Ben Carson, M.D. - America the Beautiful - 5

 It wasn't long, however, before the taxation monster raised its ugly head again, for in 1767 the Townshend Act was passed. This famously included taxes on tea, which the colonist had grown increasingly very fond of. Through trickery and parliamentary procedures, the Townshend Act allowed the British's almost bankrupt East India Company to gain a virtual monopoly on tea sales, exacerbating tensions between the colonists and England....

 In December of 1773, some of the colonists were so outraged with the taxes on tea that they disguised themselves as  Native Americans, boarded British ships in Boston Harbor, and destroyed the tea by tossing it all into the harbor. This, of course, was the famous Boston Tea Party. ... More taxes and regulations followed, many of which were quite punitive and became known as the "Intolerable Acts."...

 The tensions between Great Britain and America continued to build and numerous skirmishes, some of which are well documented by historians, broke out. One of the most famous fights took place on June 17, 1775, at Breed' Hill, where approximately 2,500 British troops attacked an American installation defended by only 1,400 troops. It was an intense battle and the British lost approximately 40 percent of their troops, while the Americans lost less than a third of theirs. Even though the British eventually won, it was a Pyrrhic victory....

 Waking Up To Some "Common Sense":

An unlikely figure emerged in the form of Thomas Paine.... And editor of a Philadelphia magazine, Paine published a fifty-page political pamphlet, Common Sense, in January of 1776, which began with one of the most memorable lines in American history: "These are the times that try men's souls."  [Like the times we live in today.]

 The pamphlet resonated so well with the colonists' feelings about independence that over 120,000 copies of the pamphlet were sold within the first three months, and half a million copies were sold in the first year.... Spurred on by the message of Common Sense, enthusiasm for independence grew dramatically, even among former Loyalists. Paine donated the profits from the sale of Common Sense to George Washington's army saying, ....

 George H. Kubeck, In pursuit of the truth, cinops be gone, Sunday, June 9, 2013