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 <[log in to unmask]> 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 ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html