American Revolution Dbq

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The road to revolution was marked by economic strife and political turmoil, but it had tremendous implications for the colonies. During the late 1700s, the English Parliament implemented various restrictive acts in the colonies that stirred up resentment. In response to these acts, the colonies put up a united front and developed a strong national identity that still persists today. A sense of unity first developed in 1754 when Benjamin Franklin published a cartoon of the colonies as separate segments of a snake with the caption, “Join or Die”. This cartoon emphasized the importance of colonial unity and impelled the colonies to join forces. Later that same year, Franklin proposed the Albany Plan of Union to bring the colonies together as a cohesive state, but lack of enthusiasm kept the plan from passing. In 1763, England was struggling with fiscal difficulties from the Seven Years’ War. They had amassed a large war debt and had no way to alleviate it. To rectify the situation, Parliament turned to the colonies. Starting from 1764, Parliament imposed the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Townshend Acts, the Tea Act, and the Coercive …show more content…

Even though there were many colonists who wanted to remain loyal to the king, political activists like Thomas Paine began to speak out and expand Enlightenment ideals. Paine’s “Common Sense” urged colonists to reject the arbitrary government of Britain and its non-representative policies. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence was drafted and argued the same thing, declaring an independent republican government in the colonies. As the ideals in these documents became more widespread, more colonists turned away from the king in favor of a more representative government. These ideals helped them form new ideas about what they stood for and provided a framework for their new identity as a free

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