The Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, 1773, a major pre-Revolution protest remembered during America250.
That night, members of the Sons of Liberty boarded three East India Company ships in Boston Harbor and dumped hundreds of chests of tea into the water. They were protesting the Tea Act and Parliament's authority to tax the colonies without colonial representation. The protest followed weeks of public meetings and a standoff involving Governor Thomas Hutchinson and the tea consignees.
The event was not simply a reaction to an unusually high tea price. The Tea Act actually lowered the price of legally imported tea while preserving a tax and giving the East India Company a privileged position. Many colonists saw those arrangements as a threat to their political rights and local merchants.
Britain responded with the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by many colonists. Those measures intensified resistance and helped lead to the First Continental Congress in 1774. The Boston Tea Party therefore became an important escalation between Britain and its North American colonies.