Let's talk about time period three. It goes from 1754 to 1800. And this is really the time period when the USA becomes the USA. So it's one of the most important time periods you're gonna study.
It's also when our most important documents are written, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. It's critical for the AP US History exam because it's the first of the six time periods that are covered on the DBQ. Up until 1754, all the material from period one and period two, does not count for the DBQ. Now the College Board tells teachers, look, you should dedicate about 12% of your class time to this specific time period.
So it's on the higher end of that percentage. The beginning and end dates of this time period make a lot of sense because in 1754, you have the French and Indian War beginning. And that's what sets off the American Revolution.
By the end in 1800, you have this bitter, nasty election where Thomas Jefferson wins. And you have the American Republic kind of taking its first baby steps as a new country. An even simpler way of thinking about this is that in 1754, the colonies were still colonies, but by 1800s, you have a bona fide United States of America.
The official course description has three key concepts you need to know. Let's start with key concept 3.1. Here's what it says. British attempts to assert tighter control over its North American colonies and the colonial resolve to pursue self-government led to a colonial independence movement, and the Revolutionary War. Now I love this.
I think this is so great because basically the official AP curriculum is blaming Great Britain for the revolution. What led to the colonial independence movement? British attempts to assert tighter control. Now it was also this colonial resolve to pursue self-government, but that's in second place.
It was the British attempts to assert tighter control that get the lion's share of the blame. And that's right, right? I mean this is America. We won the war.
We get to write our history. and our history says that it was Britain's fault. Now actually, most scholars do agree with that idea, that the story of the American Revolution is a story of bad government.
It's of a king who is stubborn and unwilling to change, a king who cracked down on his subjects who are thousands of miles away. Basically, Great Britain was completely out of touch with the colonies. Let's talk about how this happened, how the ununited colonies under British rule became the independent United States.
In 1754, the British colonies were just a string different kinds of settlements along the Atlantic Ocean. They are founded by different groups of people who had different motives. You have Maryland, the Catholic colony, Pennsylvania, the Quaker colony.
You have colonies founded for religious freedom, colonies founded for cash crops. You have English people in Virginia and Swedes in Delaware. This is a very diverse set of settlements.
But at this moment in 1754, it wasn't just British colonies. There was another colony to the north, and that was New France. New France was huge. It went all the way from the cold part of Canada, through the cold part of the Midwest, to the regular part of the Midwest, to Louisiana.
That's a huge territory. And as we said in a previous video, it wasn't like the French sent that many settlers. They focused on building alliances, and that's key. They had alliances with other countries, they had alliances with Native Americans, they had a huge trade network.
They're famous for their fur network, but they traded other goods as well. The French also began exploring all the riverways, of Canada and the northern parts of America. Now eventually the British start moving westward.
The British encroached on two people's territories. They started by stealing Native American land, and then they took French land. And eventually this explodes into war. We call this war the French and Indian War.
And the British send troops from Great Britain across the Atlantic, and they win the war against the French. But there's a problem. The British win the war, and in 1763 they tell the colonists, look, You guys have to share some of this debt. You have to pay some taxes.
And that, needless to say, didn't go over well. You can think of all these taxes, the Stamp Act and the Sugar Act and the Tea Act. They lay a foundation of American resistance and American rebellion. The British also lay down something called the Proclamation of 1763. And in the Proclamation of 1763, the British attempted to assert tighter control by stopping westward migration.
The French and Indian War creates two problems. The first is, is debt, that the British respond with taxes. The second is this westward migration, and the British respond with the proclamation of 1763. So as these taxes kept coming down, the colonists began to develop an elaborate argument that this was all a big fix, that the British government had no right to do this.
They developed a slogan, no taxation without representation. How can the American colonists be taxed if they have no representation in parliament? So in this sense, the American Revolution's all about taxes. But the American Revolution was also about ideas, specifically ideas from the Enlightenment. And one of the main Enlightenment ideas you need to know is something we call social contract theory, or social compact theory.
And it's a really simple idea. It basically says, a king and his subjects are in a contract with each other. The king has to protect his citizens, and the people have to follow the law.
If the people break the law, the king can throw them in jail or fine them. But if the king breaks the law, the people can eventually overthrow him. And that became the intellectual basis of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Key Concept 3.1 is just about the causes of the American Revolution, and they identify two. The first and most important is that the British attempted to assert tighter control.
After the French and Indian War, they cracked down, they laid down the law, they made new taxes, they told people not to move westward. That didn't go well. And the second cause is exactly the American response. The American colonists were rebellious.
They were filled with new ideas from the Enlightenment. And that toxic combination of British overreach and American rebelliousness caused the American Revolution.