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Inversely Unified: The American Revolution

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Inversely Unified The American Revolution was created by a society of problem solvers searching for resolution. Fought by members of all social statuses, the revolution was a unifying force and a product of past actions. England’s involvement in the colonies began in the late 16th Century, attempting to create a source of raw materials to be sold cheaply back to Britain to be used to manufacture goods. Britain maintained this control, with varying intensity, until the Treaty of Paris, in 1783. Previous to the Revolution, in a period known as Salutary Neglect, the Glorious Revolution in England preoccupied England and gave the American colonies previously unknown freedoms and leniencies. After the stabilization of Great Britain, a crackdown …show more content…

No single event triggered the revolution, but rather the sum of many. The historian Howard Zinn argued that the war was an opportunity seized by the elite and bourgeois to maintain their position by depicting Great Britain as the scapegoat of any and all issues experienced by the poor. The Revolutionary War was not a conspiracy of the upper classes redirecting subordinate anger towards Britain, but rather a cumulation of a series of new ideas, creating a society which strove to be radical and differentiate itself from Great Britain. These ideas settled and gradually culminated pressure until a complete cutting of ties to Britain became necessary. Including initial colonial ideas such as slavery in the south and individualism in Pennsylvania and wartime statements by the Continental Congress and Thomas Paine, these colonial concepts created not only a separating force from Britain, but simultaneously an internal unifying …show more content…

One such action was the Intolerable Acts. These acts were passed in response to the Boston Tea Party, and included British impositions such as closing Boston Harbour and allowed British Soldiers to quarter themselves in American houses. These attempts to placate the rebellious colonists were viewed with contempt and outrage. The Crown expected colonists to act as their own British subjects did, without realizing that many of the British subjects who had originally colonized America had changed. In 1776, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet entitled Common Sense, wrote, “Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘TIS TIME TO PART”. Paine voiced the opinion of the colonists and added to the idea of separation. The pamphlet sold over 120,000 copies across the colonies and became a bestseller. Colonists of all classes bought and read Common Sense because it vocalized a feeling of frustration that they had been feeling but unable to communicate for years and offered a solution: independence. Later that same year, the Declaration of Independence was written, listing grievances against the King and justifying the Colonial action to separate from Great Britain. One such grievance was: “For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and

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