Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When was the Boston Tea Party?
The Boston Tea Party was a political and mercantile protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1773.[1] The target was the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, which allowed the British East India company to sell tea from China in American colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts. American Patriots strongly opposed the taxes in the Townshend Act as a violation of their rights. Demonstrators, some disguised as Native Americans, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company.
On December 16, 1773, a group of angry rebels calling themselves the "Sons of Liberty" protested the Tea Act and disguised as Mohawk natives boarded three ships in Boston Harbor loaded with tea and proceeded to dump 92,000 pounds of tea into the ocean.
King George III reacted to the "tea party" by ordering the closing of the port of Boston.
They boarded the ships and threw the chests of tea into the Boston Harbor. The British government responded harshly and the episode escalated into the American Revolution. The Tea Party became an iconic event of American history, and since then other political protests such as the Tea Party movement have referred to themselves as historical successors to the Boston protest of 1773.
On December 16, 1773, a group of white colonists — all men, and members of the Sons of Liberty — met in Boston to protest the tax on tea imposed by England. When their protest went unheeded, they disguised themselves as their idea of Mohawk people, proceeded to Boston harbor, and dumped overboard 342 chests of English tea. (See Boston Tea Party.)
The Boston Tea Party Museum is located on the Congress Street Bridge in Boston. It features reenactments, a documentary, and a number of interactive exhibits. The museum features two replica ships of the period, Eleanor and Beaver. Additionally, the museum possesses one of two known tea chests from the original event, part of its permanent collection.[87]
The Townshend duty on tea was retained when the 1773 Tea Act was passed, which allowed the East India Company to ship tea directly to the colonies. The Boston Tea Party soon followed, which set the stage for the American Revolution.
When new taxes were levied in the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, Whig colonists again responded with protests and boycotts. Merchants organized a non-importation agreement, and many colonists pledged to abstain from drinking British tea, with activists in New England promoting alternatives, such as domestic Labrador tea.[14] Smuggling continued apace, especially in New York and Philadelphia, where tea smuggling had always been more extensive than in Boston. Dutied British tea continued to be imported into Boston, however, especially by Richard Clarke and the sons of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, until pressure from Massachusetts Whigs compelled them to abide by the non-importation agreement.[15]
However, tea and tea taxes became a bone of contention between the American Colonies and Great Britain. This led to the 1773 Boston Tea Party, a precipitating event of the Revolution, when angry Colonists destroyed the tea cargo of three British ships by dumping them into Boston Harbor. As a consequence, tea drinking became unpatriotic. Boycotts of tea led to an increase in consumption of other beverages, such as coffee or herbal teas infused with peppermint, sage or dandelions.
On December 16, 1773, Hewes joined the band of Bostonians who protested the Tea Act by dumping tea into Boston Harbor, an event now called the Boston Tea Party. The protesters divided themselves into three boarding parties, each going aboard one of the three tea ships, Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver. Hewes was appointed "boatswain" of his party that boarded Dartmouth, mostly on account of his "whistling talent." In his capacity as boatswain, Hewes went to the captain of the boarded ship to demand the keys to the tea chests. He also fought with Captain O'Connor, a fellow protester who was trying to take some of the tea for himself. According to Hewes, it took three hours to empty every tea chest and throw the content into the Boston Harbor. Like the other protesters, Hewes then quietly returned to his place of residence.
The East India Company had also been granted competitive advantages over colonial American tea importers to sell tea from its colonies in Asia in American colonies. This led to the Boston Tea Party in which protesters boarded British ships and threw the tea overboard. When protesters successfully prevented the unloading of tea in three other colonies and in Boston, Governor Thomas Hutchinson of the Province of Massachusetts Bay refused to allow the tea to be returned to Britain. This was one of the incidents which led to the American revolution and independence of the American colonies.[50]
In 2006, a libertarian political party called the "Boston Tea Party" was founded. In 2007, the Ron Paul "Tea Party" money bomb, held on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, broke the one-day fund-raising record by raising $6.04 million in 24 hours.[86] Subsequently, these fund-raising "Tea parties" grew into the Tea Party movement, which dominated politics for the next two years, culminating in a voter victory for the Republicans in 2010 who were widely elected to seats in the United States House of Representatives.
In the third segment, Bugs explains to Clyde about the Boston Tea Party. The King is seen approaching a worker in the Royal Tea Warehouse in Boston. With a box of hardware tacks in hand, he orders the worker to "Spread these tacks on the Colonist's tea". When the worker explains: "But Your Majesty, these are carpet tacks", the King dumps the tacks all over the place in a fit of insanity and exclaims: "Well, they're tea tacks now!" and exits, laughing all the way. Bugs explains to Clyde that the Colonists refused to drink their tea with tacks and that's how the Army was formed.
Both the Boston Tea Party and the Philadelphia incident were the result of Americans being upset about Great Britain's decision to tax the American colonies despite a lack of representation in Parliament. The tax on tea particularly angered the colonists, so they boycotted English tea for several years, during which time merchants in several colonial cities resorted to smuggling tea from The Netherlands. It was generally known that Philadelphia merchants were greater smugglers of tea than their Boston counterparts.
The Boston Tea Party was a 1773 colonial protest action which presaged the American Revolution.
