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The American Revolution: A Complete Timeline

From the first colonial grievances to the Treaty of Paris — the road to independence, year by year.
Illustration of the American Revolution era

The American Revolution did not begin with a battle. It began with an argument about who had the right to tax a printed page. Between the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Treaty of Paris in 1783, a dispute over Parliament's authority hardened, step by step, into a war for a new kind of nation — one that claimed to draw its powers from the governed rather than the Crown.

This timeline follows that escalation in order. Each entry links to a full account on BriefHistory; read straight through and the logic of the break with Britain comes into focus — taxes provoke protest, protest provokes coercion, coercion provokes war, and war forces the colonies to define what, exactly, they were fighting to become.

The Road to War (1765–1774)

The Revolution did not begin with a shot; it began with a tax. For a decade the quarrel was constitutional, not military — a slow-building argument over whether Parliament could tax colonists who had no one to speak for them in it. Each new levy and each colonial protest hardened the other, and by 1774 the thirteen colonies were, for the first time, beginning to act as one. These are the events that made a war thinkable.

Stamp Act
Parliament's 1765 tax on printed goods turned scattered colonial complaints into a coordinated argument over taxation without representation.
Boston Massacre
A deadly 1770 street clash that colonial printers reframed as proof of an army turned against its own citizens.
Tea Act
The 1773 law that handed the East India Company a tea monopoly and handed the colonies a fresh grievance.
The Boston Tea Party
The December 1773 protest that destroyed a fortune in tea and made reconciliation with Britain politically impossible.
Continental Congress
In 1774 the colonies began acting as one body, the first institution to speak for America as a whole.
War for Independence (1775–1781)

Once the fighting started at Lexington and Concord, the question shifted from whether the colonies should separate to whether they could survive doing it. This was the long, uncertain middle — defeats and near-collapse as often as victory, a formal Declaration midway through, and the foreign alliance that finally tipped the odds. The entries here trace the war from its first shots to the siege that effectively ended it.

Battle of Lexington and Concord
The April 1775 skirmishes that fired the first shots and converted a political crisis into open war.
Battle of Bunker Hill
A costly British victory in 1775 that proved colonial militia could stand against regular troops.
The American Revolution
The overview entry — the full arc of the war, its commanders, and its stakes in one place.
Declaration of Independence
The 1776 document that converted a tax revolt into a formal claim to nationhood.
Battle of Trenton
Washington's desperate Christmas-night crossing in 1776 that revived a collapsing cause.
Battle of Saratoga
The 1777 American victory that persuaded France to enter the war as an ally.
Battle of Yorktown
The 1781 siege, with French support, that trapped Cornwallis and effectively ended the fighting.
Independence Won (1783)

Yorktown ended the fighting, but a war is not over until the loser admits it. The final step was diplomatic: the treaty in which Britain formally recognized the United States and signed away a continent's worth of territory, converting a battlefield outcome into a recognized nation.

Treaty of Paris (1783)
The 1783 treaty in which Britain recognized American independence and ceded territory to the Mississippi.

The Treaty of Paris ended the war but left the harder question open: could thirteen quarreling states actually govern themselves? For what came next, follow the timeline into the founding documents and the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

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