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In the American colonies, settlers from Northern Ireland focused on mixed farming. Using this technique, they grew corn for human consumption and as feed for hogs and other livestock. Many improvement-minded farmers of all different backgrounds began using new agricultural practices to raise their output.
Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolk, and immigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. Virtually every American Patriot read his 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, [6] [7] which catalyzed the call for independence from Great Britain.
Education in the Thirteen Colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries varied considerably. Public school systems existed only in New England. In the 18th Century, the Puritan emphasis on literacy largely influenced the significantly higher literacy rate (70 percent of men) of the Thirteen Colonies, mainly New England, in comparison to Britain (40 percent of men) and France (29 percent of men).
The New England Primer was the first reading primer designed for the American colonies. It became the most successful educational textbook published in 17th-century colonial United States and it became the foundation of most schooling before the 1790s. In the 17th century, the schoolbooks in use had been Bibles brought over from England.
Between the late 1610s and the American Revolution, the British shipped an estimated 50,000 to 120,000 convicts to their American colonies. [20] [21] Meanwhile, the Council for New England sponsored several colonization projects, including a colony established by a group of English Puritans, known today as the Pilgrims. [22]
1740 – The Plantation Act is passed to encourage immigration to the colonies and regularize colonial naturalization procedures. Battle of Cartagena de Indias, where the colonists are called "Americans" for the first time. James Oglethorpe fails to take St. Augustine. South Carolina enacts the Negro Act of 1740.
Parliament had directly levied duties and excise taxes on the colonies, bypassing the colonial legislatures, and Americans began to insist on the principle of "no taxation without representation" with intense protests over the Stamp Act of 1765. [57]
The American Revolution (1765–1783) was an ideological and political movement in the Thirteen Colonies which peaked when colonists initiated the ultimately successful war for independence (the American Revolutionary War) against the Kingdom of Great Britain.