title: Anthony Eden

text: Michael Foot pushed for a special inquiry along the lines of the Parliamentary Inquiry into the Attack on the Dardanelles in the First World War, although Harold Wilson (Labour Prime Minister 1964–70 and 1974–76) regarded the matter as a can of worms best left unopened. This talk ceased after the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, after which Eden received a lot of fanmail telling him that he had been right, and his reputation, not least in Israel and the United States, soared. In 1986 Eden's official biographer Robert Rhodes James re-evaluated sympathetically Eden's stance over Suez and in 1990, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, James asked: "Who can now claim that Eden was wrong?". Such arguments turn mostly on whether, as a matter of policy, the Suez operation was fundamentally flawed or whether, as such "revisionists" thought, the lack of American support conveyed the impression that the West was divided and weak. Anthony Nutting, who resigned as a Foreign Office Minister over Suez, expressed the former view in 1967, the year of the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War, when he wrote that "we had sown the wind of bitterness and we were to reap the whirlwind of revenge and rebellion". Conversely, Jonathan Pearson argues in "Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis: Reluctant Gamble" (2002) that Eden was more reluctant and less bellicose than most historians have judged. D. R. Thorpe, another of Eden's biographers, writes that Suez was "a truly tragic end to his premiership, and one that came to assume a disproportionate importance in any assessment of his careers"; he suggests that had the Suez venture succeeded, "there would almost certainly have been no Middle East war in 1967, and probably no Yom Kippur War in 1973 also".


title: Anthony Eden

text: Guy Millard, one of Eden's Private Secretaries, who thirty years later, in a radio interview, spoke publicly for the first time on the crisis, made an insider's judgement about Eden: "It was his mistake of course and a tragic and disastrous mistake for him. I think he overestimated the importance of Nasser, Egypt, the Canal, even of the Middle East." While British actions in 1956 have usually been described as "imperialistic", the main motivation was economic. Eden was a liberal supporter of nationalist ambitions, including over Sudanese independence, and his 1954 Suez Canal Base Agreement, which withdrew British troops from Suez in return for certain guarantees, was negotiated with the Conservative Party against Churchill's wishes.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Rothwell believes that Eden should have cancelled the Suez Invasion plans in mid-October, when the Anglo-French negotiations at the United Nations were making some headway, and that in 1956 the Arab countries threw away a chance to make peace with Israel on her existing borders.


title: Anthony Eden

text: British Government cabinet papers from September 1956, during Eden's term as prime minister, have shown that French Prime Minister Guy Mollet approached the British Government suggesting the idea of an economic and political union between France and Great Britain. This was a similar offer, in reverse, to that made by Churchill (drawing on a plan devised by Leo Amery) in June 1940.


title: Anthony Eden

text: The offer by Guy Mollet was referred to by Sir John Colville, Churchill's former private secretary, in his collected diaries, "The Fringes of Power" (1985), his having gleaned the information in 1957 from Air Chief Marshal Sir William Dickson during an air flight (and, according to Colville, after several whiskies and soda). Mollet's request for Union with Britain was rejected by Eden, but the additional possibility of France joining the Commonwealth of Nations was considered, although similarly rejected. Colville noted, in respect of Suez, that Eden and his Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd "felt still more beholden to the French on account of this offer".


title: Anthony Eden

text: Eden also resigned from the House of Commons when he stood down as prime minister. Eden kept in touch with Lord Salisbury, agreeing with him that Macmillan had been the better choice as prime minister, but sympathising with his resignation over Macmillan's Cyprus policy. Despite a series of letters in which Macmillan almost begged him for a personal endorsement prior to the 1959 election, Eden only issued a declaration of support for the Conservative Government. Eden retained much of his personal popularity in Britain and contemplated returning to Parliament. Several Conservative MPs were reportedly willing to give up their seats for him, although the party hierarchy was less keen. He finally gave up such hopes in late 1960 after an exhausting speaking tour of Yorkshire. Macmillan initially offered to recommend him for a viscountcy, which Eden assumed to be a calculated insult, and he was granted an earldom (which was then the traditional rank for a former prime minister) after reminding Macmillan that he had already been offered one by the Queen. He entered the House of Lords as the Earl of Avon in 1961.


title: Anthony Eden

text: In retirement, Lord Avon, as he became, lived in 'Rose Bower' by the banks of the River Ebble in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire. Starting in 1961, he bred a herd of 60 Herefordshire cattle (one of whom was called "Churchill") until a further decline in his health forced him to sell them in 1975. In 1968, he bought Alvediston Manor, where he lived until his death in 1977.


title: Anthony Eden

text: In July 1962, Lord Avon made front-page news by commenting that "Mr Selwyn Lloyd has been horribly treated" when the latter was dismissed as Chancellor in the reshuffle known as the "Night of the Long Knives". In August 1962, at a dinner party, he had a "slanging match" with Nigel Birch, who as Secretary of State for Air had not wholeheartedly supported the Suez Invasion. In 1963, Lord Avon initially favoured Hailsham for the Conservative leadership but then supported Douglas-Home as a compromise candidate.


title: Anthony Eden

text: From 1945 to 1973, Lord Avon was Chancellor of the University of Birmingham. In a television interview in 1966, he called on the United States to halt its bombing of North Vietnam to concentrate on developing a peace plan "that might conceivably be acceptable to Hanoi." The bombing of North Vietnam, he argued, would never settle the conflict in South Vietnam. "On the contrary," he declared, "bombing creates a sort of David and Goliath complex in any country that has to suffer—as we had to, and as I suspect the Germans had to, in the last war." Lord Avon sat for extensive interviews for the famed multi-part Thames Television production, "The World at War", which was first broadcast in 1973. He also featured frequently in Marcel Ophüls' 1969 documentary "Le chagrin et la pitié", discussing the occupation of France in a wider geopolitical context. He spoke impeccable, if accented, French.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Avon's occasional articles and his early 1970s television appearance were an exception to an almost total retirement. He seldom appeared in public, unlike other former prime ministers, e.g. James Callaghan who commented frequently on current affairs. He was even accidentally omitted from a list of Conservative prime ministers by Margaret Thatcher when she became Conservative leader in 1975, although she later went out of her way to establish relations with Lord Avon, and later, his widow. In retirement, he was highly critical of regimes such as Sukarno's Indonesia which confiscated assets belonging to their former colonial rulers, and appears to have reverted somewhat to the right-wing views which he had espoused in the 1920s.


title: Anthony Eden

text: In retirement, Lord Avon corresponded with Selwyn Lloyd, co-ordinating the release of information and with which writers they would agree to speak and when. Rumours that Britain had colluded with France and Israel appeared, albeit in garbled form, as early as 1957. By the 1970s they had agreed that Lloyd would only tell his version of the story after Avon's death (in the event, Lloyd would outlive Lord Avon by a year, struggling with terminal illness to complete his own memoirs).


title: Anthony Eden

text: In retirement, Lord Avon was particularly bitter that Eisenhower had initially indicated British and French troops should be allowed to remain around Port Said, only for the US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr, to press for an immediate withdrawal at the UN, thereby rendering the operation a complete failure. Avon felt the Eisenhower administration's unexpected opposition was hypocritical in light of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état and the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état.


title: Anthony Eden

text: The Earl of Avon published three volumes of political memoirs, in which he denied that there had been any collusion with France and Israel. Like Churchill, Lord Avon relied heavily on the ghost-writing of young researchers, whose drafts he would sometimes toss angrily into the flowerbeds outside his study. One of them was the young David Dilks.


title: Anthony Eden

text: In his view, American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whom he particularly disliked, was responsible for the ill fate of the Suez adventure. In an October press conference, barely three weeks before the fighting began, Dulles had coupled the Suez Canal issue with colonialism, and his statement infuriated Eden and much of the UK as well. "The dispute over Nasser's seizure of the canal," wrote Eden, "had, of course, nothing to do with colonialism, but was concerned with international rights." He added that "if the United States had to defend her treaty rights in the Panama Canal, she would not regard such action as colonialism." His lack of candour further diminished his standing, and a principal concern in his later years was trying to rebuild his reputation that was severely damaged by Suez, sometimes taking legal action to protect his viewpoint.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Lord Avon faulted the United States for forcing him to withdraw, but he took credit for United Nations action in patrolling the Israeli-Egyptian borders. Eden said of the invasion, "Peace at any price has never averted war. We must not repeat the mistakes of the pre-war years, by behaving as though the enemies of peace and order are armed with only good intentions." Recalling the incident in a 1967 interview, Lord Avon declared, "I am still unrepentant about Suez. People never look at what would have happened if we had done nothing. There is a parallel with the 1930s. If you allow people to break agreements with impunity, the appetite grows to feed on such things. I don't see what other we ought to have done. One cannot dodge. It is hard to act rather than dodge." In his 1967 interview (which he stipulated would not be used until after his death), Avon acknowledged secret dealings with the French and "intimations" of the Israeli attack. He insisted, however, that "the joint enterprise and the preparations for it were justified in the light of the wrongs it [the Anglo-French invasion] was designed to prevent." "I have no apologies to offer," Eden declared.


