The Sugar Act was passed by Parliament in 1764. The Sugar Act taxed molasses. This tax replaced an earlier tax that most colonial merchants ignored by smuggling molasses into the colonies. Merchants would often bribe the tax collectors to sneak the molasses in. This new tax was lower than the original tax, but it made it easier for officials to place colonial smugglers on trial.

The Stamp Act was passed by Parliament in 1765. Legal documents were taxed by this new law - things like wills and licenses. It also taxed other paper goods like playing cards and newspapers.

Colonists resented the Stamp Act. You can read more about their protests here.

Two ways that the American Colonists tried to fight against these new taxes were petitions and boycotts. A petition is a document signed by many people and is sent to the government asking for a change.

A boycott is when people refuse to buy things. Colonists refused to buy products from England in the hopes of getting Parliament to change its mind about the new taxes.

Parliament did get rid of the Stamp Act.

The Boston Massacre took place on the night of March 5, 1770 when a mob of Boston citizens threatened a British soldier. Paul Revere created a picture of the event.

To learn more about this event, please visit The Boston Massacre Mystery website.

Click here for a large image of Paul Revere's engraving.

Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773. At the time, tea was extremely popular in the colonies and many colonists drank tea twice a day. Most of the tea consumed in the Colonies came from the British East India Company. The tea was shipped to the colonies where it was bought by colonial store owners. The merchants/store owners would then sell the tea to the colonists at a higher price than they bought it from the British East India Company.

A lot of British tea was sitting in warehouses because the colonists refused to buy it because of the tax - the colonists were boycotting the tea because they couldn't vote on the tax.

This boycott hurt the British East India Company financially. Parliament tried to help the company by passing a law that let them sell the tea directly to the colonists and bypass the colonial tea merchants. This made the tea cheaper for the colonists. However:

• The tea tax was still in place and the colonists still could not vote on it

• Colonial tea merchants were hurt financially

This tax led to a whole new boycott and also the Boston Tea Party.

On the night of December 16, 1773, Sons of Liberty, led by a man named Samuel Adams, protested the Tea Act by dumping 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. This nonviolent protest was illegal, and it showed that the colonists were willing to take a strong stand against the British government. The tea that was destroyed would have cost around $1,700,000 in today's money.

The British Government was very upset with the Boston Tea Party. In 1774 they took action to punish the American colonists for the Boston Tea Party. Parliament passed a series of laws or acts. They called these acts the Coercive Acts. The colonists called them the Intolerable Acts.

Here are the four parts of the Intolerable Acts:

• Boston Harbor was closed

• The elected governor of Massachusetts was replaced with a military leader - General Gage

• There could no longer be any town meetings in Boston unless the Governor said it was OK

• Colonists could be forced to house soldiers in their own homes

All of this would stay in place until the tea was repaid.

The colonists were upset with the Intolerable Acts and many started to collect weapons and ammunition to resist the British restrictions. Some colonial men volunteered to train to fight if necessary. These men were called minutemen, because they were supposed to be able to grab their rifles and go fight at a minute's notice.

General Gage learned of some guns and ammunition that were being stored at a city outside of Boston called Concord. He sent British troops to take the guns and ammunition.

The Sons of Liberty responded by assembling minutemen. The colonial minutemen and the British troops met at a town called Lexington which was near Concord. The British told the minutemen to leave. Someone fired a gun, no one knows who, but fighting broke out and 8 minutemen were killed. This has often been called "The shot heard round the world" and these events led to the Revolutionary War.