American Archives

Key people, events, and institutions

Documents in this group relate in some major way to the listed person or institution.


  • Albany Congress (1754): first attempt to unify the colonies, to unify against the French and Indians; used by Whig patriots as an example to follow.
  • Benjamin Franklin
  • Boston Massacre (1770): riotous confrontation between British soldiers and town artisans and laborers, over work and the British occupation in which the British killed five laboring men; became a cause celebre.
  • Boston Town Meeting: proceedings and information on the regular meetings of Boston's inhabitants.
  • Colonial government: actions and proceedings of colonial governmental bodies, even when they resisted British rule.
  • Commissioners of trade: British officials who enforced commercial rules, such as the Navigation Acts and the Townhsend Duties.
  • Continental Army: army formed in 1775 out of provincial and local militias and headed by George Washington.
  • Continental Congress: shadow revolutionary government (1774-1775) and national government after Independence.
  • French and Indian War (1754-1763): war (in America) between the French (and their Indian allies) and the British (and their colonial and Indian allies) for control of North America.
  • General Thomas Gage: military governor of Massachusetts, 1775-1776.
  • Guy Johnson: British Commissioner for northern Indians and a British sympathizer.
  • John Adams
  • John Locke: late-seventeenth-century British philosopher, whose works helped structure Revolutionary ideology.
  • John Wilkes: British opponent of King George III, elected to Parliament (but refused recognition by Commons), jailed for seditious libel, and hero to American Revolutionaries.
  • King George III
  • Liberty affair (1769): sinking of a customs' ship in Newport, Rhode Island, and its aftermath.
  • London/British merchants: and their opinions on American affairs.
  • Meetings, provincial conventions, assemblies: proceedings and information on revolutionary bodies (committees as well as conventions and assemblies), but not regular colonial legislatures.
  • North Carolina Regulators: agrarian rebels in the early 1770s who demanded more equitable taxation and lower judicial fees, opposed by wealthy Whig patriots.
  • Parliament: proceedings of and information about British houses of Commons and Lords.
  • Quebec/Canada: attempts of revolutionaries to enlist English and French-speaking Canadians on their side; fears of attacks from Canada by those loyal to Britain.
  • Sam Adams: Radical revolutionary leader and agitator in Boston.
  • Sons of Liberty: mostly urban patriotic/Whig group, who co-ordinated response to the Stamp Act and later British legislation.
  • Stamp Act and Riots (1765-1766): recollections of the Stamp tax and the riots that followed.
  • State legislatures: proceedings of legislatures after independence.
  • Tea Act and Boston Tea Party (1773): British tax on tea and later destruction of the tea in Boston harbor.
  • The Bible: arguments from or verses quotes from the Bible.
  • Thomas Hutchinson: Royal governor of Massachusetts, 1771-17774, vilified for his support of British policies.
  • Thomas Jefferson
  • Thomas Paine: British-born author of Common Sense.
  • Townshend duties: Revenue Act (1767); import duties on tea, lead, paper, and other commodities.
  • Vermont/New Hampshire Grants/Green Mountain Boys: land controversies in Vermont and settlers there (called New Hampshire Grants), their militia (Green Mountain Boys), and their leader Ethan Allen.
  • Virginia/Pennsylvania Conflict: conflicts over the sovereignty of current-day western Pennsylvania, contested by settlers and speculators from Virginia and from Pennsylvania.
  • William Franklin: Benjamin's son and Royal governor of New Jersey.
  • Wyoming Conflict: controversy between Pennsylvania and Connecticut over sovereignty of the Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania, where the Connecticut-chartered Susquehanna Company had directed settlement.