title: Anthony Eden

text: At the time of his retirement, Eden had been short of money, although he was paid a £100,000 advance for his memoirs by "The Times", with any profit over this amount to be split between himself and the newspaper. By 1970, they had brought him £185,000 (around £3,000,000 at 2014 prices), leaving him a wealthy man for the first time in his life. Towards the end of his life, he published a personal memoir of his early life, "Another World" (1976).


title: Anthony Eden

text: On 5 November 1923, shortly before his election to Parliament, he married Beatrice Beckett, who was then eighteen. They had three sons: Simon Gascoigne (1924–1945), Robert, who died fifteen minutes after being born in October 1928, and Nicholas (1930–1985).


title: Anthony Eden

text: The marriage was not a success, with both parties apparently conducting affairs. By the mid-1930s his diaries seldom mention Beatrice. The marriage finally broke up under the strain of the loss of their son Simon, who was killed in action with the RAF in Burma in 1945. His plane was reported "missing in action" on 23 June and found on 16 July; Eden did not want the news to be public until after the election result on 26 July, to avoid claims of "making political capital" from it.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Between 1946 and 1950, whilst separated from his wife, Eden conducted an open affair with Dorothy, Countess Beatty, the wife of David, Earl Beatty.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Eden was the great-great-grandnephew of author Emily Eden and in 1947, wrote an introduction to her novel "The Semi-Attached Couple" (1860).


title: Anthony Eden

text: In 1950, Eden and Beatrice were finally divorced, and in 1952, he married Churchill's niece Clarissa Spencer-Churchill (1920–2021), a nominal Roman Catholic who was fiercely criticised by Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh for marrying a divorced man.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Eden had a stomach ulcer, exacerbated by overwork, as early as the 1920s. He also had gallstones, requiring surgery to remove the gallbladder (cholecystectomy). The physician consulted at the time was the Royal Physician, Sir Horace Evans. Three surgeons were recommended and Eden chose the one that had previously performed his appendectomy, John Basil Hume, surgeon from St Bartholomew's Hospital. During the open cholecystectomy on 12 April 1953, in London, United Kingdom, it is thought that the common bile duct was damaged, leaving Eden susceptible to recurrent infections, biliary obstruction, and liver failure.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Eden suffered from cholangitis, an abdominal infection which became so agonising that he was admitted to hospital in 1956 with a temperature reaching . He was re-operated in London in an attempt to correct the injury with placement of a surgical drain. He suffered further with symptoms of biliary obstruction and required further revisional surgery on three more occasions in Boston, Massachusetts to treat recurrent stricturing of the right hepatic duct.


title: Anthony Eden

text: He was also prescribed Benzedrine, the wonder drug of the 1950s. Regarded then as a harmless stimulant, it belongs to the family of drugs called amphetamines, and at that time they were prescribed and used in a very casual way. Among the side effects of Benzedrine are insomnia, restlessness, and mood swings, all of which Eden suffered during the Suez Crisis; indeed, earlier in his premiership he complained of being kept awake at night by the sound of motor scooters, being unable to sleep more than 5 hours per night or sometimes waking up at 3 am. Eden's drug regimen is now commonly agreed to have been a part of the reason for his bad judgment while prime minister. The Thorpe biography, however, denied Eden's abuse of Benzedrine, stating that the allegations were "untrue, as is made clear by Eden's medical records at Birmingham University, not yet [at the time] available for research".


title: Anthony Eden

text: The resignation document written by Eden for release to the Cabinet on 9 January 1957 admitted his dependence on stimulants while denying that they had affected his judgement during the Suez crisis in the autumn of 1956. "... I have been obliged to increase the drugs [taken after the "bad abdominal operations"] considerably and also increase the stimulants necessary to counteract the drugs. This has finally had an adverse effect on my precarious inside," he wrote. However, in his book "The Suez Affair" (1966), historian Hugh Thomas, quoted by David Owen, claimed that Eden had revealed to a colleague that he was "practically living on Benzedrine" at the time.


title: Anthony Eden

text: In all, at different points, but mostly simultaneously, he took a combination of sedatives, opioid painkillers and corresponding stimulants to counteract their depressant effects; these included Promazine (a strongly sedative antipsychotic Eden used to induce sleep and counteract the stimulants he took), Dextroamphetamine, Sodium Amytal (a barbiturate sedative), Secobarbital (a barbiturate sedative), Vitamin B12 and Pethidine (a unique opioid painkiller thought at the time to have the property of relaxing the bile ducts which is now known to be inaccurate).


title: Anthony Eden

text: In December 1976, Lord Avon, as Eden now was, felt well enough to travel with his wife to the United States to spend Christmas and New Year with Averell and Pamela Harriman; however, after reaching the States, his health rapidly deteriorated. Prime Minister James Callaghan arranged for an RAF plane that was already in America to divert to Miami, to fly Avon home.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Lord Avon died from metastatic carcinoma of the prostate to bones and mediastinal nodes at his home, Alvediston Manor in Wiltshire, on 14 January 1977, aged 79. He was survived by Clarissa. His will was proven on St. Patrick's Day, 17 March, with his estate amounting to £92,900 (equivalent to £ in ).


title: Anthony Eden

text: He was buried in St Mary's churchyard at Alvediston, Wiltshire, just three miles upstream from 'Rose Bower', at the source of the River Ebble. Lord Avon's papers are housed at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.


title: Anthony Eden

text: At his death, Avon was the last surviving member of Churchill's War Cabinet. Avon's surviving son, Nicholas Eden, 2nd Earl of Avon (1930–1985), known as Viscount Eden from 1961 to 1977, was also a politician and a minister in the Thatcher government until his death from AIDS at the age of 54.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Eden, who was well-mannered, well-groomed, and good-looking, always made a particularly cultured appearance and on occasions he emerged as something of a James Bond figure; he had an interest in sports cars and car racing. This image gave him huge popular support throughout his political life, but some contemporaries felt he was merely a superficial person lacking any deeper convictions.


title: Anthony Eden

text: That view was enforced by his very pragmatic approach to politics. Sir Oswald Mosley, for example, said he never understood why Eden was so strongly pushed by the Tory party, as he felt that Eden's abilities were very much inferior to those of Harold Macmillan and Oliver Stanley. In 1947, Dick Crossman called Eden "that peculiarly British type, the idealist without conviction".


title: Anthony Eden

text: US Secretary of State Dean Acheson regarded Eden as a quite old-fashioned amateur in politics typical of the British Establishment. In contrast, Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev commented that until his Suez adventure Eden had been "in the top world class".


title: Anthony Eden

text: Eden was heavily influenced by Stanley Baldwin when he first entered Parliament. After earlier combative beginnings, he cultivated a low-key speaking style that relied heavily on rational argument and consensus-building, rather than rhetoric and party point-scoring, which was often highly effective in the House of Commons. However, he was not always an effective public speaker, and his parliamentary performances sometimes disappointed many of his followers, such as after his resignation from Neville Chamberlain's government. Winston Churchill once even commented on one of Eden's speeches that the latter had used every cliché except "God is love". That was deliberate since Eden often struck out original phrases from speech drafts and replaced them with clichés.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Eden's inability to express himself clearly is often attributed to shyness and lack of self-confidence. Eden is known to have been much more direct in meeting with his secretaries and advisers than in cabinet meetings and public speeches and sometimes tended to become enraged and behave "like a child", only to regain his temper within a few minutes. Many who worked for him remarked that he was "two men": one charming, erudite, and hard-working and the other petty and prone to temper tantrums during which he would insult his subordinates.


title: Anthony Eden

text: As prime minister, Eden was notorious for telephoning ministers and newspaper editors from 6 a.m. onward. Rothwell wrote that even before Suez, the telephone had become "a drug": "During the Suez Crisis Eden's telephone mania exceeded all bounds".


title: Anthony Eden

text: Eden was notoriously "unclubbable" and offended Churchill by declining to join The Other Club. He also declined honorary membership in the Athenaeum. However, he maintained friendly relations with Opposition MPs; for example, George Thomas received a kind two-page letter from Eden on learning that his stepfather had died. Eden was a Trustee of the National Gallery (in succession to MacDonald) between 1935 and 1949. He also had a deep knowledge of Persian poetry and of Shakespeare and would bond with anybody who could display similar knowledge.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Rothwell wrote that although Eden was capable of acting with ruthlessness, for instance over the repatriation of the Cossacks in 1945, his main concern was to avoid being seen as "an appeaser", such as over the Soviet reluctance to accept a democratic Poland in October 1944. Like many people, Eden convinced himself that his past actions were more consistent than they had in fact been.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Recent biographies put more emphasis on Eden's achievements in foreign policy and perceive him to have held deep convictions regarding world peace and security as well as a strong social conscience. Rhodes James applied to Eden Churchill's famous verdict on Lord Curzon (in "Great Contemporaries"): "The morning had been golden; the noontime was bronze; and the evening lead. But all was solid, and each was polished until it shone after its fashion".


title: Anthony Eden

text: Both Eden Court, Leamington Spa, built in 1960, and Sir Anthony Eden Way, Warwick, built in the 2000s, are named in his honour.


title: Anthony Eden

text: Personal and political papers of Anthony Eden and papers of the Eden family can be found at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham in the Avon Papers collection. A collection of letters and other papers relating to Anthony Eden can also be found at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.


