He became heir to the throne on the death of his father in 1751, succeeding his grandfather, George II, in 1760. He was the third Hanoverian monarch and the first one to be born in England and to use English as his first language.
George III is widely remembered for two things: losing the American colonies and going mad. This is far from the whole truth.
George's direct responsibility for the loss of the colonies is not great. He opposed their bid for independence to the end, but he did not develop the policies, such as the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend duties of 1767 on tea, paper and other products, which led to war in 1775-76 and which had the support of Parliament.
These policies were largely due to the financial burdens of garrisoning and administering the vast expansion of territory brought under the British Crown in America, the costs of a series of wars with France and Spain in North America, and the loans given to the East India Company (then responsible for administering India).
By the 1770s, and at a time when there was no income tax, the national debt required an annual revenue of £4 million to service it.
The declaration of American independence on 4 July 1776, the end of the war with the surrender by British forces in 1782, and the defeat which the loss of the American colonies represented, could have threatened the Hanoverian throne.
Read a letter by George III on the loss of America[PDF icon] Read a letter by George III on the loss of AmericaHowever, George's strong defence of what he saw as the national interest and the prospect of long war with revolutionary France made him, if anything, more popular than before.
The American war, its political aftermath and family anxieties placed great strain on George in the 1780s. After serious bouts of illness in 1788-89 and again in 1801, George became permanently deranged in 1810.
He was mentally unfit to rule in the last decade of his reign; his eldest son - the later George IV - acted as Prince Regent from 1811. Some medical historians have said that George III's mental instability was caused by a hereditary physical disorder called porphyria.
George's accession in 1760 marked a significant change in royal finances. Since 1697, the monarch had received an annual grant of £700,000 from Parliament as a contribution to the Civil List, i.e. civil government costs (such as judges' and ambassadors' salaries) and the expenses of the Royal Household.
In 1760, it was decided that the whole cost of the Civil List should be provided by Parliament, in return for the surrender of the hereditary revenues by the King for the duration of his reign.
The first 25 years of George's reign were politically controversial for reasons other than the conflict with America. The King was accused by some critics, particularly Whigs (a leading political grouping), of attempting to reassert royal authority in an unconstitutional manner.
In fact, George took a conventional view of the constitution and the powers left to the Crown after the conflicts between Crown and Parliament in the 17th century.
Although he was careful not to exceed his powers, George's limited ability and lack of subtlety in dealing with the shifting alliances within the Tory and Whig political groupings in Parliament meant that he found it difficult to bring together ministries which could enjoy the support of the House of Commons.
His problem was solved first by the long-lasting ministry of Lord North (1770-82) and then, William, from 1783, by Pitt the Younger, whose ministry lasted until 1801.
George III was the most attractive of the Hanoverian monarchs. He was a good family man and devoted to his wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, for whom he bought the Queen's House (later enlarged to become Buckingham Palace). They had 15 children, 13 of whom reached adulthood.
However, his sons disappointed him and, after his brothers made unsuitable secret marriages, the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 was passed at George's insistence. (Under this Act, the Sovereign must give consent to the marriage of any lineal descendant of George II, with certain exceptions.)
Being extremely conscientious, George read all government papers and sometimes annoyed his ministers by taking such a prominent interest in government and policy.
His political influence could be decisive. In 1801, he forced Pitt the Younger to resign when the two men disagreed about whether Roman Catholics should have full civil rights. George III, because of his coronation oath to maintain the rights and privileges of the Church of England, was against the proposed measure.
One of the most cultured of monarchs, George started a new royal collection of books (65,000 of his books were later given to the British Museum, as the nucleus of a national library) and opened his library to scholars.
In 1768, George founded and paid the initial costs of the Royal Academy of Arts (now famous for its exhibitions).
342 chests were poured into the Boston Harbor. It weighed about 92,000 pounds. The reported damage was <span>£9,659 and it is worth $1,700,000 in today's money. Hoped this helped!</span>
The main resource used to produce energy during the Industrial Revolution was coal. The early uses of wind, water and wood for energy were replaced by coal, which could produce high levels of heat, power machines that were much more efficient and replace slow, manual labor.
1. Johnston and Lee attacked McClellan - Battle of Seven Pines; This was part of the Peninsula Campaign designed to quickly capture Richmond2. Commanded Army of the Potomac - Gen. McClellan, his distrust led to Lincoln replacing him. He would also later challenge Lincoln in the 1964 Presidential Election.3. Kept Union Army in Washington, D.C. - "Stonewall" Jackson; Jackson was quite possibly a better General than Lee; Lee mourned his death greatly. He was accidentally killed by one of his own sentries. 4. Commanded Army of Virginia - Robert E Lee; He was originally Lincoln's first choice for the Commander of the Union forces. When Virginia seceded, however, he could not take up arms against his own countrymen and kin. 5. Commanded Union forces in the East - General Halleck; His defense first mindset led to his quick replacement. Lincoln called him a glorified clerk6. defeated Pope at the 2nd Battle of Bull Run - Jackson and Lee; Pope met adn attacked Jackson's forces. When Lee's men arrived, Pope had to retreat7. Bloodiest single day battle - Antietam; it was also one of the earlier battles. It showed that the war was not going to be over quickly.
Answer: Both have important elements of civilization in common — among the earliest of written languages, a network of interconnected cities, cooperating and conflicting, formalized government and religion, and so on — but these were very different civilizations, not least for geographical and climatological reasons.
Mesopotamia is a complex example of a river valley civilization — complex because it consists of not one river, but two, the Tigris and the Euphrates, but still I think we can call this a paradigm case of a river valley civilization. We also know that the earliest origins of civilization emerged here, or nearby (Anatolia may be the ultimate point of origin for civilization in this geographical region). The deep history of civilization originating in this region has meant repeated bifurcations in the history of the region, hence cultural and civilizational complexity.
The origins of Mayan civilization are as yet not sufficiently known to determine whether Mayan civilization was completely autonomous in its origins, or if the idea of civilization came to Mesoamerica by way of idea diffusion from the earliest sources of settled neolithic agriculture in the Rio Balsas valley (where corn originated in what is now southern Mexico). Whether or not a civilization emerged autonomously is not always a central question, but in the case of Mayan civilization it should be a central question, because one of the most distinctive things about Mayan civilization is that it is a civilization of a tropical rainforest. Most autonomously emerging civilizations appeared in river valleys, but Mayan civilization appeared and flourished in the jungles of Mesoamerica. There are few other examples of civilizations of the tropical rainforest in the world, the Khmer civilization being another, but in the case of the Khmer we know that it did not originate autonomously, as it comes much later in history when the idea of civilization was already diffused in Indochina.
