In the 1750s, North America took center stage in the world’s first truly global war. In Europe and nearly everywhere else, this bitter contest among the great empires of Britain, France, and Spain is known as the Seven Years War (1756–1763). Here in the United States we call it the French and Indian War. Join University of Maryland historian Dr. Richard Bell as he tracks the shifting fortunes of these several European forces, as well as their Native and colonial American allies, on American soil. We will examine the peace treaty that Britain and France finally signed in 1763 to bring this destructive war to an end and the peculiar legacy of American colonists’ involvement: how their participation reinforced a sense of themselves as essential partners in the British Empire, but also sowed the seeds of the imperial crisis that would culminate just 20 years later in American independence.