title: Poisson distribution

text: In probability theory and statistics, the Poisson distribution is a discrete probability distribution that expresses the probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time or space if these events occur with a known constant mean rate and independently of the time since the last event. It is named after French mathematician Siméon Denis Poisson (; ). The Poisson distribution can also be used for the number of events in other specified interval types such as distance, area, or volume.


title: Poisson distribution

text: For instance, a call center receives an average of 180 calls per hour, 24 hours a day. The calls are independent; receiving one does not change the probability of when the next one will arrive. The number of calls received during any minute has a Poisson probability distribution with mean 3: the most likely numbers are 2 and 3 but 1 and 4 are also likely and there is a small probability of it being as low as zero and a very small probability it could be 10.


title: Poisson distribution

text: Another example is the number of decay events that occur from a radioactive source during a defined observation period.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The distribution was first introduced by Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840) and published together with his probability theory in his work "Recherches sur la probabilité des jugements en matière criminelle et en matière civile" (1837). The work theorized about the number of wrongful convictions in a given country by focusing on certain random variables that count, among other things, the number of discrete occurrences (sometimes called "events" or "arrivals") that take place during a time-interval of given length. The result had already been given in 1711 by Abraham de Moivre in "De Mensura Sortis seu; de Probabilitate Eventuum in Ludis a Casu Fortuito Pendentibus" . This makes it an example of Stigler's law and it has prompted some authors to argue that the Poisson distribution should bear the name of de Moivre.


title: Poisson distribution

text: In 1860, Simon Newcomb fitted the Poisson distribution to the number of stars found in a unit of space.


title: Poisson distribution

text: A further practical application of this distribution was made by Ladislaus Bortkiewicz in 1898 when he was given the task of investigating the number of soldiers in the Prussian army killed accidentally by horse kicks; this experiment introduced the Poisson distribution to the field of reliability engineering.


title: Poisson distribution

text: A discrete random variable is said to have a Poisson distribution, with parameter formula_21 if it has a probability mass function given by:


title: Poisson distribution

text: The Poisson distribution can be applied to systems with a large number of possible events, each of which is rare. The number of such events that occur during a fixed time interval is, under the right circumstances, a random number with a Poisson distribution.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The equation can be adapted if, instead of the average number of events formula_26 we are given the average rate formula_27 at which events occur. Then formula_28 and:


title: Poisson distribution

text: If these conditions are true, then is a Poisson random variable, and the distribution of is a Poisson distribution.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The Poisson distribution is also the limit of a binomial distribution, for which the probability of success for each trial equals divided by the number of trials, as the number of trials approaches infinity (see Related distributions).


title: Poisson distribution

text: On a particular river, overflow floods occur once every 100 years on average. Calculate the probability of = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 overflow floods in a 100 year interval, assuming the Poisson model is appropriate.


title: Poisson distribution

text: María Dolores Ugarte and colleagues report that the average number of goals in a World Cup soccer match is approximately 2.5 and the Poisson model is appropriate.


title: Poisson distribution

text: Suppose that astronomers estimate that large meteorites (above a certain size) hit the earth on average once every 100 years ( event per 100 years), and that the number of meteorite hits follows a Poisson distribution. What is the probability of meteorite hits in the next 100 years?


title: Poisson distribution

text: Under these assumptions, the probability that no large meteorites hit the earth in the next 100 years is roughly 0.37. The remaining is the probability of 1, 2, 3, or more large meteorite hits in the next 100 years.


title: Poisson distribution

text: In an example above, an overflow flood occurred once every 100 years The probability of no overflow floods in 100 years was roughly 0.37, by the same calculation.


title: Poisson distribution

text: In general, if an event occurs on average once per interval ( = 1), and the events follow a Poisson distribution, then In addition, as shown in the table for overflow floods.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The number of students who arrive at the student union per minute will likely not follow a Poisson distribution, because the rate is not constant (low rate during class time, high rate between class times) and the arrivals of individual students are not independent (students tend to come in groups). The non-constant arrival rate may be modeled as a mixed Poisson distribution, and the arrival of groups rather than individual students as a compound Poisson process.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The number of magnitude 5 earthquakes per year in a country may not follow a Poisson distribution, if one large earthquake increases the probability of aftershocks of similar magnitude.


title: Poisson distribution

text: Examples in which at least one event is guaranteed are not Poisson distributed; but may be modeled using a zero-truncated Poisson distribution.


title: Poisson distribution

text: Count distributions in which the number of intervals with zero events is higher than predicted by a Poisson model may be modeled using a zero-inflated model.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The higher non-centered moments, of the Poisson distribution, are Touchard polynomials in : formula_44 where the {braces} denote Stirling numbers of the second kind. The coefficients of the polynomials have a combinatorial meaning. In fact, when the expected value of the Poisson distribution is 1, then Dobinski's formula says that the ‑th moment equals the number of partitions of a set of size .


title: Poisson distribution

text: If formula_46 for formula_47 are independent, then formula_48 A converse is Raikov's theorem, which says that if the sum of two independent random variables is Poisson-distributed, then so are each of those two independent random variables.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The lower bound can be proved by noting that formula_69 is the probability that formula_70 where formula_71 which is bounded below by formula_72 where formula_73 is relative entropy (See the entry on bounds on tails of binomial distributions for details). Further noting that formula_74 and computing a lower bound on the unconditional probability gives the result. More details can be found in the appendix of Kamath "et al.".


title: Poisson distribution

text: The Poisson distribution can be derived as a limiting case to the binomial distribution as the number of trials goes to infinity and the expected number of successes remains fixed — see law of rare events below. Therefore, it can be used as an approximation of the binomial distribution if is sufficiently large and "p" is sufficiently small. The Poisson distribution is a good approximation of the binomial distribution if is at least 20 and "p" is smaller than or equal to 0.05, and an excellent approximation if  ≥ 100 and  ≤ 10. formula_75


title: Poisson distribution

text: The factor of formula_114 can be replaced by 2 if formula_115 is further assumed to be monotonically increasing or decreasing.


title: Poisson distribution

text: This distribution has been extended to the bivariate case. The generating function for this distribution is


title: Poisson distribution

text: The marginal distributions are Poisson("θ") and Poisson("θ") and the correlation coefficient is limited to the range


title: Poisson distribution

text: A simple way to generate a bivariate Poisson distribution formula_119 is to take three independent Poisson distributions formula_120 with means formula_121 and then set formula_122 The probability function of the bivariate Poisson distribution is


title: Poisson distribution

text: The free Poisson distribution with jump size formula_124 and rate formula_8 arises in free probability theory as the limit of repeated free convolution


title: Poisson distribution

text: In other words, let formula_127 be random variables so that formula_127 has value formula_124 with probability formula_130 and value 0 with the remaining probability. Assume also that the family formula_131 are freely independent. Then the limit as formula_132 of the law of formula_133 is given by the Free Poisson law with parameters formula_134


title: Poisson distribution

text: This definition is analogous to one of the ways in which the classical Poisson distribution is obtained from a (classical) Poisson process.


title: Poisson distribution

text: This law also arises in random matrix theory as the Marchenko–Pastur law. Its free cumulants are equal to formula_138


title: Poisson distribution

text: We give values of some important transforms of the free Poisson law; the computation can be found in e.g. in the book "Lectures on the Combinatorics of Free Probability" by A. Nica and R. Speicher


title: Poisson distribution

text: Poisson's probability mass function formula_143 can be expressed in a form similar to the product distribution of a Weibull distribution and a variant form of the stable count distribution.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The variable formula_144 can be regarded as inverse of Lévy's stability parameter in the stable count distribution:


title: Poisson distribution

text: where formula_146 is a standard stable count distribution of shape formula_147 and formula_148 is a standard Weibull distribution of shape formula_149


title: Poisson distribution

text: Given a sample of measured values formula_150 for we wish to estimate the value of the parameter of the Poisson population from which the sample was drawn. The maximum likelihood estimate is


title: Poisson distribution

text: Since each observation has expectation so does the sample mean. Therefore, the maximum likelihood estimate is an unbiased estimator of . It is also an efficient estimator since its variance achieves the Cramér–Rao lower bound (CRLB). Hence it is minimum-variance unbiased. Also it can be proven that the sum (and hence the sample mean as it is a one-to-one function of the sum) is a complete and sufficient statistic for .


title: Poisson distribution

text: To prove sufficiency we may use the factorization theorem. Consider partitioning the probability mass function of the joint Poisson distribution for the sample into two parts: one that depends solely on the sample formula_152 (called formula_153) and one that depends on the parameter formula_8 and the sample formula_152 only through the function formula_156 Then formula_157 is a sufficient statistic for formula_158


title: Poisson distribution

text: The first term, formula_160 depends only on formula_161 The second term, formula_162 depends on the sample only through formula_163 Thus, formula_157 is sufficient.


title: Poisson distribution

text: To find the parameter that maximizes the probability function for the Poisson population, we can use the logarithm of the likelihood function:


title: Poisson distribution

text: So is the average of the values. Obtaining the sign of the second derivative of "L" at the stationary point will determine what kind of extreme value is.


title: Poisson distribution

text: which is the negative of times the reciprocal of the average of the k. This expression is negative when the average is positive. If this is satisfied, then the stationary point maximizes the probability function.


