No Taxation Without Representation: 1768 Petition, Memorial, and Remonstrance

The most eloquent and effective taxation protest leading to the American Revolution was sent by Virginia to the British Government. The Virginia House of Burgesses sent a copy to every other colonial assembly, stimulating similar protests from Georgia, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina (some copying the wording). Although this protest led directly to the Declaration of Independence, it is not mentioned by history books that should describe and evaluate it.

Called "Petition to His Majesty, Memorial to the House of Lords, and Remonstrance to the House of Commons" (PMR), a 1769 reprint of this missive surfaced in 1994 auction, published by the Virginia Burgesses whose members included George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. "No Taxation without Representation" makes available photographs of this 1769 PMR imprint and also the 1768 manuscript original, together with similar protests from other American colonies. It also links to supporting 18th-century documents.

Henry Gladney was born in Czechoslovakia, grew up in Canada, and studied at the University of Toronto and Princeton University before joining IBM Research in 1963. There with collaborators, he invented a real-time time-sharing system used in 16,000 large computers (1968), widely emulated access control software (1975), and digital library services that became IBM's Content Manager offering (1993). After leaving IBM, he designed the first reliable long-term preservation method for digital documents (2002).

Gladney is the author of one hundred peer-reviewed works and a book, Preserving Digital Information (2007).