at the moment. If you read their words you will see they wished slavery did not exist in America but they believed that in time it would be eradicated. Slavery was not an American problem. It was a world problem. It did not exist here because the American colonist were particularly evil. It came here with those coming from other places in the world. The American revolution was a revolution indeed and the ideas of liberty and quality were believed by the men who wrote those words.
Whoa whoa whoa, let’s get something straight–Dunmore’s Proclamation was just a method to bolster his own forces; it wasn’t like he was really offering freedom for slaves (also, he himself owned slaves). He mostly wanted to scare the colonists with a possible slave rebellion which backfired because people became so angry about it that they made the punishment for runaways death (and, you know, chased him out of Virginia). Moreover, later generals who would accept blacks into their units mostly used former slaves as servants. Not to mention the large number of blacks who were left to die on shores because too many showed up and the British weren’t equipped to deal with that amount of people, so they just left them behind. And at the end almost none of them got anything they were promised, although some were granted land in Nova Scotia, but it was so shitty that one former slave’s account questioned whether it was worth it. Honestly, if the British had won there would still have been slaves, because it was so ingrained in America’s economy that they wouldn’t get rid of it (plus, trying to get rid of it would probably start a whole other war)
Tea was actually created by accident when tea leaves accidentally fell into the Chinese Emperor’s water, but the emperor decided to let the leaves run their course. Hence, the refreshing tea we know today was created. ps: matches, plastic bottles, and flavorless pill coatings were also among these accidental creations although they happened later in time.
Question: While you mention that the Tea Tax would have made British Tea cheaper, I believe it was because it allowed the Dutch East India Co. (Voc) to sell products directly in America and essentially maintain a monopoly awhile cutting out middlemen (aka American Merchants or Businesses). So while it would have reduced costs to the VoC, it possibly could have led to prices rising bc of a lack of a free market to limit prices (via supply&demand). I don’t want to pick at your show, bc its awesome, but I’m just curious on how you trail it off as a footnote – rather than an economic wrangling. Love the show! Keep it up!
I’d been waiting for when you’d start talking about “privilege” outright. That was absolutely treacherous, magnificently so. Ease into it with the Atlantic slave trade(which you deem unique in that it is “chattel” slavery, neglecting to then mention the ottomans, mongols or the Irish all fitting your same definition of that) and inch your way across the room until the point where a democracy with merit based suffrage, and the inheritance of property are being demonized. And of course insinuating that there is something wrong with the drafters of the declaration of independence being accomplished men, putting especial focus on them being white instead of anything that they at the time would have identified as so as to divide the contemporary US into black and white and use this as some excuse for the former’s apparent inadequacies. Which takes us back to the idea of “privilege” and how you’ll no doubt insist the mere existence of inequality of outcome is evidence of an inequality of opportunity. It’s a shame that you can’t get the entertaining history summaries without having to patronize some extreme leftist propagandist.
Hi folks – I am unable to find the quote attributed to Kant anywhere (in the form presented) online. Furthermore, I’m unclear how little numbers embedded in the quotes (like footnotes? – they are used in all CC articles) and the bubbles that pop out from them are supposed to help our understanding. They don’t appear to link to anything. I’m sorry, I’m at a loss in trying to understand what they are for. Does anyone have any idea about how these graphics are supposed to function? (Look around 8:30 – to see what I’m asking about.) Thanks!
I think it is unfair to criticize the achievements of the american revolution through our modern eyes. I mean that sure, today, a system of goverment that doesn’t recognizes women and slaves as citizens seems appalling (and for good reason), but you have to understand things from the perspective of their respective era. Back then a representative democracy (even if only 15% could participate) founded upon the freedom of religion and speech and with no dei gratia monarch was unheard of
Just a note, but another major reason the colonists opposed the Stamp Act was because it imposed a cost on free speech. Stamps were required for all forms of paper documents, including books, newspapers, letters, and even legal documents like contracts. So if you were poor and the Stamp Act was taking a big drain on your finances, you wouldn’t be able to write or publish thought, or form any sort of contract. It also added additional costs to people getting fair legal representation, as it dramatically increased the cost of lawyers as a Stamp was required for each and every document, which depending on the situation could be hundreds of pages. It also put a tax on free press, as newspapers needed to pay per page published, for every issue printed, making newspapers difficult to run, more prone to corruption, and more likely to collapse. Smaller newspapers did collapse, and were only reinstated after the war.