title: Poisson distribution

text: For completeness, a family of distributions is said to be complete if and only if formula_171 implies that formula_172 for all formula_158 If the individual formula_174 are iid formula_175 then formula_176 Knowing the distribution we want to investigate, it is easy to see that the statistic is complete.


title: Poisson distribution

text: For this equality to hold, formula_178 must be 0. This follows from the fact that none of the other terms will be 0 for all formula_179 in the sum and for all possible values of formula_158 Hence, formula_181 for all formula_8 implies that formula_183 and the statistic has been shown to be complete.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The confidence interval for the mean of a Poisson distribution can be expressed using the relationship between the cumulative distribution functions of the Poisson and chi-squared distributions. The chi-squared distribution is itself closely related to the gamma distribution, and this leads to an alternative expression. Given an observation from a Poisson distribution with mean "μ", a confidence interval for "μ" with confidence level is


title: Poisson distribution

text: where formula_186 is the quantile function (corresponding to a lower tail area "p") of the chi-squared distribution with degrees of freedom and formula_187 is the quantile function of a gamma distribution with shape parameter n and scale parameter 1. This interval is 'exact' in the sense that its coverage probability is never less than the nominal .


title: Poisson distribution

text: When quantiles of the gamma distribution are not available, an accurate approximation to this exact interval has been proposed (based on the Wilson–Hilferty transformation):


title: Poisson distribution

text: For application of these formulae in the same context as above (given a sample of measured values each drawn from a Poisson distribution with mean ), one would set


title: Poisson distribution

text: In Bayesian inference, the conjugate prior for the rate parameter of the Poisson distribution is the gamma distribution. Let


title: Poisson distribution

text: denote that is distributed according to the gamma density "g" parameterized in terms of a shape parameter "α" and an inverse scale parameter "β":


title: Poisson distribution

text: Then, given the same sample of measured values as before, and a prior of Gamma("α", "β"), the posterior distribution is


title: Poisson distribution

text: It can be shown that gamma distribution is the only prior that induces linearity of the conditional mean. Moreover, a converse result exists which states that if the conditional mean is close to a linear function in the formula_195 distance than the prior distribution of must be close to gamma distribution in Levy distance.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The posterior mean E[] approaches the maximum likelihood estimate formula_196 in the limit as formula_197 which follows immediately from the general expression of the mean of the gamma distribution.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The posterior predictive distribution for a single additional observation is a negative binomial distribution, sometimes called a gamma–Poisson distribution.


title: Poisson distribution

text: Suppose formula_198 is a set of independent random variables from a set of formula_199 Poisson distributions, each with a parameter formula_200 formula_201 and we would like to estimate these parameters. Then, Clevenson and Zidek show that under the normalized squared error loss formula_202 when formula_203 then, similar as in Stein's example for the Normal means, the MLE estimator formula_204 is inadmissible.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The Poisson distribution arises in connection with Poisson processes. It applies to various phenomena of discrete properties (that is, those that may happen 0, 1, 2, 3, … times during a given period of time or in a given area) whenever the probability of the phenomenon happening is constant in time or space. Examples of events that may be modelled as a Poisson distribution include:


title: Poisson distribution

text: Gallagher showed in 1976 that the counts of prime numbers in short intervals obey a Poisson distribution provided a certain version of the unproved prime r-tuple conjecture of Hardy-Littlewood is true.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The rate of an event is related to the probability of an event occurring in some small subinterval (of time, space or otherwise). In the case of the Poisson distribution, one assumes that there exists a small enough subinterval for which the probability of an event occurring twice is "negligible". With this assumption one can derive the Poisson distribution from the Binomial one, given only the information of expected number of total events in the whole interval.


title: Poisson distribution

text: Let the total number of events in the whole interval be denoted by formula_158 Divide the whole interval into formula_209 subintervals formula_210 of equal size, such that formula_211 (since we are interested in only very small portions of the interval this assumption is meaningful). This means that the expected number of events in each of the subintervals is equal to formula_212


title: Poisson distribution

text: Now we assume that the occurrence of an event in the whole interval can be seen as a sequence of Bernoulli trials, where the formula_213-th Bernoulli trial corresponds to looking whether an event happens at the subinterval formula_214 with probability formula_212 The expected number of total events in formula_209 such trials would be formula_26 the expected number of total events in the whole interval. Hence for each subdivision of the interval we have approximated the occurrence of the event as a Bernoulli process of the form formula_218 As we have noted before we want to consider only very small subintervals. Therefore, we take the limit as formula_209 goes to infinity.


title: Poisson distribution

text: In this case the binomial distribution converges to what is known as the Poisson distribution by the Poisson limit theorem.


title: Poisson distribution

text: In several of the above examples — such as, the number of mutations in a given sequence of DNA—the events being counted are actually the outcomes of discrete trials, and would more precisely be modelled using the binomial distribution, that is


title: Poisson distribution

text: In such cases is very large and is very small (and so the expectation is of intermediate magnitude). Then the distribution may be approximated by the less cumbersome Poisson distribution formula_221


title: Poisson distribution

text: This approximation is sometimes known as the "law of rare events", since each of the individual Bernoulli events rarely occurs.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The name "law of rare events" may be misleading because the total count of success events in a Poisson process need not be rare if the parameter is not small. For example, the number of telephone calls to a busy switchboard in one hour follows a Poisson distribution with the events appearing frequent to the operator, but they are rare from the point of view of the average member of the population who is very unlikely to make a call to that switchboard in that hour.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The variance of the binomial distribution is 1 − "p" times that of the Poisson distribution, so almost equal when "p" is very small.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The word "law" is sometimes used as a synonym of probability distribution, and "convergence in law" means "convergence in distribution". Accordingly, the Poisson distribution is sometimes called the "law of small numbers" because it is the probability distribution of the number of occurrences of an event that happens rarely but has very many opportunities to happen. "The Law of Small Numbers" is a book by Ladislaus Bortkiewicz about the Poisson distribution, published in 1898.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The Poisson distribution arises as the number of points of a Poisson point process located in some finite region. More specifically, if "D" is some region space, for example Euclidean space R, for which |"D"|, the area, volume or, more generally, the Lebesgue measure of the region is finite, and if denotes the number of points in "D", then


title: Poisson distribution

text: Poisson regression and negative binomial regression are useful for analyses where the dependent (response) variable is the count of the number of events or occurrences in an interval.


title: Poisson distribution

text: In a Poisson process, the number of observed occurrences fluctuates about its mean with a standard deviation formula_223 These fluctuations are denoted as "Poisson noise" or (particularly in electronics) as "shot noise".


title: Poisson distribution

text: The correlation of the mean and standard deviation in counting independent discrete occurrences is useful scientifically. By monitoring how the fluctuations vary with the mean signal, one can estimate the contribution of a single occurrence, "even if that contribution is too small to be detected directly". For example, the charge "e" on an electron can be estimated by correlating the magnitude of an electric current with its shot noise. If "N" electrons pass a point in a given time "t" on the average, the mean current is formula_224; since the current fluctuations should be of the order formula_225 (i.e., the standard deviation of the Poisson process), the charge formula_226 can be estimated from the ratio formula_227


title: Poisson distribution

text: An everyday example is the graininess that appears as photographs are enlarged; the graininess is due to Poisson fluctuations in the number of reduced silver grains, not to the individual grains themselves. By correlating the graininess with the degree of enlargement, one can estimate the contribution of an individual grain (which is otherwise too small to be seen unaided). Many other molecular applications of Poisson noise have been developed, e.g., estimating the number density of receptor molecules in a cell membrane.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The Poisson distribution poses two different tasks for dedicated software libraries: "evaluating" the distribution formula_229, and "drawing random numbers" according to that distribution.


title: Poisson distribution

text: Computing formula_229 for given formula_231 and formula_8 is a trivial task that can be accomplished by using the standard definition of formula_229 in terms of exponential, power, and factorial functions. However, the conventional definition of the Poisson distribution contains two terms that can easily overflow on computers: and . The fraction of to ! can also produce a rounding error that is very large compared to "e", and therefore give an erroneous result. For numerical stability the Poisson probability mass function should therefore be evaluated as


title: Poisson distribution

text: which is mathematically equivalent but numerically stable. The natural logarithm of the Gamma function can be obtained using the codice_1 function in the C standard library (C99 version) or R, the codice_2 function in MATLAB or SciPy, or the codice_3 function in Fortran 2008 and later.


title: Poisson distribution

text: The less trivial task is to draw integer random variate from the Poisson distribution with given formula_158


title: Poisson distribution

text: A simple algorithm to generate random Poisson-distributed numbers (pseudo-random number sampling) has been given by Knuth:


title: Poisson distribution

text: The complexity is linear in the returned value , which is on average. There are many other algorithms to improve this. Some are given in Ahrens & Dieter, see below.


title: Poisson distribution

text: For large values of , the value of = "e" may be so small that it is hard to represent. This can be solved by a change to the algorithm which uses an additional parameter STEP such that "e" does not underflow:


title: Poisson distribution

text: The choice of STEP depends on the threshold of overflow. For double precision floating point format the threshold is near "e", so 500 should be a safe "STEP".


title: Poisson distribution

text: Inverse transform sampling is simple and efficient for small values of , and requires only one uniform random number "u" per sample. Cumulative probabilities are examined in turn until one exceeds "u".