Boston Tea Party may also refer to:
A number of colonists were inspired by the Boston Tea Party to carry out similar acts, such as the burning of Peggy Stewart. The Boston Tea Party eventually proved to be one of the many reactions that led to the American Revolutionary War. In his December 17, 1773 entry in his diary, John Adams wrote:
The Boston Tea Party appalled British political opinion makers of all stripes. The action united all parties in Britain against the American radicals. Parliament enacted the Boston Port Act, which closed Boston Harbor until the dumped tea was paid for. This was the first of the so-called Coercive Acts, or Intolerable Acts as they were called by the colonists, passed by Parliament in response to the Boston Tea Party. These harsh measures united many colonists even more in their frustrations against Britain, and were one of the many causes of the American Revolutionary War.
As Europeans developed a taste for tea in the 17th century, rival companies were formed to import the product from China.[4] In England, Parliament gave the East India Company a monopoly on the importation of tea in 1698.[5] When tea became popular in the British colonies, Parliament sought to eliminate foreign competition by passing an act in 1721 that required colonists to import their tea only from Great Britain.[6] The East India Company did not export tea to the colonies; by law, the company was required to sell its tea wholesale at auctions in England. British firms bought this tea and exported it to the colonies, where they resold it to merchants in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.[7]
In New York and Philadelphia, opposition to the Act resulted in the return of tea delivered there back to Britain. In Charleston, the colonists left the tea on the docks to rot. Governor Hutchinson in Boston was determined to leave the ships in port, even though vigilant colonists refused to allow the tea to be landed. Matters reached a crisis when the time period for landing the tea and paying the Townshend taxes was set to expire, and on December 16, 1773, colonists disguised as Indians swarmed aboard three tea-laden ships and dumped their cargo into the harbour in what is now known as the Boston Tea Party. Similar "Destruction of the Tea" (as it was called at the time) occurred in New York and other ports shortly thereafter, though Boston took the brunt of Imperial retaliation, because it was the first "culprit".
Whether or not Samuel Adams helped plan the Boston Tea Party is disputed, but he immediately worked to publicize and defend it.[69] He argued that the Tea Party was not the act of a lawless mob, but was instead a principled protest and the only remaining option the people had to defend their constitutional rights.[70]
In 1773 Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush and member of the Sons of Liberty authored a diatribe inveighing against British Tea and its harmful properties, both physical and political. It was quickly reprinted in Boston, where Young had already spoke out in a similar vein in a letter to the "Boston Evening Post" of October 25. Young is considered to be one of the active organizers of the Boston Tea Party although he himself did not actually participate in the destruction of the tea chests. At the time he was addressing a crowd at the Old South Meeting House on the negative health effects of tea drinking. According to the Boston Tea Party Museuam, this was probably a diversion intended to help the Tea Party organizers by keeping the crowd in the Meeting House while the tea was being destroyed.
What became the genesis of the Bosstown Sound is said to exist, at least in rudimentary form, as early as June 1967, when journalist Mel Lyman's first issue of "Avatar" was pressed. His newspaper carried an advertisement promoting a scheduled event, headlined by two of Boston's earliest psychedelic rock bands, Ill Wind and the Hallucinations, at the Boston Tea Party. Ill Wind and the Hallucinations' performances helped establish the Boston Tea Party as a must-go-to venue for the city's psychedelic scene, and soon other like-minded musical acts -- among them the Velvet Underground, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, and Lothar and the Hand People -- became frequent attractions. Journalist Earl Greyland, described the Boston Tea Party's importance in "Boston After Dark": "[It] occurred on March 15, 1968, when, as the staid WBCN audience sat listening to its usual Muzak, the voice of Frank Zappa asked, 'Are you hung up?' and Cream launched into 'I Feel Free'. That was the beginning of the "American Revolution", a daily seven-hour program originating from the dressing room of the Tea Party. The combination of providing an established performance setting and radio exposure made the Tea Party a gig second in importance only to the Fillmore". Other psychedelic venues that contributed to the promotion of the underground music scene in Boston include the Psychedelic Supermarket, the Crosstown Bus, the Catacombs, and the Unicorn.
One of the many taxes protested by the colonists was a tax on tea, imposed when Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, and retained when most of the provisions of those acts were repealed. With the passage of the Tea Act in 1773, tea sold by the British East India Company would become less expensive than smuggled tea, and there would be reduced profitmaking opportunities for Massachusetts merchants engaged in the tea trade. This led to protests against the delivery of the company's tea to Boston. On December 16, 1773, when a tea ship of the East India Company was planning to land taxed tea in Boston, a group of local men known as the Sons of Liberty sneaked onto the boat the night before it was to be unloaded and dumped all the tea into the harbor, an act known as the Boston Tea Party.
The Boston Tea Party (BTP) was a United States political party named after the event known as the Boston Tea Party of 1773.
The Boston Tea Party has often been referenced in other political protests. When Mohandas K. Gandhi led a mass burning of Indian registration cards in South Africa in 1908, a British newspaper compared the event to the Boston Tea Party.[82] When Gandhi met with the British viceroy in 1930 after the Indian salt protest campaign, Gandhi took some duty-free salt from his shawl and said, with a smile, that the salt was "to remind us of the famous Boston Tea Party."[83]
In 1773, Britain passed the Tea Act. Many of the colonists saw the act as an attempt to force them to accept the taxes established by the Townshend Acts. The act prompted the Boston Tea Party, where a group of rebels threw an entire shipment of tea sent by the British East India Company into Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party was a key event leading up to the revolution, as the British government responded furiously with the Intolerable Acts, demanding compensation for the lost tea from the rebels. This angered the colonists further and led to the American Revolutionary War. The war began in the area surrounding Boston with the Battles of Lexington and Concord.