We found 14 items that match your search
North Carolina Women Support a Non-importation Campaign
This declaration, reprinted in a London newspaper, provides an example of women's political activism during the revolutionary period. Over fifty "American ladies" from Edenton, North Carolina signed an agreement to stop buying and using tea, British [...]
Colonial Crowds Protest the Stamp Act
Colonists' protests against the Stamp Act took many forms, including hanging and burning effigies of British officials, and destroying the offices and houses of Stamp Act commissioners and royal officials. The following account of an attack on [...]
A Colonial Newspaper Protests The Stamp Act
In 1765 the British Parliament, in an attempt to increase revenue from the colonies to pay for troops and colonial administration, passed the Stamp Act. It required colonists to purchase stamps for many documents and printed items, such as land [...]
Capitol Design Competition: Guidelines
In 1792, with the new nation in need of a physical structures to house its newly-elected government, Thomas Jefferson decided that the design for the Capitol building should be chosen by an open competition. In a newspaper announcement of the [...]
Anti-Federalists Oppose Slavery Provisions in Constitution
Slavery was one of the most divisive issues in the debates over whether or not to ratify the Constitution. Although the constitution banned the importation of slaves beginning in 1808, it did not restrict the continued use and ownership of slaves, [...]
Slaveowners Fear the Haitian Revolution Has Arrived in Charleston
In the American South, slaves were typically dispersed among large populations of armed and vigilant whites. As a result, there were few large-scale, armed slave rebellions there. This was not the case in the West Indies, where plantation owners [...]
A Massachusetts Yeoman Opposes the "Aristocratickal" Constitution
The ratification of the United States Constitution was the subject of intense discussion, debate, and dissent during the period 1787-1789. This letter gives a sense of the opposition of many Anti-Federalists to what they perceived as the [...]
Massachusetts Anti-Federalists Take a Skeptical View of Federal Power
The ratification of the United States Constitution was the subject of intense discussion, debate, and dissent during the period 1787-1789. Democracy was yet a largely untried experiment, and those who pondered what form the new constitution should [...]
A Son of Liberty Lists His Objections to the New Constitution
After delegates to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia finished their work and adopted the U.S. Constitution in September, 1787, it remained for the states to ratify it. Vigorous debates took place in all of the thirteen states. This [...]
An Ex-Slave Petitions the Pennsylvania Legislature to Remain Free
Cato, a slave newly freed with his children, wrote this letter to Freeman's Journal, an African-American newspaper, when the Pennsylvania legislature was debating whether to repeal a recently passed law that gradually emancipated all slaves in the [...]