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The Thirteen Colonies, also known as the Thirteen British Colonies, the Thirteen American Colonies, or later as the United Colonies, were a group of British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America. Founded in the 17th and 18th centuries, they began fighting the American Revolutionary War in April 1775 and formed the United States of America by declaring full independence in July 1776. Just prior to declaring independence, the Thirteen Colonies in their traditional groupings were: New England (New Hampshire; Massachusetts; Rhode Island; Connecticut); Middle (New York; New Jersey; Pennsylvania; Delaware); Southern (Maryland; Virginia; North Carolina; South Carolina; and Georgia). The Thirteen Colonies came to have very similar political, constitutional, and legal systems, dominated by Protestant English-speakers. The first of these colonies was Virginia Colony in 1607, a Southern colony. While all these colonies needed to become economically viable, the founding of the New England colonies, as well as the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania, were substantially motivated by their founders' concerns related to the practice of religion. The other colonies were founded for business and economic expansion. The Middle Colonies were established on an earlier Dutch colony, New Netherland. All the Thirteen Colonies were part of Britain's possessions in the New World, which also included territory in Canada, Florida, and the Caribbean.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The colonial population grew from about 2,000 to 2.4 million between 1625 and 1775, displacing Native Americans. This population included people subject to a system of slavery which was legal in all of the colonies prior to the American Revolutionary War. In the 18th century, the British government operated its colonies under a policy of mercantilism, in which the central government administered its possessions for the economic benefit of the mother country.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The Thirteen Colonies had a high degree of self-governance and active local elections, and they resisted London's demands for more control. The French and Indian War (1754–1763) against France and its Indian allies led to growing tensions between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies. During the 1750s, the colonies began collaborating with one another instead of dealing directly with Britain. With the help of colonial printers and newspapers these inter-colonial activities and concerns were shared and cultivated a sense of a united American identity and led to calls for protection of the colonists' "Rights as Englishmen", especially the principle of "no taxation without representation". Conflicts with the British government over taxes and rights led to the American Revolution, in which the colonies worked together to form the Continental Congress. The colonists fought the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) with the aid of the Kingdom of France and, to a much smaller degree, the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of Spain.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: In 1606, King James I of England granted charters to both the Plymouth Company and the London Company for the purpose of establishing permanent settlements in America. The London Company established the Colony of Virginia in 1607, the first permanently settled English colony on the continent. The Plymouth Company founded the Popham Colony on the Kennebec River, but it was short-lived. The Plymouth Council for New England sponsored several colonization projects, culminating with Plymouth Colony in 1620 which was settled by English Puritan separatists, known today as the Pilgrims. The Dutch, Swedish, and French also established successful American colonies at roughly the same time as the English, but they eventually came under the English crown. The Thirteen Colonies were complete with the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, although the term "Thirteen Colonies" became current only in the context of the American Revolution.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: In London beginning in 1660, all colonies were governed through a state department known as the Southern Department, and a committee of the Privy Council called the Board of Trade and Plantations. In 1768, a specific state department was created for America, but it was disbanded in 1782 when the Home Office took responsibility.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven Colonies formed the New England Confederation in (1643–1654; 1675–c. 1680) and all New England colonies were included in the Dominion of New England (1686–1689).


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The Province of Carolina was initially chartered in 1629 and initial settlements were established after 1651. That charter was voided in 1660 by Charles II and a new charter was issued in 1663, making it a proprietary colony. The Carolina province was divided into separate proprietary colonies, north and south in 1712.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Earlier, along the coast, the Roanoke Colony was established in 1585, re-established in 1587, and found abandoned in 1590.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The first successful English colony was Jamestown, established May 14, 1607, near Chesapeake Bay. The business venture was financed and coordinated by the London Virginia Company, a joint-stock company looking for gold. Its first years were extremely difficult, with very high death rates from disease and starvation, wars with local Native Americans, and little gold. The colony survived and flourished by turning to tobacco as a cash crop.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: In 1632, King Charles I granted the charter for Province of Maryland to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. Calvert's father had been a prominent Catholic official who encouraged Catholic immigration to the English colonies. The charter offered no guidelines on religion.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The Province of Carolina was the second attempted English settlement south of Virginia, the first being the failed attempt at Roanoke. It was a private venture, financed by a group of English Lords Proprietors who obtained a Royal Charter to the Carolinas in 1663, hoping that a new colony in the south would become profitable like Jamestown. Carolina was not settled until 1670, and even then the first attempt failed because there was no incentive for emigration to that area. Eventually, however, the Lords combined their remaining capital and financed a settlement mission to the area led by Sir John Colleton. The expedition located fertile and defensible ground at what became Charleston, originally Charles Town for Charles II of England.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Beginning in 1609, Dutch traders explored and established fur trading posts on the Hudson River, Delaware River, and Connecticut River, seeking to protect their interests in the fur trade. The Dutch West India Company established permanent settlements on the Hudson River, creating the Dutch colony of New Netherland. In 1626, Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians and established the outpost of New Amsterdam. Relatively few Dutch settled in New Netherland, but the colony came to dominate the regional fur trade. It also served as the base for extensive trade with the English colonies, and many products from New England and Virginia were carried to Europe on Dutch ships. The Dutch also engaged in the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade, taking enslaved Africans to the English colonies in North America and Barbados. The West India Company desired to grow New Netherland as it became commercially successful, yet the colony failed to attract the same level of settlement as the English colonies did. Many of those who did immigrate to the colony were English, German, Walloon, or Sephardim.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: In 1638, Sweden established the colony of New Sweden in the Delaware Valley. The operation was led by former members of the Dutch West India Company, including Peter Minuit. New Sweden established extensive trading contacts with English colonies to the south and shipped much of the tobacco produced in Virginia. The colony was conquered by the Dutch in 1655, while Sweden was engaged in the Second Northern War.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Beginning in the 1650s, the English and Dutch engaged in a series of wars, and the English sought to conquer New Netherland. Richard Nicolls captured the lightly defended New Amsterdam in 1664, and his subordinates quickly captured the remainder of New Netherland. The 1667 Treaty of Breda ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War and confirmed English control of the region. The Dutch briefly regained control of parts of New Netherland in the Third Anglo-Dutch War, but surrendered claim to the territory in the 1674 Treaty of Westminster, ending the Dutch colonial presence in North America.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: After the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the British renamed the colony "York City" or "New York". Large numbers of Dutch remained in the colony, dominating the rural areas between New York City and Albany, while people from New England started moving in as well as immigrants from Germany. New York City attracted a large polyglot population, including a large black slave population. In 1674, the proprietary colonies of East Jersey and West Jersey were created from lands formerly part of New York.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 as a proprietary colony of Quaker William Penn. The main population elements included the Quaker population based in Philadelphia, a Scotch-Irish population on the Western frontier and numerous German colonies in between. Philadelphia became the largest city in the colonies with its central location, excellent port, and a population of about 30,000.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The Pilgrims were a small group of Puritan separatists who felt that they needed to distance themselves physically from the Church of England, which they perceived as corrupted. They initially moved to the Netherlands, but eventually sailed to America in 1620 on the "Mayflower". Upon their arrival, they drew up the Mayflower Compact, by which they bound themselves together as a united community, thus establishing the small Plymouth Colony. William Bradford was their main leader. After its founding, other settlers traveled from England to join the colony.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: More Puritans immigrated in 1629 and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony with 400 settlers. They sought to reform the Church of England by creating a new, ideologically pure church in the New World. By 1640, 20,000 had arrived; many died soon after arrival, but the others found a healthy climate and an ample food supply. The Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies together spawned other Puritan colonies in New England, including the New Haven, Saybrook, and Connecticut colonies. During the 17th century, the New Haven and Saybrook colonies were absorbed by Connecticut.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Roger Williams established Providence Plantations in 1636 on land provided by Narragansett sachem Canonicus. Williams was a Puritan who preached religious tolerance, separation of Church and State, and a complete break with the Church of England. He was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony over theological disagreements; he founded the settlement based on an egalitarian constitution, providing for majority rule "in civil things" and "liberty of conscience" in religious matters. In 1637, a second group including Anne Hutchinson established a second settlement on Aquidneck Island, also known as Rhode Island.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: On October 19, 1652, the Massachusetts General Court decreed that "for the prevention of clipping of all such pieces of money as shall be coined with-in this jurisdiction, it is ordered by this Courte and the authorite thereof, that henceforth all pieces of money coined shall have a double ring on either side, with this inscription, Massachusetts, and a tree in the center on one side, and New England and the yeare of our Lord on the other side. "These coins were the famous "tree" pieces. There were Willow Tree Shillings, Oak Tree Shillings, and Pine Tree Shillings" minted by John Hull and Robert Sanderson in the "Hull Mint" on Summer Street in Boston, Massachusetts. "The Pine Tree was the last to be coined, and today there are specimens in existence, which is probably why all of these early coins are referred to as "the pine tree shillings." The "Hull Mint" was forced to close in 1683.   In 1684 the charter of Massachusetts was revoked by the king Charles II.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Other colonists settled to the north, mingling with adventurers and profit-oriented settlers to establish more religiously diverse colonies in New Hampshire and Maine. Massachusetts absorbed these small settlements when it made significant land claims in the 1640s and 1650s, but New Hampshire was eventually given a separate charter in 1679. Maine remained a part of Massachusetts until achieving statehood in 1820.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: In 1685, King James II of England closed the legislatures and consolidated the New England colonies into the Dominion of New England, putting the region under the control of Governor Edmund Andros. In 1688, the colonies of New York, West Jersey, and East Jersey were added to the dominion. Andros was overthrown and the dominion was closed in 1689, after the Glorious Revolution deposed King James II; the former colonies were re-established. According to Guy Miller, the Rebellion of 1689 was the "climax of the 60-year-old struggle between the government in England and the Puritans of Massachusetts over the question of who was to rule the Bay colony."


