History: sources, eras, and turning points, early United States (grade 8)

Britain won the French and Indian War in 1763, but it had big debts. To pay them, Parliament taxed the colonies. The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed paper items like newspapers.

The colonies had no members in Parliament. Colonial leaders said only their own representatives could agree to tax them. Their slogan was "no taxation without representation."

The conflict grew. Colonists dumped tea into Boston Harbor in 1773. Fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in 1775. Congress approved the Declaration in 1776.

After the Declaration in 1776, Americans wrote the Constitution in 1787. In 1803, the nation bought the Louisiana Territory from France, nearly doubling its size.

President Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore it. He told Lewis to explore the Missouri River and look for a water route across the continent "for the purposes of commerce." Commerce means trade.

Tensions over slavery grew as the nation grew. The Civil War began in 1861. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in 1865.

For decades, North and South argued over whether slavery could spread into new western territories. After Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, Southern states began to leave the Union. War began in 1861.

In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It declared enslaved people in the Confederate states free. The Thirteenth Amendment later ended slavery everywhere in 1865.

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery and became a famous speaker. In 1852 he asked what the Fourth of July meant to an enslaved person. He was pointing to the gap between the nation's promise of liberty and the fact of slavery.

Reconstruction was the time after the Civil War when the nation rebuilt. In 1865, the Freedmen's Bureau opened schools for people who had been enslaved. Many Southern states had made it a crime to teach enslaved people to read.

New amendments made freed people citizens and protected Black men's right to vote.

Reconstruction ended in 1877. Later, many Southern states added poll taxes, which were fees to vote, and literacy tests, which were reading tests. These rules kept many Black citizens from voting.