The American Founding

With Britain victorious in the French and Indian War, Americans began to move west and claim the land they felt was now theirs, only to encounter royal regulations and further war with Native Americans amid a postwar economic depression.

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In 1759 and 1760, the British invaded Quebec, conquering the region within two years and bringing the French and Indian War, which had engaged all residents of North America for six years, to its conclusion.

After several years of continued defeat at the hands of the French, the British embarked on a bold strategy in 1758 by attempting to invade Quebec from both the east and the west simultaneously.

To counter a planned British invasion of New France, French commander Louis-Joseph de Montcalm planned an elaborate siege of British lakefront installations in Northern New York, driving the British from the region and pressing the French advantage in the war.

The British sent forces to defend their North American territories against the French in 1755, and were met with a French army ready to wage war on the frontier, and which quickly advanced to stake a claim to the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region.

Ordered to assert British claim to the Ohio Valley, young Virginia militia major George Washington ventured into the Pennsylvania backcountry in 1754 and inadvertently started the French and Indian War.

On the eve of the French and Indian War, New France spanned territories from Quebec and Ontario, to the modern American Midwest, to Louisiana, and was a powerful commercial empire poised to take on the British for control of the Ohio Valley.

In the mid-18th Century, preachers from England and America alike traveled the Eastern Seaboard of what is now the United States proclaiming a message of salvation and giving rise to the tradition of American evangelicalism through revival meetings.

In the 1730s and 1740s, concurrent events in New York, South Carolina, and Central and South America united people from New Hampshire to Georgia in defense of liberty and territory while enslaved people continued to yearn for freedom.

Young Member of Parliament James Oglethorpe, inspired by his vision of a home for England's poor and indebted, led an expedition to North America to found Georgia, which began as a master-planned community of subsistence farmers, but was transformed into a plantation economy by the time of its takeover by the Crown in the 1750s.