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The northern and southern sections of the Carolina colony operated more or less independently until 1691 when Philip Ludwell was appointed governor of the entire province. From that time until 1708, the northern and southern settlements remained under one government. However, during this period, the two halves of the province began increasingly to be known as North Carolina and South Carolina, as the descendants of the colony's proprietors fought over the direction of the colony. The colonists of Charles Town finally deposed their governor and elected their own government. This marked the start of separate governments in the Province of North-Carolina and the Province of South Carolina. In 1729, the king formally revoked Carolina's colonial charter and established both North Carolina and South Carolina as crown colonies.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: In the 1730s, Parliamentarian James Oglethorpe proposed that the area south of the Carolinas be colonized with the "worthy poor" of England to provide an alternative to the overcrowded debtors' prisons. Oglethorpe and other English philanthropists secured a royal charter as the Trustees of the colony of Georgia on June 9, 1732. Oglethorpe and his compatriots hoped to establish a utopian colony that banned slavery and recruited only the most worthy settlers, but by 1750 the colony remained sparsely populated. The proprietors gave up their charter in 1752, at which point Georgia became a crown colony.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The colonial population of Thirteen Colonies grew immensely in the 18th century. According to historian Alan Taylor, the population of the Thirteen Colonies stood at 1.5  million in 1750, which represented four-fifths of the population of British North America. More than 90 percent of the colonists lived as farmers, though some seaports also flourished. In 1760, the cities of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston had a population in excess of 16,000, which was small by European standards. By 1770, the economic output of the Thirteen Colonies made up forty percent of the gross domestic product of the British Empire.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: As the 18th century progressed, colonists began to settle far from the Atlantic coast. Pennsylvania, Virginia, Connecticut, and Maryland all laid claim to the land in the Ohio River valley. The colonies engaged in a scramble to purchase land from Indian tribes, as the British insisted that claims to land should rest on legitimate purchases. Virginia was particularly intent on western expansion, and most of the elite Virginia families invested in the Ohio Company to promote the settlement of Ohio Country.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The British colonies in North America became part of the global British trading network, as the value tripled for exports from British North America to Britain between 1700 and 1754. The colonists were restricted in trading with other European powers, but they found profitable trade partners in the other British colonies, particularly in the Caribbean. The colonists traded foodstuffs, wood, tobacco, and various other resources for Asian tea, West Indian coffee, and West Indian sugar, among other items. American Indians far from the Atlantic coast supplied the Atlantic market with beaver fur and deerskins. British North America had an advantage in natural resources and established its own thriving shipbuilding industry, and many North American merchants engaged in the transatlantic trade.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Improved economic conditions and easing of religious persecution in Europe made it more difficult to recruit labor to the colonies, and many colonies became increasingly reliant on slave labor, particularly in the South. The population of slaves in British North America grew dramatically between 1680 and 1750, and the growth was driven by a mixture of forced immigration and the reproduction of slaves. Slaves supported vast plantation economies in the South, while slaves in the North worked in a variety of occupations. There were some slave revolts, such as the Stono Rebellion and the New York Conspiracy of 1741, but these uprisings were suppressed.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: A small proportion of the English population migrated to British North America after 1700, but the colonies attracted new immigrants from other European countries. These immigrants traveled to all of the colonies, but the Middle Colonies attracted the most and continued to be more ethnically diverse than the other colonies. Numerous settlers immigrated from Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant—particularly "New Light" Ulster Presbyterians. Protestant Germans also migrated in large numbers, particularly to Pennsylvania. In the 1740s, the Thirteen Colonies underwent the First Great Awakening.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: In 1738, an incident involving a Welsh mariner named Robert Jenkins sparked the War of Jenkins' Ear between Britain and Spain. Hundreds of North Americans volunteered for Admiral Edward Vernon's assault on Cartagena de Indias, a Spanish city in South America. The war against Spain merged into a broader conflict known as the War of the Austrian Succession, but most colonists called it King George's War. In 1745, British and colonial forces captured the town of Louisbourg, and the war came to an end with the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. However, many colonists were angered when Britain returned Louisbourg to France in return for Madras and other territories. In the aftermath of the war, both the British and French sought to expand into the Ohio River valley.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The French and Indian War (1754–1763) was the American extension of the general European conflict known as the Seven Years' War. Previous colonial wars in North America had started in Europe and then spread to the colonies, but the French and Indian War is notable for having started in North America and spread to Europe. One of the primary causes of the war was increasing competition between Britain and France, especially in the Great Lakes and Ohio valley.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The French and Indian War took on a new significance for the British North American colonists when William Pitt the Elder decided that major military resources needed to be devoted to North America in order to win the war against France. For the first time, the continent became one of the main theaters of what could be termed a "world war". During the war, it became increasingly apparent to American colonists that they were under the authority of the British Empire, as British military and civilian officials took on an increased presence in their lives.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The war also increased a sense of American unity in other ways. It caused men to travel across the continent who might otherwise have never left their own colony, fighting alongside men from decidedly different backgrounds who were nonetheless still American. Throughout the course of the war, British officers trained Americans for battle, most notably George Washington, which benefited the American cause during the Revolution. Also, colonial legislatures and officials had to cooperate intensively in pursuit of the continent-wide military effort. The relations were not always positive between the British military establishment and the colonists, setting the stage for later distrust and dislike of British troops. At the 1754 Albany Congress, Pennsylvania colonist Benjamin Franklin proposed the Albany Plan which would have created a unified government of the Thirteen Colonies for coordination of defense and other matters, but the plan was rejected by the leaders of most colonies.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: In the Treaty of Paris (1763), France formally ceded to Britain the eastern part of its vast North American empire, having secretly given to Spain the territory of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River the previous year. Before the war, Britain held the thirteen American colonies, most of present-day Nova Scotia, and most of the Hudson Bay watershed. Following the war, Britain gained all French territory east of the Mississippi River, including Quebec, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio River valley. Britain also gained Spanish Florida, from which it formed the colonies of East and West Florida. In removing a major foreign threat to the thirteen colonies, the war also largely removed the colonists' need for colonial protection.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The British and colonists triumphed jointly over a common foe. The colonists' loyalty to the mother country was stronger than ever before. However, disunity was beginning to form. British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder had decided to wage the war in the colonies with the use of troops from the colonies and tax funds from Britain itself. This was a successful wartime strategy but, after the war was over, each side believed that it had borne a greater burden than the other. The British elite, the most heavily taxed of any in Europe, pointed out angrily that the colonists paid little to the royal coffers. The colonists replied that their sons had fought and died in a war that served European interests more than their own. This dispute was a link in the chain of events that soon brought about the American Revolution.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The British were left with large debts following the French and Indian War, so British leaders decided to increase taxation and control of the Thirteen Colonies. They imposed several new taxes, beginning with the Sugar Act of 1764. Later acts included the Currency Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, and the Townshend Acts of 1767. Colonial newspapers and printers in particular took strong exception against the Stamp Act which imposed a tax on newspapers and official documents, and played a central role in disseminating literature among the colonists against such taxes and the idea of taxation without colonial representation.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The Royal Proclamation of 1763 restricted settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, as this was designated an Indian Reserve. Some groups of settlers disregarded the proclamation, however, and continued to move west and establish farms. The proclamation was soon modified and was no longer a hindrance to settlement, but the fact angered the colonists that it had been promulgated without their prior consultation.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Parliament had directly levied duties and excise taxes on the colonies, bypassing the colonial legislatures, and Americans began to insist on the principle of "no taxation without representation" with intense protests over the Stamp Act of 1765. They argued that the colonies had no representation in the British Parliament, so it was a violation of their rights as Englishmen for taxes to be imposed upon them. Parliament rejected the colonial protests and asserted its authority by passing new taxes.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Colonial discontentment grew with the passage of the 1773 Tea Act, which reduced taxes on tea sold by the East India Company in an effort to undercut the competition, and Prime Minister North's ministry hoped that this would establish a precedent of colonists accepting British taxation policies. Trouble escalated over the tea tax, as Americans in each colony boycotted the tea, and those in Boston dumped the tea in the harbor during the Boston Tea Party in 1773 when the Sons of Liberty dumped thousands of pounds of tea into the water. Tensions escalated in 1774 as Parliament passed the laws known as the Intolerable Acts, which greatly restricted self-government in the colony of Massachusetts. These laws also allowed British military commanders to claim colonial homes for the quartering of soldiers, regardless of whether the American civilians were willing or not to have soldiers in their homes. The laws further revoked colonial rights to hold trials in cases involving soldiers or crown officials, forcing such trials to be held in England rather than in America. Parliament also sent Thomas Gage to serve as Governor of Massachusetts and as the commander of British forces in North America.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: By 1774, colonists still hoped to remain part of the British Empire, but discontentment was widespread concerning British rule throughout the Thirteen Colonies. Colonists elected delegates to the First Continental Congress which convened in Philadelphia in September 1774. In the aftermath of the Intolerable Acts, the delegates asserted that the colonies owed allegiance only to the king; they would accept royal governors as agents of the king, but they were no longer willing to recognize Parliament's right to pass legislation affecting the colonies. Most delegates opposed an attack on the British position in Boston, and the Continental Congress instead agreed to the imposition of a boycott known as the Continental Association. The boycott proved effective and the value of British imports dropped dramatically. The Thirteen Colonies became increasingly divided between Patriots opposed to British rule and Loyalists who supported it.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: In response, the colonies formed bodies of elected representatives known as Provincial Congresses, and Colonists began to boycott imported British merchandise. Later in 1774, 12 colonies sent representatives to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. During the Second Continental Congress, the remaining colony of Georgia sent delegates as well.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage feared a confrontation with the colonists; he requested reinforcements from Britain, but the British government was not willing to pay for the expense of stationing tens of thousands of soldiers in the Thirteen Colonies. Gage was instead ordered to seize Patriot arsenals. He dispatched a force to march on the arsenal at Concord, Massachusetts, but the Patriots learned about it and blocked their advance. The Patriots repulsed the British force at the April 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord, then lay siege to Boston.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: By spring 1775, all royal officials had been expelled, and the Continental Congress hosted a convention of delegates for the 13 colonies. It raised an army to fight the British and named George Washington its commander, made treaties, declared independence, and recommended that the colonies write constitutions and become states (later enumerated in the 1777 Articles of Confederation). The Second Continental Congress assembled in May 1775 and began to coordinate armed resistance against Britain. It established a government that recruited soldiers and printed its own money. General Washington took command of the Patriot soldiers in New England and forced the British to withdraw from Boston. In 1776, the Thirteen Colonies (now self referenced as states)declared their independence from Britain. With the help of France and Spain, they defeated the British and their German allies in the American Revolutionary War, with the final battle usually being referred to as the Siege of Yorktown in 1781. In the Treaty of Paris (1783), Britain officially recognized the independence of the United States of America.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The colonial population rose to a quarter of a million during the 17th century, and to nearly 2.5 million on the eve of the American revolution. The estimates do not include the Indian tribes outside the jurisdiction of the colonies.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Good health was important for the growth of the colonies: "Fewer deaths among the young meant that a higher proportion of the population reached reproductive age, and that fact alone helps to explain why the colonies grew so rapidly." There were many other reasons for the population growth besides good health, such as the Great Migration.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: By 1776, about 85% of the white population's ancestry originated in the British Isles (English, Scots-Irish, Scottish, Welsh), 9% of German origin, 4% Dutch and 2% Huguenot French and other minorities.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Over 90% were farmers, with several small cities that were also seaports linking the colonial economy to the larger British Empire. These populations continued to grow at a rapid rate during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, primarily because of high birth rates and relatively low death rates. Immigration was a minor factor from 1774 to 1830.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: According to the United States Historical Census Data Base (USHCDB), the ethnic populations in the British American Colonies of 1700, 1755, and 1775 were:


