During the 18th century, elements of Enlightenment thinking culminated in the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. By the eighteenth century, as the American colonists began to think of freedom from England, they thought of other freedoms as well. In 1777, Thomas Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. In 1789, freedom of religion became the law of the land with the passage of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
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Joseph Priestley Discovers Oxygen
On this day in 1774, dissenting British minister Joseph Priestley, author of Observations on Civil Liberty and the Nature and Justice of the War with America, discovers oxygen while serving as a tutor to the sons of American sympathizer William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, at Bowood House in Wiltshire, ...
The Quebec Act: The Last of the Intolerable Acts
The Quebec Act was passed by the Parliament of Great Britain on June 22, 1774. The Quebec Act was designed to extend the boundaries of Quebec and guaranteed religious freedom to Catholic Canadians. The Quebec Act was considered one of the Intolerable Acts, a series of oppressive British Laws passed by ...
4th Intolerable Act Passed: The Quartering Act of 1774
The purpose of the Quartering Act of 1774 of the Intolerable Acts was to extend the provisions of the previous 1765 Quartering Act giving the governor, rather than the assembly, the authority to enforce arrangements to ensure that the colonists supplied billeting for the troops. The 1765 Quartering Act had ...
Two More ‘Intolerable Acts’ Passed: The Massachusetts Government Act & Administration Justice Act
The Massachusetts Government Act was passed by the Parliament of Great Britain on May 20, 1774. The Massachusetts Government Act revoked the colony's 1691 charter effectively ended the constitution of Massachusetts and and restricted the number of town meetings that a community might hold and prohibited the election of town officials ...
Gov. Morris Letter to John Penn: We Shall be under the Domination of a Riotous Mob
When news of the first measures that came to be known as the Coercive Acts reached New York City, the Sons of Liberty sprang to action, calling a large public meeting in Fraunces Tavern. Moderates within the city, fearing that this radical group would take things too far by imposing ...
The First of the Intolerable Acts, the Boston Port Act, is Passed by Congress
The Boston Port Act was passed by the Parliament of Great Britain March 31, 1774. The Boston Port Act was designed to punish the inhabitants of Boston, Massachusetts for the incident that would become known as the Boston Tea Party. The Port Act was one of a series of British Laws ...
John Hancock on a Militia: “They fight (Not for a Master’s ambition, but) for their Houses, their Lands, for their Wives, …for their Liberty, and for their God”
On the 4th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, 1774, John Hancock, who would be the first to sign the Declaration of Independence, stated: “Will not a well-disciplined militia afford you ample security against foreign foes? We want not courage; it is discipline alone in which we are exceeded by the most ...
The Boston Tea Party: American Patriots Protest the Tea Tax by Throwing 342 Tea Chests into the Boston Harbor
On December 16, 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty, many dressed in disguise as Mohawks, boarded three British ships docked in Boston harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea into the chilly waters of Boston Harbor. The sunken chests held over 45 tons of tea, worth almost $1 million today ...
The Tea Act of 1773: Catalyst for the Boston Tea Party
The Tea Act, passed by Parliament on May 10, 1773, granted the British East India Company Tea a monopoly on tea sales in the American colonies. This was what ultimately compelled a group of Sons of Liberty members on the night of December 16, 1773 to disguise themselves as Mohawk ...
Benjamin Franklin Becomes America’s First Whistleblower when he Discretely Passed Along Some Secret British Government Documents, the Hutchinson Letters.
Edward Snowden and the NSA documents. Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables. Daniel Elsberg and the Pentagon papers. Benjamin Franklin and the Hutchinson letters? Snowden, Assange, and Elsberg all considered themselves to be self-appointed whistleblowers. Individuals who wanted to open governments by disclosing sensitive government documents. Without a doubt, ...
