Short answers, pulled from the story.
The American Revolution was a political movement in the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain that ran from 1765 to 1789. It began as a rebellion over the rights of Englishmen and evolved into a revolution that produced the sovereign United States.
The colonists rebelled because Parliament imposed taxes such as the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and the Townshend Acts without giving them representation, captured in the slogan "No taxation without representation." Discontent grew after the French and Indian War, when Britain sought greater control over colonial affairs and garrisoned troops in North America.
On the 16th of December 1773, men led by Samuel Adams and dressed to evoke Indigenous people boarded British East India Company ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 10,000 pounds worth of taxed tea into the water. It was a protest against the Tea Act, and Parliament responded with the punitive Intolerable Acts.
The Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July 1776 at the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia. It was drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson and famously proclaimed that "all men are created equal."
The war turned decisively at the Siege of Yorktown in October 1781, when the British army under Cornwallis surrendered to combined French and Continental forces commanded by George Washington. Britain signed the Treaty of Paris on the 3rd of September 1783, recognizing American sovereignty and ceding territory east of the Mississippi River.
France formally entered the war after the American victory at the Battles of Saratoga in October 1777, and Benjamin Franklin negotiated a permanent military alliance signed on the 6th of February 1778. France supplied money, gunpowder, and munitions, and its fleet's victory at the Battle of the Chesapeake left Cornwallis trapped at Yorktown.
The American Revolution drew on the American Enlightenment, including natural law, natural rights, consent of the governed, and equality under the law. John Locke, often called "the philosopher of the American Revolution," argued in his Two Treatises of Government that all humans were created equally free and governments needed the consent of the governed.