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Slavery was legal and practiced in all of the Thirteen Colonies. In most places, it involved house servants or farm workers. It was of economic importance in the export-oriented tobacco plantations of Virginia and Maryland and on the rice and indigo plantations of South Carolina.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: About 287,000 slaves were imported into the Thirteen Colonies over a period of 160 years, or 2% of the estimated 12 million taken from Africa to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade. The great majority went to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and the numbers had to be continually replenished. By the mid-18th century, life expectancy was much higher in the American colonies.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The numbers grew rapidly through a very high birth rate and low mortality rate, reaching nearly four million by the 1860 census. From 1770 until 1860, the rate of natural growth of North American slaves was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that in England.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Protestantism was the predominant religious affiliation in the Thirteen Colonies, although there were also Catholics, Jews, and deists, and a large fraction had no religious connection. The Church of England was officially established in most of the South. The Puritan movement became the Congregational church, and it was the established religious affiliation in Massachusetts and Connecticut into the 18th century. In practice, this meant that tax revenues were allocated to church expenses. The Anglican parishes in the South were under the control of local vestries and had public functions such as repair of the roads and relief of the poor.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The colonies were religiously diverse, with different Protestant denominations brought by British, German, Dutch, and other immigrants. The Reformed tradition was the foundation for Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Continental Reformed denominations. French Huguenots set up their own Reformed congregations. The Dutch Reformed Church was strong among Dutch Americans in New York and New Jersey, while Lutheranism was prevalent among German immigrants. Germans also brought diverse forms of Anabaptism, especially the Mennonite variety. Reformed Baptist preacher Roger Williams founded Providence Plantations which became the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Jews were clustered in a few port cities. The Baltimore family founded Maryland and brought in fellow Catholics from England. Catholics were estimated at 1.6% of the population or 40,000 in 1775. Of the 200–250,000 Irish who came to the Colonies between 1701 and 1775 less than 20,000 were Catholic, many of whom hid their faith or lapsed because of prejudice and discrimination. Between 1770 and 1775 3,900 Irish Catholics arrived out of almost 45,000 white immigrants (7,000 English, 15,000 Scots, 13,200 Scots-Irish, 5,200 Germans). Most Catholics were English Recusants, Germans, Irish, or blacks; half lived in Maryland, with large populations also in New York and Pennsylvania. Presbyterians were chiefly immigrants from Scotland and Ulster who favored the back-country and frontier districts.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Quakers were well established in Pennsylvania, where they controlled the governorship and the legislature for many years. Quakers were also numerous in Rhode Island. Baptists and Methodists were growing rapidly during the First Great Awakening of the 1740s. Many denominations sponsored missions to the local Indians.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Higher education was available for young men in the north, and most students were aspiring Protestant ministers. Nine institutions of higher education were chartered during the colonial era. These colleges, known collectively as the colonial colleges were New College (Harvard), the College of William & Mary, Yale College (Yale), the College of New Jersey (Princeton), King's College (Columbia), the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), the College of Rhode Island (Brown), Queen's College (Rutgers) and Dartmouth College. The College of William & Mary and Queen's College later became public institutions while the other institutions account for seven of the eight private Ivy League universities.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: With the exception of the College of William and Mary, these institutions were all located in New England and the Middle Colonies. The southern colonies held the belief that the family had the responsibility of educating their children, mirroring the common belief in Europe. Wealthy families either used tutors and governesses from Britain or sent children to school in England. By the 1700s, university students based in the colonies began to act as tutors.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Most New England towns sponsored public schools for boys, but public schooling was rare elsewhere. Girls were educated at home or by small local private schools, and they had no access to college. Aspiring physicians and lawyers typically learned as apprentices to an established practitioner, although some young men went to medical schools in Scotland.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The three forms of colonial government in 1776 were provincial (royal colony), proprietary, and charter. These governments were all subordinate to the British monarch with no representation in the Parliament of Great Britain. The administration of all British colonies was overseen by the Board of Trade in London beginning late in the 17th century.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The provincial colony was governed by commissions created at the pleasure of the king. A governor and his council were appointed by the crown. The governor was invested with general executive powers and authorized to call a locally elected assembly. The governor's council would sit as an upper house when the assembly was in session, in addition to its role in advising the governor. Assemblies were made up of representatives elected by the freeholders and planters (landowners) of the province. The governor had the power of absolute veto and could prorogue (i.e., delay) and dissolve the assembly. The assembly's role was to make all local laws and ordinances, ensuring that they were not inconsistent with the laws of Britain. In practice, this did not always occur, since many of the provincial assemblies sought to expand their powers and limit those of the governor and crown. Laws could be examined by the British Privy Council or Board of Trade, which also held veto power of legislation. New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were crown colonies. Massachusetts became a crown colony at the end of the 17th century.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Proprietary colonies were governed much as royal colonies, except that lord proprietors appointed the governor rather than the king. They were set up after the English Restoration of 1660 and typically enjoyed greater civil and religious liberty. Pennsylvania (which included Delaware), New Jersey, and Maryland were proprietary colonies.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Charter governments were political corporations created by letters patent, giving the grantees control of the land and the powers of legislative government. The charters provided a fundamental constitution and divided powers among legislative, executive, and judicial functions, with those powers being vested in officials. Massachusetts, Providence Plantation, Rhode Island, Warwick, and Connecticut were charter colonies. The Massachusetts charter was revoked in 1684 and was replaced by a provincial charter that was issued in 1691. Providence Plantations merged with the settlements at Rhode Island and Warwick to form the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which also became a charter colony in 1636.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: After 1680, the imperial government in London took an increasing interest in the affairs of the colonies, which were growing rapidly in population and wealth. In 1680, only Virginia was a royal colony; by 1720, half were under the control of royal governors. These governors were appointees closely tied to the government in London.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Historians before the 1880s emphasized American nationalism. However, scholarship after that time was heavily influenced by the "Imperial school" led by Herbert L. Osgood, George Louis Beer, Charles McLean Andrews, and Lawrence H. Gipson. This viewpoint dominated colonial historiography into the 1940s, and they emphasized and often praised the attention that London gave to all the colonies. In this view, there was never a threat (before the 1770s) that any colony would revolt or seek independence.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: British settlers did not come to the American colonies with the intention of creating a democratic system; yet they quickly created a broad electorate without a land-owning aristocracy, along with a pattern of free elections which put a strong emphasis on voter participation. The colonies offered a much freer degree of suffrage than Britain or indeed any other country. Any property owner could vote for members of the lower house of the legislature, and they could even vote for the governor in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Voters were required to hold an "interest" in society; as the South Carolina legislature said in 1716, "it is necessary and reasonable, that none but such persons will have an interest in the Province should be capable to elect members of the Commons House of Assembly". The main legal criterion for having an "interest" was ownership of real estate property, which was uncommon in Britain, where 19 out of 20 men were controlled politically by their landlords. (Women, children, indentured servants, and slaves were subsumed under the interest of the family head.) London insisted on this requirement for the colonies, telling governors to exclude from the ballot men who were not freeholders—that is, those who did not own land. Nevertheless, land was so widely owned that 50% to 80% of the men were eligible to vote.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The colonial political culture emphasized deference, so that local notables were the men who ran and were chosen. But sometimes they competed with each other and had to appeal to the common man for votes. There were no political parties, and would-be legislators formed ad hoc coalitions of their families, friends, and neighbors. Outside of Puritan New England, election day brought in all the men from the countryside to the county seat to make merry, politick, shake hands with the grandees, meet old friends, and hear the speeches—all the while toasting, eating, treating, tippling, and gambling. They voted by shouting their choice to the clerk, as supporters cheered or booed. Candidate George Washington spent £39 for treats for his supporters. The candidates knew that they had to "swill the planters with bumbo" (rum). Elections were carnivals where all men were equal for one day and traditional restraints were relaxed.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The actual rate of voting ranged from 20% to 40% of all adult white males. The rates were higher in Pennsylvania and New York, where long-standing factions based on ethnic and religious groups mobilized supporters at a higher rate. New York and Rhode Island developed long-lasting two-faction systems that held together for years at the colony level, but they did not reach into local affairs. The factions were based on the personalities of a few leaders and an array of family connections, and they had little basis in policy or ideology. Elsewhere the political scene was in a constant whirl, based on personality rather than long-lived factions or serious disputes on issues.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The colonies were independent of one other long before 1774; indeed, all the colonies began as separate and unique settlements or plantations. Further, efforts had failed to form a colonial union through the Albany Congress of 1754 led by Benjamin Franklin. The thirteen all had well-established systems of self-government and elections based on the Rights of Englishmen which they were determined to protect from imperial interference.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The British Empire at the time operated under the mercantile system, where all trade was concentrated inside the Empire, and trade with other empires was forbidden. The goal was to enrich Britain—its merchants and its government. Whether the policy was good for the colonists was not an issue in London, but Americans became increasingly restive with mercantilist policies.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Mercantilism meant that the government and the merchants became partners with the goal of increasing political power and private wealth, to the exclusion of other empires. The government protected its merchants—and kept others out—by trade barriers, regulations, and subsidies to domestic industries in order to maximize exports from and minimize imports to the realm. The government had to fight smuggling—which became a favorite American technique in the 18th century to circumvent the restrictions on trading with the French, Spanish or Dutch. The tactic used by mercantilism was to run trade surpluses, so that gold and silver would pour into London. The government took its share through duties and taxes, with the remainder going to merchants in Britain. The government spent much of its revenue on a superb Royal Navy, which not only protected the British colonies but threatened the colonies of the other empires, and sometimes seized them. Thus the British Navy captured New Amsterdam (New York) in 1664. The colonies were captive markets for British industry, and the goal was to enrich the mother country. Colonial commodities were shipped on British ships to the mother country where Britain sold them to Europe reaping the benefits of the export trade. Finished goods were manufactured in Britain and sold in the colonies, or imported by Britain for retail to the colonies, profiting the mother country. Like other New World colonial empires, the British empire's commodity production was dependent on slave labor; as observed in 1720s Britain, "all this great increase in our treasure proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes" in Britain's colonies.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Britain implemented mercantilism by trying to block American trade with the French, Spanish, or Dutch empires using the Navigation Acts, which Americans avoided as often as they could. The royal officials responded to smuggling with open-ended search warrants (Writs of Assistance). In 1761, Boston lawyer James Otis argued that the writs violated the constitutional rights of the colonists. He lost the case, but John Adams later wrote, "Then and there the child Independence was born."


