Historians begin with a question or set of questions. They use these questions to examine evidence or sources in order to develop and support their arguments. This exercise asks you to examine a group of sources against a series of questions given below.
Be sure that you create a set of reading notes for your responses. You will need them later in this module. Historians share their ideas with each other in a way that allows for a free exchange of interpretations. This exercise asks you to do this with your classmates using the discussion board assigned by your instructor. Grenville strongly urg'd not only the power but the right of Parliament to tax the colonys, and hop'd in Gods Name Historians draw their evidence from a variety of sources, including documents, vital records such as birth certificates , images and artifacts things people make and use.
This exercise asks you to draw on a combination of documentary and visual evidence. Examine the evidence against the suggest questions and make notes for later use. Read two of the following documents. Which specific words, phrases, or ideas appear particularly important or useful in communicating an idea?
Who was the audience for the documents you selected. How did protests work? Who attended? Who or what was targeted? What was done?
It imposed a tax on all papers and official documents in the American colonies, though not in England. Included under the act were bonds, licenses, certificates, and other official documents as well as more mundane items such as plain parchment and playing cards.
Parliament reasoned that the American colonies needed to offset the sums necessary for their maintenance. The American colonists were angered by the Stamp Act and quickly acted to oppose it.
Instead, the colonists made clear their opposition by simply refusing to pay the tax. Prominent individuals such as Benjamin Franklin and members of the independence-minded group known as the Sons of Liberty argued that the British parliament did not have the authority to impose an internal tax.
Public protest flared and the ensuing violence attracted broad attention. Tax commissioners were threatened and quit their jobs out of fear; others simply did not succeed in collecting any money. While the Congress and the colonial assemblies passed resolutions and issued petitions against the Stamp Act, the colonists took matters into their own hands. The most famous popular resistance took place in Boston, where opponents of the Stamp Act, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, enlisted the rabble of Boston in opposition to the new law.
Oliver agreed to resign his commission as stamp distributor. Similar events transpired in other colonial towns, as crowds mobbed the stamp distributors and threatened their physical well-being and their property.
By the beginning of , most of the stamp distributors had resigned their commissions, many of them under duress. Mobs in seaport towns turned away ships carrying the stamp papers from England without allowing them to discharge their cargoes. Determined colonial resistance made it impossible for the British government to bring the Stamp Act into effect. In , Parliament repealed it. The British government coupled the repeal of the Stamp Act with the Declaratory Act, a reaffirmation of its power to pass any laws over the colonists that it saw fit.
However, the colonists held firm to their view that Parliament could not tax them. The issues raised by the Stamp Act festered for 10 years before giving rise to the Revolutionary War and, ultimately, American independence. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Tea Act of was one of several measures imposed on the American colonists by the heavily indebted British government in the decade leading up to the American Revolutionary War The Townshend Acts were a series of measures, passed by the British Parliament in , that taxed goods imported to the American colonies.
But American colonists, who had no representation in Parliament, saw the Acts as an abuse of power. But Parliament then passed the Declaratory Act, which stated its right in principle to tax the colonies as it saw fit.
In the years following the Stamp Act riots, the use of a Congress of the Colonies and the Committees of Correspondence were key components of the independence drive a decade later.
British troops felled tree, which hosted the iconic scene of the Stamp Act protests and, later the planning of the Boston Tea Party, in August Toggle navigation. Sign up for our email newsletter.
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