Title: Popular sovereignty in the United States
Content:  The concept of popular sovereignty (from which the consent of the governed derives its importance) did not originate in North America; its intellectual roots can be traced back to 17th- and 18th-century European political philosophy. The American contribution was the translation of these ideas into a formal structure of government. Before the American Revolution, there were few examples of a people creating their own government. Most had experienced government as an inheritance—as monarchies or other expressions of power. The American Revolution resulted in a government based on popular sovereignty, the first large-scale establishment of this concept (although it had been discussed and experimented in European contexts). The early Americans supported the contention that governments were legitimate only if they 
Title: Self-governing colony
Content:  The term "self-governing colony" has sometimes been used in relation to the direct rule of a Crown colony by an executive governor, elected under a limited franchise, such as in Massachusetts between 1630 and 1684. The first local legislatures raised in the English overseas possessions were the House of Burgesses of Virginia (1619) and the House of Assembly of Bermuda (1620), originally part of Virginia. The Parliament of Bermuda, which now also includes a Senate, is the third-oldest in the Commonwealth of Nations, after the Tynwald and Westminster (currently the Parliament of the United Kingdom). Of the three, only Bermuda's has legislated continuously, with the Royalist camp maintaining control of the archipelago during the Commonwealth of England and the Protectorate. However, in the modern sense of the term, the first self-governing colony is generally 
Title: Concurrent majority
Content:  Prior to the American Revolution, most governments were controlled by small minorities of ruling elites. Most of the population was completely disfranchised, even in countries like Switzerland whose governments (local, regional, and federal) were democratic by contemporary standards. The conception of government that materialized during the separation of the United States from Great Britain marked a movement away from such control toward wider suffrage. The problem of tyranny then became a problem of limiting the majority's power.
Title: History of Australia (1788–1850)
Content:  Traditional Aboriginal society had been governed by councils of elders and a corporate decision-making process, but the first European-style governments established after 1788 were autocratic and run by appointed governors—although English law was transplanted into the Australian colonies by virtue of the doctrine of reception, thus notions of the rights and processes established by the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689 were brought from Britain by the colonists. Agitation for representative government began soon after the settlement of the colonies. From 1788 until the 1850s, the governance of the colonies, including most policy decision-making, was largely in the hands of the governors, who were 
Title: History of Ohio
Content:  The rebellion of 1820 firmly rooted the tradition of sovereignty in the state. In 1859, Governor Salmon P. Chase reaffirmed that tradition, stating: "We have rights which the Federal Government must not invade — rights superior to its power, on which our sovereignty depends; and we mean to assert those rights against all tyrannical assumptions of authority." Following the War of the Rebellion, the debate over ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments reignited the sovereignty movement in Ohio. General Durbin Ward stated: "Fellow citizens of Ohio, I boldly assert that the States of this Union have always had, both before and since the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, entire sovereignty over the whole subject of suffrage in all its relations and bearings. Ohio has that sovereignty now, and it cannot be taken from her..." As recently as 2009, the tradition re-emerged, with an Ohio sovereignty resolution passing in the state senate, and signatures being collected to place a Testate sovereignty amendment on the ballot in 2011.
Title: Popular sovereignty in the United States
Content:  Before the Civil War that before and after the revolution, Americans believed "that the people in a republic, like a king in a monarchy, exercised plenary authority as the sovereign. This interpretation persisted from the revolutionary period up to the Civil War." Despite this widespread belief, the term "popular sovereignty" was infrequently used by the early Americans. In expressing the fundamental concept of rule by the people, they described an ideal of how the people would exercise sovereignty in the US and state officers and employees would be public servants. The phrase "popular sovereignty" did not become popular until the 1840s.
Title: Self-determination
Content:  The American Revolution of the 1770s has been seen as the first assertion of the right of national and democratic self-determination, because of the explicit invocation of natural law, the natural rights of man, as well as the consent of, and sovereignty by, the people governed; these ideas were inspired particularly by John Locke's enlightened writings of the previous century. Thomas Jefferson further promoted the notion that the will of the people was supreme, especially through authorship of the United States Declaration of Independence which inspired Europeans throughout the 19th century. The French Revolution was motivated similarly and legitimatized the 
Title: History of the United States Congress
Content:  Although one can trace the history of the Congress of the United States to the First Continental Congress, which met in the autumn of 1774, the true antecedent of the United States Congress was convened on May 10, 1775 with twelve colonies in attendance. A year later, on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress declared the thirteen colonies free and independent states, referring to them as the "United States of America." The Second Continental Congress was the national government until March 1, 1781, supervised the war and diplomacy, and adopted the Articles of Confederation before the States ratified it in 1781. One common term for patriot was "Congress Man"—a supporter of Congress against the King. The Congress of the Confederation governed the United States for eight years (March 1, 1781 to March 4, 1789). There was no chief executive or president before 1789, so Congress governed the United States.
Title: Local government in the United States
Content:  When North America was colonized by Europeans from the 17th century onward, there was initially little control from governments back in Europe. Many settlements began as shareholder or stockholder business enterprises, and while the king of Britain had technical sovereignty, in most instances "full governmental authority was vested in the company itself." Settlers had to fend for themselves; compact towns sprung up based as legal corporations in what has been described as "pure democracy": The people, owing to the necessity of guarding against the Indians and wild animals, and to their desire to attend the same church, settled in small, compact communities, or townships, which they called towns. The town was a 
Title: The Radicalism of the American Revolution
Content:  the government—lost its significance for a system in which the people participated throughout. The liberty that was now emphasized was personal or private...[they began to] regard public and private liberty as antagonistic rather than complementary...Such a total grounding of government in self-interest and consent had made old-fashioned popular revolutions obsolete." In 1992, as Gordon S. Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution first circulated among scholars, historian Daniel T. Rodgers attempted to define the parameters of the debates launched by The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Creation of the American Republic. Rodgers posited periodization as the source of much controversy between what he deemed 

Question: when did the tradition of self government began in america?
Answer: 1783.