American Revolution (1775–1783) compete with Hindus and other religious and ethnic groups for positions of power in British-ruled India In order to prepare Indian Muslims to accept Western education, Khan first created the Scientific Society of Aligarh in 1864, which translated Western scientific, historical, and philosophical works into Indian languages Khan visited England in 1870, and his inspiration for Aligarh College was the universities at Oxford and Cambridge He founded what was then known as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in 1875; it offered a Western curriculum similar to that of an English public (private) school, and the first principal, Theodore Beck, was British Aligarh College became the leading center for the education of modern Muslim leadership in India and helped to create an educated Muslim elite that held many political positions and were catalysts for change within the British system The college was particularly important in providing practical experience in politics through campus debating societies and student elections and in encouraging the formation of a collective and unified identity by the Indian Muslim community Aligarh College became a full-fledged university in 1920 and was renamed Aligarh Muslim University The university is located in the city of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, in northern India It currently has about 30,000 students representing many religious and ethnic backgrounds and offers instruction in 80 fields of study, including law, medicine, and engineering Further reading: Khan, Abdul Rashid The All India Muslim Educational Conference: Its Contribution to the Cultural Development of Indian Muslims, 1886–1947 New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; Moin, Mumtaz The Aligarh Movement: Origin and Early History Karachi, Pakistan: Salman Academy, 1976; Muhammed, Shan Successors of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan: Their Role in the Growth of Muslim Political Consciousness in India Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1981; Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza “Religious Modernism in the Arab World, India and Iran: The Perils and Prospects of a Discourse.” Muslim World 83, no (1993) Sarah Boslaugh American Revolution (1775–1783) The war that created and established the independence of the United States of America officially broke out between Britain and 13 of its North American 23 colonies at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and ended when the Treaty of Paris was signed However, historians now maintain that the revolution really began during, or at least in the wake of, the Seven Years’ War, also called the French and Indian War, long before the “shot heard round the world” of April 19, 1775 Serious political and social issues between Britain and its colonies emerged during this earlier conflict Many colonial American men were not prepared to endure the harsh discipline of the British army or navy during the war and had an extraordinarily narrow and even legalistic perspective on their military obligations For their part, aristocratic British military officers were unfamiliar with colonial America’s more boisterous political culture and expected colonial militiamen to obey orders without a second thought These problems of deference and duty grew worse in the 1760s as the British attempted to deal with issues of imperial governance over the huge territory they had won from France The British struggled to reconcile the goals of its colonial subjects, who hungered for Indian lands between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains, with the need to foster peace, stability, and the continuation of the fur trade among the Indian tribes in the same region As the French and Indian Wars were ending in 1763, an Indian coalition assembled by Ottawa chief Pontiac besieged British garrisons in and around the Great Lakes, killing or capturing 2,000 colonials and resulting in Britain’s Proclamation Line This poorly conceived and expensive attempt to separate Indian and colonial claims proved hugely unpopular with American expansionists The greatest problem that Britain faced, however, was the doubling of its national debt resulting from the Seven Years’ War, as this conflict was known in Europe Parliament sought to levy taxes on the colonies in order to manage the debt without raising levies on already heavily taxed British subjects The colonists, mistrustful of parliamentary motives and quite used to being subsidized by the Crown, reacted with alarm to new taxes on items such as sugar, paper, and, later, tea Each new tax was followed by petitions, protests, and even riots, especially in Boston, where leaders like Samuel Adams rallied opposition against parliamentary power over the colonies, and in Virginia, where Burgess Patrick Henry shocked fellow legislators by seeming to foment rebellion against King George III Each time resistance to a tax ensued, Parliament repealed it but introduced a new one, spawning more resistance that was often met by British shows of