What was the name of the 1773 Boston protest in which colonists dumped tea into Boston Harbor?

The 1773 Boston protest in which colonists dumped tea into Boston Harbor was the Boston Tea Party.

The protest took place on December 16, 1773, after Parliament passed the Tea Act. The law allowed the East India Company to sell tea directly to the American colonies, while retaining a tax that many colonists viewed as an assertion of Parliament’s authority without colonial representation.

Members of Boston’s Sons of Liberty boarded tea ships and threw 340 chests of tea into the harbor. Some participants disguised themselves as Indigenous people, although the protest was organized by colonial activists rather than by Indigenous communities.

The Tea Party was not simply a complaint about high prices: the Tea Act actually lowered the legal price of tea. Britain responded with the punitive Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by many colonists. Those measures intensified resistance and helped lead to the First Continental Congress in 1774 and open war in 1775.