• The Pre-Columbian era is the time before Christopher Columbus went to America in 1492. At that time Native Americans lived on the land that is now the United States. In 1621, a group of Englishmen called the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts.
• England was not the only country to settle its people and explorers at what would become the United States.
• In the 1500s, Spain built a fort at Saint Augustine, Florida. France settled Louisiana, and the area around the Great Lakes. The Dutch settled New York, which they called New Netherland. Other areas were settled by Scotch-Irish, Germans, and Swedes.
• However, in time England controlled all of the colonies, and most American colonists adopted the English way of life.
• The growth of the colonies was not good for Native Americans.
• Many of them died of smallpox, a disease brought to America by the Europeans. The ones who lived lost their lands to the colonists. By 1733, there were thirteen colonies. New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston were the largest cities and main ports at that time.
• From 1754 to 1763, England and France fought a war over their land in America called the Seven Years War or the French and Indian War, which the English won. After the war, the English issued the Proclamation of 1763.
• It said that people who lived in the thirteen colonies could not live west of the Appalachian Mountains. Many colonists who wanted to move to the frontier did not like the Proclamation.
• After the French and Indian War, the colonists began to think that they were not getting their "rights as freeborn Englishman". This meant they wanted to be treated fairly by the English government.
• This was mainly caused by the new taxes the British made the colonies pay to pay for the war.
• Americans called this "No taxation without representation", meaning that the colonists should not have to pay taxes unless they had votes in the British Parliament. Each tax was disliked, and replaced by another, which led to more unity between the colonies.
• In 1770, colonists in Boston known as the Sons of Liberty got in. a fight with British soldiers. This became known as the Boston Massacre.
• After the Tea Act, the Sons of Liberty dumped hundreds of boxes of tea in a river. This was known as the Boston Tea Party (1773).
• This led to the British Army taking over Boston. After that, leaders of the 13 colonies formed a group called the Continental Congress. Many people were members of the Continental Congress, but some of the more important ones were Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, Roger Sherman and John Jay.
• In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense. It argued that the colonies should be free of English rule. This was based on the English ideas of natural rights and social contract put forth by John Locke and others.
• On July 4, 1776, people from 13 colonies agreed to the United States Declaration of Independence.

When did the War started?

• When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, delegates – including new additions Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson – voted to form a Continental Army, with George Washington as its commander in chief.
• On June 17, in the Revolution’s first major battle, colonial forces inflicted heavy casualties on the British regiment of General William Howe at Breed’s Hill in Boston. The engagement (known as the Battle of Bunker Hill) ended in British victory, but lent encouragement to the revolutionary cause.
• Throughout that fall and winter, Washington’s forces struggled to keep the British contained in Boston, but artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga in New York helped shift the balance of that struggle in late winter. The British evacuated the city in March 1776, with Howe and his men retreating to Canada to prepare a major invasion of New York.
• By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain.
• On July 4, the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence, drafted by a five-man committee including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Thomas Jefferson.
• That same month, determined to crush the rebellion, the British government sent a large fleet, along with more than 34,000 troops to New York. In August, Howe’s Redcoats routed the Continental Army on Long Island; Washington was forced to evacuate his troops from New York City by September.
• Pushed across the Delaware River, Washington fought back with a surprise attack in Trenton, New Jersey, on Christmas night and won another victory at Princeton to revive the rebels’ flagging hopes before making winter quarters at Morristown.
• British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack, aimed at separating New England (where the rebellion enjoyed the most popular support) from the other colonies.
• To that end, General John Burgoyne’s army aimed to march south from Canada toward a planned meeting with Howe’s forces on the Hudson River. Burgoyne’s men dealt a devastating loss to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga, while Howe decided to move his troops southward from New York to confront Washington’s army near the Chesapeake Bay.
• The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek, Pennsylvania, on September 11 and entered Philadelphia on September 25. Washington rebounded to strike Germantown in early October before withdrawing to winter quarters near Valley Forge.
• Howe’s move had left Burgoyne’s army exposed near Saratoga, New York, and the British suffered the consequences of this on September 19, when an American force under General Horatio Gates defeated them at Freeman’s Farm (known as the first Battle of Saratoga). After suffering another defeat on October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second Battle of Saratoga), Burgoyne surrendered his remaining forces on October 17.
• The American victory at Saratoga would prove to be a turning point of the American Revolution, as it prompted France (which had been secretly aiding the rebels since 1776) to enter the war openly on the American side, though it would not formally declare war on Great Britain until June 1778.
• The American Revolution, which had begun as a civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, was now looking like a world war.

Where did siginificant help come from?

