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Thank you for listening and my sincere appreciation to our brothers and sisters at Hillsdale College.

Thank you for listening and my sincere appreciation to our brothers and sisters at Hillsdale College.

You're listening to the best of the Mark Levin Show. Happy Independence Day.

It's an important day. I want to take a little bit of time talking about this with you, giving you a little bit of information that I doubt many of you have ever been exposed to.

Let's start this way. 1776, the 4th of July didn't just happen all of a sudden.

It wasn't an impetuous act as they point out in history.com. 13 colonies banding together, first 12, and the 13th Rhode Island.

To fight in one award of independence against the craft was a culmination. We series of events which had begun more than a decade earlier.

Escalations began shortly after the end of the French and Indian War, known elsewhere as the 7 years war in 1763.

Here are a few of the main events that took place, although not all of them. The Stamp Act of 1765.

To recoup some of the massive debt left over from the war with France, the British Parliament passed laws such as the Stamp Act, which for the first time taxed a wide range of transactions and the colonies.

Up until then, each colony had its own government which decided which taxes they would have and collected them.

It says William Randall, Professor Meritus history, Chaplin College, author numerous works on the early history.

They felt that they spent a lot of blood and treasure to protect the colonists from the Indians, and they should pay their fair share that was the British few.

The colonists didn't see it that way. They resented not only having to buy goods from the British but pay tax on them as well.

The tax never got collected because there were riots all over the place Randall says. Ultimately, Benjamin Franklin convinced the British to rescind it, but not only made things worse.

They made the Americans think they could push back against other acts of the crown.

Some time later, two years later in fact the Townsend Acts.

Parliament again tried to assert its authority by passing legislation to tax goods that the Americans imported from Great Britain.

The crown established a board of customs, commissioners, to stop smuggling and corruption among local officials in the colonies,

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