Boston tea

Boston Iced Tea

The Boston Tea Party was a political protest staged on December 16, 1773 at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts. American colonists, frustrated at Britain for imposing “taxation without representation,” dumped 342 chests of British tea into the harbor. The event was the first major act of defiance to British rule over the colonists.

The Tea Act of 1773 was a British Law, passed by the Parliament of Great Britain on May 10, 1773. It was designed to bail out the British East India Company and expand the company's monopoly on the tea trade to all British Colonies. It was selling excess tea at a reduced price.

A big pot of tea flavored with cranberry juice. Delicious and refreshing!

Very few colonists wanted or even envisaged independence at this stage. (Dickinson had hinted at such a possibility with expressions of pain that were obviously sincere.) The colonial struggle for power, although charged with intense feeling, was not an attempt to change government structure but an argument over legal interpretation. The core of the colonial case was that, as British subjects, they were entitled to the same privileges as their fellow subjects in Britain. They could not…

Boston Tea Party Cause and Effect Anchor Chart American Revolution 5th Grade Social Studies

Common wisdom is that “taxation without representation” was the rallying cry for tossing 90,000 pounds of tea worth $1,000,000 in today’s dollars into Boston Harbor in 1773, an iconic act of civil …

Tea party

The Boston Tea Party, protesting the English tax on tea.

Tips for visiting the Boston Tea Party Museum with kids -- what to know, what it is like and what to expect before you go.