The American Revolution refers to the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which the Thirteen Colonies of North America overthrew the governance of the Parliament of Great Britain, and then rejected the British monarchy itself to become the sovereign United States of America. In this period the colonies first rejected the authority of the Parliament to govern them without representation, and formed self-governing independent states. These states through the Second Continental Congress then joined together against the British to defend that self-governance in the armed conflict from 1775 to 1783 known as the American Revolutionary War (also called American War of Independence).

This resulted in the individual states uniting to form one nation, breaking away from the British Empire in 1776 when the Congress issued the Declaration of Independence. While the states had already rejected the governance of Parliament, through the Declaration the new United States now rejected the legitimacy of the monarchy to demand allegiance. The war raged for seven years, with effective American victory in October 1781, followed by formal British abandonment of any claims to the United States with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

The American Revolution included a series of broad intellectual and social shifts that occurred in the early American society, such as the new republican ideals that took hold in the American population. In some states, sharp political debates broke out over the role of democracy in government, with a number of even the most liberal Founding Fathers fearing mob rule. Consequently, many issues of national governance were not settled until the Constitution of the United States (1787), including the United States Bill of Rights (1789) comprising its first 10 amendments, replaced the relatively weak Articles of Confederation (see Federalist Papers) that framed the first attempt at a national government.

In contrast to the loose confederation, the Constitution enshrined the natural rights idealized by republican revolutionaries, and guaranteed them under a relatively strong federated government, as well as allowing for dramatically expanded suffrage for national elections. The American shift to republicanism, and the gradually increasing democracy, caused an upheaval of the traditional social hierarchy, and created the ethic that has formed the core of American political values. The American Revolution was predicated by a number of ideas and events that, combined, led to a political and social separation of colonial possessions from the home nation and a coalescing of those former individual colonies into an independent nation.

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