Course of History: Boston Tea Party
Throughout the course of history, there was not just one independent act that led America to fight for her independence. It was multiple series that eventually led the colonist to fight against Britain. The colonies decided to confront and rebel against British rule when Britain decided to tax the people without consent from the British Parliament.
The topic of this paper will cover the causes and the effects the Boston Tea Party had on the colonies. Everyone knows the story of how Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean in search of a new route to India but instead landed in the Americas. Technically he landed in the Bahamas, not on actual America soil. So it was not really Christopher Columbus who founded America, but Amerigo Vespucci. When Columbus landed in the Bahamas, he thought he found a route to India, so he assumed America was India. When Columbus came back from his voyage announcing a new route to India, Vespucci began to question the veracity of Columbus’s claims, (Lauer and Schlager).
Vespucci first problem is that the length of Columbus’ voyage was less than a month. He believed that it was too short a period of time to travel such a great distance. Vespucci’s second problem was based upon the fact that Columbus had sailed directly west from Spain. Vespucci set out to gather his own empirical data and signed on as an expert astronomer for the next expedition funded by the Spanish monarchy. The ships sailed westward and reached the coast of what is now Brazil, (Lauer and Schlager). Along with mapping the entire coastline, he also charted territory, which consists of present-day Colombia, Uruguay, and Argentina. He then explored parts of the Amazon, the Para, and the La Plata rivers. The information from these detailed expeditions convinced European scholars that Columbus had not reached India but had found a vast uncharted territory, (Lauer and Schlager). Vespucci’s maps would eventually be used for further exploration of the Western Hemisphere, setting the stage for Europe’s colonization of the New World. Amerigo Vespucci was held in such high esteem that in 1507 the German cartographer Martin Waldseemí?ller (1470-1521) named this new region “”America”” to honor Vespucci’s achievements as a geographer, (Lauer and Schlager).
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the eastern coast of North America had been forever transformed. The fields and forests, rivers and streams where generations of Indian tribes had farmed, fished, and hunted had become a world owned and ruled by white men, a borderland of the British Empire. A combination of epidemic disease and warfare during the seventeenth century had shattered Native American settlements along the Atlantic coast. Weakened and demoralized, the remnants of these coastal tribes ceded their ancestral territories, retreated inland or resigned themselves to resettlement in communities regulated by colonial authorities, (Cayton). Fast forward to 1607, Britain has finally colonized America. At the beginning of early colonization, between 1607-1763, Britain was more relaxed with governing the Americas because Britain was preoccupied with fighting the French and Indian. She did not have enough manpower to see if the colonies were misbehaving. Eventually, Britain won the French and Indian war and became stricter on the colonies.