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: However, the colonists took pains to argue that they did not oppose British regulation of their external trade; they only opposed legislation that affected them internally.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Britain in the late-18th century had another dozen colonial possessions in the New World. The British West Indies, Newfoundland, the Province of Quebec, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Bermuda, and East and West Florida remained loyal to the British crown throughout the war (although Spain reacquired Florida before the war was over, and in 1821 sold it to the United States). Several of the other colonies evinced a certain degree of sympathy with the Patriot cause, but their geographical isolation and the dominance of British naval power precluded any effective participation. The British crown had only recently acquired several of those lands, and many of the issues facing the Thirteen Colonies did not apply to them, especially in the case of Quebec and Florida.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The first British Empire centered on the Thirteen Colonies, which attracted large numbers of settlers from Britain. The "Imperial School" in the 1900–1930s took a favorable view of the benefits of empire, emphasizing its successful economic integration. The Imperial School included such historians as Herbert L. Osgood, George Louis Beer, Charles M. Andrews, and Lawrence Gipson.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: The shock of Britain's defeat in 1783 caused a radical revision of British policies on colonialism, thereby producing what historians call the end of the First British Empire, even though Britain still controlled Canada and some islands in the West Indies. Ashley Jackson writes:


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Much of the historiography concerns the reasons why the Americans rebelled in the 1770s and successfully broke away. Since the 1960s, the mainstream of historiography has emphasized the growth of American consciousness and nationalism and the colonial republican value-system, in opposition to the aristocratic viewpoint of British leaders.


title: Thirteen Colonies

text: Historians in recent decades have mostly used one of three approaches to analyze the American Revolution:


title: Ellen Pompeo

text: Ellen Kathleen Pompeo (; born November 10, 1969) is an American actress. She is best known for her role on "Grey's Anatomy" as the titular Dr. Meredith Grey. One of the world's highest-paid actors since 2017, she has made multiple appearances on the "Forbes’" year-end lists. Her accolades include a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe Award nomination.


title: Ellen Pompeo

text: Born in Everett, Massachusetts, Pompeo moved to Miami and then New York City, where a casting director discovered her and signed her for an ad campaign for L'Oreal. She made her screen debut with NBC's legal drama "Law & Order", then guest-starred in other television shows, including the comedy "Strangers with Candy", the medical drama "Strong Medicine" and the sitcom "Friends". She made her feature film debut in 1999 with the romantic comedy "Coming Soon", and went on to play minor roles in films like "In the Weeds" and "Mambo Café" but found little initial success. A turning point came in her career in 2002, when she gained wide recognition for her starring role in Brad Silberling's romantic drama "Moonlight Mile".


title: Ellen Pompeo

text: Pompeo was then cast in ABC's popular medical drama "Grey's Anatomy", and gained worldwide recognition for her portrayal of the title character Dr. Meredith Grey. The role on the long-running series earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award. The character became widely popular, making Pompeo one of the most renowned television actresses. In 2016, she was ranked fourth in the list of highest paid TV actresses by "Forbes", with earnings of $14.9 million; she became the third highest-paid female and the fifth highest-paid actor overall in 2018 with earnings of $23.6 million. She was also the highest-ranked actress from a drama series on the list.


title: Ellen Pompeo

text: Pompeo's other film roles include the comedy "Old School" (2003), the superhero film "Daredevil" (2003), the caper film "Art Heist" (2004), and the comedy drama "Life of the Party" (2005). In addition to her acting career, she has directed two episodes of "Grey's Anatomy" and founded a production company, Calamity Jane. She has been married to music producer Chris Ivery since 2007; they have three children.


title: Ellen Pompeo

text: Pompeo was born in Everett, Massachusetts, on November 10, 1969. Her father was born in Gesualdo, Italy, and was of Italian, English, and Irish descent; and her mother of Irish ancestry. She was raised as a Catholic. Her mother died of an accidental painkiller overdose when she was four. Her father remarried soon after; he died on September 1, 2012. In 2006, Pompeo said, "I think having my mother die at such a very young age—when she was 39—[made me] appreciate life so much." She has five older siblings: three sisters and two brothers. She was nicknamed "the pencil", and "stracciatella" (gelato flavor). She worked as a bartender in Miami when she started dating her then boyfriend. They moved to New York City in 1995, where she was approached by a casting director to appear in ads for Citibank and L'Oreal.


title: Ellen Pompeo

text: Pompeo's early work included adverts and small independent films. She made her television debut in 1996 by guest-starring in the NBC legal police drama "Law & Order". She made her feature film debut in "Coming Soon" (1999), playing a small part. She made her second appearance in "Law & Order" in 2000, and then guest-starred on "Strangers with Candy", "Strong Medicine", and "Friends". She then moved to Los Angeles in 2001. She participated in the movie "Mambo Café" with Thalía.