Ten Tea Parties

Young Americans know the story of 1773's Boston Tea Party - in which 100 colonists (disguised as Native Americans) charged three British ships and dumped 92,000 pounds of tea into the Boston Harbour. But do you know the story of the Philadelphia Tea Party (December 1773)? How about the New York Tea Party (April 1774)? The Annapolis Tea Party (October 1774)? The Charleston SC Tea Party (November 1774)? Revolutionary America was full of tea parties - and "Ten Tea Parties" is the first book to chronicle all of these uniquely American protests. Author and historian Joseph Cummins begins with the history of the East India Company (the biggest global corporation of the 18th century) and their staggering financial losses during the Boston Tea Party (more than a million dollars' worth of tea in today's money). From there we travel to Philadelphia, where 8,000 colonists gathered on Christmas Day to threaten the captain of a ship with tarring and feathering. Then we sail for New York City, where the Sons of Liberty stormed a British ship and tossed 18 chests of tea into the Hudson River. Still later, in Annapolis, a mob of patriots actually set a British ship on fire; its crew jumped overboard and the smell of the detestable weed carried for miles. "Ten Tea Parties" concludes with a discussion of how Americans have returned again and again to the tea party as a political protest. In 1973, during the 200th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, protestors dressed in tri-cornered hats and knee breeches to hang effigies of Richard Nixon. And in early 2009, a new political Tea Party formed out of disaffected conservative voters.