The Great Awakening brought people together (though it did also divide them), but its influence on what the United States would later become is great. First of all, it forced people to have their own religious experience and it decreased the heavy hands of the clergy; new denominations also would come to be because of the Great Awakening as a direct result of the importance that was put on personal faith and views on salvation. The Great Awakening also brought the American colonies together and though there was also some division, there was more unification than ever before in the colonies. The Great Awakening is so significant in the shaping of American and what it would later become because it gave individuals the freedom to find their own peace with life and God as it pertained to their earthly life -- and also to their later salvation. The United States of America is a country that holds up the rights of individuals to have their own individual experience and the foundation for that freedom started with the Great Awakening in the colonies.

The Boston Tea Party is remembered often these days with the attention the Tea Party has gotten lately. The original Tea Party occurred on December 16 of 1773 when colonists, dressed as Indians, dumped 342 chests containing 90,000 pounds of tea into Boston harbor (Geiter & Spark 2003, 197). This, of course, was a reaction to the implementation of North's Tea Act passed earlier in the year. The Act was created with the idea of helping the nearly bankrupt East India Company fix its financial problem by allowing it to ship tea directly to certain merchants in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston (2003, 197). Lord North refused to remove the duty on tea, which would have lowered the price of teas significantly in the colonies. "The company could offer it for sale at prices which would undercut the merchants who had not been earmarked by it to distribute the tea, who included legitimate traders as well as smugglers" (2003, 197). The organized protests against the Tea Act were another example of the British government's determination...

There were many great events that paved the way to revolution. The tax on tea certainly angered many colonist, but before dumping the 90,000 pounds of tea in Boston Harbor, there were many civil attempts and meetings held to discuss the problem (Simmons 1981, 338). The colonists knew that Parliament was using the colonist's tax money to repay British war debts and they were not going to tolerate such unfair treatment. The raid of the three ships containing the tea was a harmless act of rebellion as the masked men did not touch or harm anything but the tea. The point is that they wanted to send a message as opposed to thoughtlessly destroying property. Of course, this then was followed by the Intolerable Acts -- Great Britain's punishment for the event, but what is illustrated is the important factor: the colonists were becoming independent and they were not going to tolerate any kind of unfair treatment from England anymore.
The neglect of the Spaniards and the French to colonize the mid-Atlantic seaboard, the Great Awakening, and the Boston Tea Party are three distinct facts of the formation of the United States and what it has come to exemplify today. There were so many different events that occurred to make this country, however, there is no denying that the first settlers in Jamestown were the early Americans who paved the way for religious freedom and eventually their influences would help America become independent.