What war did the Americans fight to win independence from Britain?

Why this is the answer

The same war goes by three accepted names: the American Revolution, the Revolutionary War, and the War for Independence. The study guide places the birth of the country inside the war, since the colonies declared independence while the fighting was going on. The colonists fought the British because they did not have self-government. Great Britain let the colonies keep their own colonial congresses only as long as the colonists paid British taxes and obeyed British laws. In the 1760s Britain was fighting a war in Europe and North America and raised taxes on the colonies to help pay for it, without letting colonial representatives vote. Britain answered the protests with laws to punish the colonists: more taxes, and the colonial congresses were made illegal. In 1775 colonists in Massachusetts began fighting British troops, and soon all thirteen colonies had joined in. They formed an army and named George Washington its general. The fighting stopped in 1781, when the British army surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, but two more years passed before the peace treaty of 1783, in which Great Britain accepted that the United States had won and was an independent nation. That agreement, the Treaty of Paris, also set the official boundary between the new country and Canada. The wording deserves a moment of attention, because the parentheses in the official list matter. "American" is optional in two of the names: "the Revolutionary War" and "the War for Independence" are complete as they stand. In the first name it is part of the answer, so say "the American Revolution" in full. Another mistake is answering with an event from the war, such as Yorktown or the Declaration of Independence, when the officer is asking for the name of the war itself. To keep the dates straight, picture the war's two ends: it opened with fighting in Massachusetts in 1775 and closed with a treaty eight years later, in 1783.