American Revolutionary War: British general John Burgoyne's Saratoga campaign ended with his surrender to the Americans, later convincing France to enter the war in alliance with the United States.

The American Revolutionary War, also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was the armed conflict that comprised the final eight years of the broader American Revolution, in which American Patriot forces organized as the Continental Army and commanded by George Washington defeated the British Army. The conflict was fought in North America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic Ocean. The war's outcome seemed uncertain for most of the war. But Washington and the Continental Army's decisive victory in the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 led King George III and the Kingdom of Great Britain to negotiate an end to the war in the Treaty of Paris two years later, in 1783, in which the British monarchy acknowledged the independence of the Thirteen Colonies, leading to the establishment of the United States as an independent and sovereign nation.

General John "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne was a British Army officer, playwright and politician who sat in the House of Commons of Great Britain from 1761 to 1792. He first saw action during the Seven Years' War when he participated in several battles, most notably during the Spanish invasion of Portugal in 1762.

The Saratoga campaign in 1777 was an attempt by the British to gain military control of the strategically important Hudson River valley during the American Revolutionary War. It ended in the surrender of a British army, which historian Edmund Morgan argues, "was a great turning point of the war, because it won for Americans the foreign assistance which was the last element needed for victory."

French involvement in the American Revolutionary War of 1775–1783 began in 1776 when the Kingdom of France secretly shipped supplies to the Continental Army of the Thirteen Colonies upon its establishment in June 1775. France was a long-term historical rival with the Kingdom of Great Britain, from which the Thirteen Colonies were attempting to separate. Having lost its own North American colony to Britain in the Seven Years' War, France sought to weaken Britain by helping the American insurgents.