President of the United States States which is not decided by popular vote. Nine vice presidents became president by virtue of a president's intra-term death or resignation. Donald Trump of New York is the 45th and current president. He assumed office on January 20, 2017. During the American Revolution in 1776, the Thirteen Colonies, acting through the Second Continental Congress, declared political independence from Great Britain. The new states were independent of each other as nation states and recognized the necessity of closely coordinating their efforts against the British. Congress desired to avoid anything that remotely resembled a monarchy and negotiated the Articles of Confederation
United States Declaration of Independence Parliament was the legislature of Great Britain only, and that the colonies, which had their own legislatures, were connected to the rest of the empire only through their allegiance to the Crown. The issue of Parliament's authority in the colonies became a crisis after Parliament passed the Coercive Acts (known as the Intolerable Acts in the colonies) in 1774 to punish the colonists for the Gaspee Affair of 1772 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Many colonists saw the Coercive Acts as a violation of the British Constitution and thus a threat to the liberties of all of British