The Townshend Acts, a series of acts passed, beginning in 1767 were the acts that eventually led to the Boston Massacre. Anger over the Townshend Acts led to the occupation of Boston by British troops in 1768, which eventually resulted in the Boston Massacre of 1770.
These phenomenal age paved way to the age of "enlightenment" where there was a loosely organized intellectual movement, secular, rationalist, liberal, and egalitarian in outlook and values, that flourished in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The name was self-bestowed, and the terminology of darkness and light was identical in the major European languages. <span>The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and came to advance ideals such as liberty, progress, tolerance, </span>fraternity<span>, </span>constitutional government<span>, and </span>separation of church and state.