•  The American revolutionary fighters faced seemingly impossible obstacles. But they always had the French on their side.
• When the first guns fired in 1775, there was not yet even a Continental Army. Those battles were fought by local militias. Few Americans had any military experience, and there was no method of training, supplying, or paying an army.
• Moreover, a majority of Americans opposed the war in 1775. Many historians believe only about a third of all Americans supported a war against the British at that time. Further, the Colonies had a poor track record of working together.
• By 1778, the Americans, backed by the French, were marginally ahead of the British. However, more importantly, they were far more determined for a long war than the British were.
• The British grew increasingly frustrated. The loss at Saratoga was humiliating. Capturing the enemy's capital, Philadelphia, did not bring them much advantage. As long as the American Continental Army and state militias remained in the field, the British had to keep on fighting.
• And no matter how much damage the British did to American cities or private property, the Americans refused to surrender. This was a new type of war.
• Having failed in the north, the British turned their attention to the south. They hoped to inspire Loyalist support among dissatisfied Americans — a hope that was never realized. Fighting continued.
• The threat of French naval participation kept the British uneasy. In October 1781, the war virtually came to an end when General Cornwallis was surrounded and forced to surrender the British position at Yorktown, Virginia.
• Though the movement for American independence effectively triumphed at Yorktown, contemporary observers did not see that as the decisive victory yet.
• British forces remained stationed around Charleston, and the powerful main army still resided in New York. Though neither side would take decisive action over the better part of the next two years, the British removal of their troops from Charleston and Savannah in late 1782 finally pointed to the end of the conflict.
• British and American negotiators in Paris signed preliminary peace terms in Paris late that November, and on September 3, 1783, Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris.
• At the same time, Britain signed separate peace treaties with France and Spain (which had entered the conflict in 1779), bringing the American Revolution to a close after eight long years.

Who played important role in the independence of America?

• Founding Fathers, the most prominent statesmen of America’s Revolutionary generation, were responsible for the successful war for colonial independence from Great Britain, the liberal ideas celebrated in the Declaration of Independence, and the republican form of government defined in the United States Constitution.
• While there are no agreed-upon criteria for inclusion, membership in this select group customarily requires conspicuous contributions at one or both of the foundings of the United States: during the American Revolution, when independence was won, or during the Constitutional Convention, when nationhood was achieved.
• Although the list of members can expand and contract in response to political pressures and ideological prejudices of the moment, the following 10, represent the “gallery of greats” that has stood the test of time: John Adams, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Marshall, George Mason, and George Washington. There is a nearly unanimous consensus that Washington was the most important Father of them all.
• Within the broader world of popular opinion in the United States, the Founding Fathers are often accorded near mythical status as demigods. For the rest of the world, however, opinion is more divided.
• In general, scholarship at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st has focused more on ordinary and “inarticulate” Americans in the late 18th century, the periphery of the social scene rather than the centre.
• And much of the scholarly work focusing on the Founders has emphasized their failures more than their successes, primarily their failure to end slavery or reach a sensible accommodation with the Native Americans.
• The very term Founding Fathers has also struck some scholars as inherently sexist, verbally excluding women from a prominent role in the founding. Such influential women as Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and Mercy Otis Warren made significant contributions that merit attention, despite the fact that the Founding Fathers label obscures their role.
• At the most general level, they created the first modern nation-state based on liberal principles.
• These include the democratic principle that political sovereignty in any government resides in the citizenry rather than in a divinely sanctioned monarchy; the capitalistic principle that economic productivity depends upon the release of individual energies in the marketplace rather than on state-sponsored policies; the moral principle that the individual, not the society or the state, is the sovereign unit in the political equation; and the judicial principle that all citizens are equal before the law.
• Moreover, this liberal formula has become the preferred political recipe for success in the modern world, vanquishing the European monarchies in the 19th century and the totalitarian regimes of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the 20th century.
• More specifically, the Founding Fathers managed to defy conventional wisdom in four unprecedented achievements: first, they won a war for colonial independence against the most powerful military and economic power in the world; second, they established the first large-scale republic in the modern world; third, they invented political parties that institutionalized the concept of a legitimate opposition; and fourth, they established the principle of the legal separation of church and state, though it took several decades for that principle to be implemented in all the states.
• Finally, all these achievements were won without any recourse to the guillotine (French Revolution) or the firing squad (Russian Revolution), which is to say without the violent purges that accompanied subsequent revolutions in France, Russia, and China.

How do African Americans Judge this day?

• A long-overdue reckoning on racial inequality was set off in 2020 by the murder of a Black man named George Floyd, perhaps the latest tipping point following hundreds of years and countless atrocities.
• In other words, the country finds itself still struggling to reach the ideals laid out for it in the Declaration of Independence.
• The July 4th holiday has long been marked by protests as well. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence itself is a statement of protest, listing out grievance after grievance, leading up to a severing of ties. “…these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved…”
• The Declaration of Independence was also initially seen as a statement of values. As the original document reads, in part: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
• Slavery lasted through the Civil War, which ended in 1865, and was abolished by the 13th amendment that same year. Soon after, the 14th amendment established equal rights for all free people, and the 15th amendment gave African American men the right to vote. But society would continue to grapple with inequality.
• “What is the Fourth of July but another time for a race riot? Can’t Whites live up to their ideals even on this day of national independence?” asks Louise Stevenson, professor of History and American Studies at Franklin & Marshall College.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. commented on the Declaration of Independence in his “American Dream” sermon, given July 4th, 1965. “Now ever since the founding fathers of our nation dreamed this dream in all of its magnificence — to use a big word that the psychiatrists use — America has been something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against herself. On the one hand we have proudly professed the great principles of democracy, but on the other hand we have sadly practiced the very opposite of those principles.”
• There is no better way to conclude this knapp than to quote Frederick Douglass, a famous 19th Century writer and abolitionist, who gave a speech at an 1852 event meant to pay tribute to the Declaration of Independence.
• Decrying it instead, he said: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
• To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
• There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”