I'd like to know what is interesting or important about the American War of Independence from an objective point of view (say, if aliens were studying a history of planet earth with no human agenda, what about it would be noteworthy).
I've been thinking about this lately as I haven't studied the war since high school, and since I went to a conservative Christian school I think my textbook may have had some bias in how it portrayed early US history.
One immediate consequence was that while the war did little to change the overall balance among the great powers of Europe; France nearly bankrupted itself supporting the Americans directly and engaging the British Empire across the world. The debt crisis in France weakened the monarchy and was an important cause of the French Revolution.