Movements

American Revolution

Also Known As American War of Independence

Citation Formats

General Reference

Political Atlas. "American Revolution." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-political.interactiveatlas.org/movements/american-revolution.

APA Style

Political Atlas. (n.d.). American Revolution. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-political.interactiveatlas.org/movements/american-revolution

BibTeX

@misc{politicalatlas-american-revolution,
  author = {Political Atlas},
  title = {American Revolution},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-political.interactiveatlas.org/movements/american-revolution},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

War fought from 1775 to 1783 in which thirteen of Britain's North American colonies won independence and founded the United States. Fighting began at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 after years of dispute over British taxation and control of colonial affairs, and the Continental Congress declared independence on 4 July 1776. French military and financial support proved decisive, and the war effectively ended with the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781, formalised by the 1783 Treaty of Paris. It produced both the Declaration of Independence and, a decade later, the United States Constitution.

Facts

Founded Year

1775 1

Founding Context

Grew out of the Thirteen Colonies' opposition to British taxation and trade measures imposed after the Seven Years' War without colonial representation in Parliament, with grievances crystallizing around acts such as the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts before fighting began in 1775. 1

Learn More

The American Revolution: Independence Fought and Won

Not every revolution rewrites who governs an existing state; some create a new state by separating from one. The American Revolution is the founding example of the second kind: a war fought to remove a colony from imperial rule entirely, rather than to reorganize the government that already sat over it.

Fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, after a decade of dispute between Britain and its thirteen North American colonies over taxation without representation and control of colonial affairs. The Continental Congress declared independence on 4 July 1776, but declaring it and winning it were different projects: the war continued for five more years, decided in practice by French military and financial support, until the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781 and the Treaty of Paris that formalised it in 1783. The Declaration of Independence supplied the revolution's founding argument; the United States Constitution, ratified a decade later, supplied the government the argument had promised.

The gap between those two documents is itself instructive: independence was won in name in 1776 and in fact by 1783, but the constitutional government the Declaration promised took until 1789 to actually convene, a sequence this atlas's own entry on the United States narrates rather than compresses into a single date. Other movements that later cited the Declaration's language of natural rights inherited that same distinction between declaring independence and building the government to hold it.

Cross-Tradition Connections