Subject:  1763: The Year that Transformed North America
Date: Friday 9 February 2013. 2:40 pm.
To: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history 
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From: Jim Glanville <[log in to unmask]>

Fellow List Members:

In Colin Calloway's "The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation 
of North America" (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006) at 
the end of his introduction at page 18 comes the sentence "Redrawing the 
political map of North America in 1763 transformed the continent in ways 
the peacemakers and mapmakers could barely have imagined."

The Treaty of Paris, concluded on 10 February 1763, confirmed the 
British expulsion of the French from almost all of North America and 
ratified the outcome of the French and Indian War. In so doing, it set 
in motion events that would lead to the great American land acquisition 
after the War of Independence, ratified at a second Treaty of Paris in 
1783. Twenty years later the American Empire expanded yet again with the 
Louisiana Purchase (of land that French in the interim had gained from 
the Spanish) spearheaded by the expanionist-minded Virginian Thomas 
Jefferson.

So this coming Sunday, we Virginians might pause to consider the 250th 
anniversary of a seminal event in our history.

Jim Glanville
Blacksburg-in-former-Fincastle-County


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