This might be nice for 1st grade students, but this was not a trivial encounter. As a retired teacher, It seems that our educational system has dumbed down this encounter by telling about the famous “ride of Paul Revere ” and “the British are coming, the British are coming. Why are the British coming ??? Most adults I have talked to have no idea what happened after this. This was a gun control enforcement action. By the end of the day 4000 farmers from many surrounding towns had killed 770 British regulars. Most of the British soldiers had walked 30 miles, the last fifteen in retreat and had to be rescued by another British regiment out of Boston. This was the British trying to impose GUN CONTROL on the the people of Massachusetts. Remember Lexington Green. Tax after tax did not start this war. It was this GUN GRAB and losing 770 regulars to a bunch of colony farmers.
But, in 1789 they passed a very important document that not just spelled out the natural rights of the people, it mostly created specific rules to limit government(THEMSELVES!!!) to protect the people. Their foresight somewhat protects us today, but I still commend our forefathers for understanding the dangers of overreaching government and putting the people before themselves.
Taxation Without Representation is totally a bankrupt argument considering that every person living under the British crown are citizens and therefore represented in Parliament. All of the taxes levied onto the colonists leading up to 1775 were repealed promptly thanks to the representatives of the people advocating for them in parliament.
hi, I’m Brazilian and lived for 2 years in the US, so I can tell how different these two countries are… As my field of study is engineering, I’m just perusal these articles for fun and I’ve got a question: Why have the US and Canada worked and Mexico, Central and South America haven’t really worked as well? For example, Brazil was colonized by Portugal while the US was by UK, technically it was two European rich countries controlling two american promising countries with many resources… Congrats for your work and thanks for all the information
To be clear- yes, the US only extended participation in government to a percentage of the population, but this was a massively unique and radical move towards democracy. There’s no reason to belittle this. Also, to be clear- the British instituted slavery and were probably the most dominant and brutal colonizers, the world around.
“You guys are Canadian; you’ve never actually declared independence,” No, but we did declare Confederation (on July 1st, 1867), which technically made us a separate nation from Britain… You know, except we couldn’t declare war on our own until WWII, we still need the head Monarch’s approval when changing mostly any big legal document (The Bill of Rights, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, etc.) and we still have an Attorney General, a representation of the Crown, but we still did technically declare independence!
It’s nice to see him view both sides and not just see men like Washington as heroes. But I disagree with his gloss over the actual war, many historians see that without foreign aid America would have lost as shown by the Battle of Long Island. He kind of just says that they lose which I think I wrong and misses a big aspect of the war
i think the real reason you guys had a revolution and not just a war of independence is the fact that you kickstarted the entire human made written constitution thing, which caught on later and became the norm in all future wars,where a newly formed state’s first task was to lay down it’s constitution and display to the world what kind of country you are,or atleast aspire to be
You forgot the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This is arguably why “No taxation without representation” became the rallying cry of the colonies– it disallowed settling beyond the Appalachians because England didn’t want a war with Native Americans. This, in many colonists’ minds, disproved the British argument that Parliament represented all of Britain and its colonies even if they didn’t have votes. Many colonists would have been fine with the the tax if they had been allowed to settle the land they just fought and died and proved themselves for.
John doesn’t really go into it here but it’s worth pointing out England (by this time Britain) had a degree of power-sharing between the Crown and the aristocracy + the wealthier commoners, that other European nations didn’t have. It was a Consitutional monarchy (albeit with a more powerful monarch than today ). To modern eyes it looks like a narrow oligarchy but to Brits on both sides of the pre-1776 Atlantic, it was startlingy different to France or Spain, even if the poor still got screwed. The end result of that was that what the Founding Fathers were initally demanding was what they saw as their rights as free-born Englishmen, who just happened to live in the Americas and therefore couldn’t inherit a seat in the House of Lords or buy one (literally) in the House of Commons, or even vote in a British election. Obviously there was the whole issue of the Proclamation Line as well but the Bill of Rights (the English one) basically said “No taxation without Representation” and the wealthier colonists were saying “and that includes us”. The fact that they came from that political tradition is part of why their revolution produced (eventually) a Constitution that’s still around today, while revolutions in South America tended to devolve into instability or despotism.
Dear Crash Course, and Mr. Green I love your website and it helped me a “little bit.” But Mr. Green don’t you think you’re going TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO fast (Talking?) I mean you can slow down a bit.. Sometimes you speak “SO” fast that I don’t really understand it AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Would you mind slowing down a little bit that would really help thanks…
Question: What if the British government allowed American colonists to be represented in the parliament since that was the main beginning complaint of the American colonists? I am no historian, just a high school student, but I really do wonder if the British were more inclusionary of the Americans, then the revolution wouldn’t have garnered enough local support to have much of an effect on the loyalty of the colonists. Could we have became sort of a British commonwealth like Canada is today after centuries of complete imperial rule?