The Boston Tea Party was the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor remembered as an early event leading to the American Revolution and America250.
On December 16, 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty boarded tea ships and dumped hundreds of chests of East India Company tea into the harbor. They opposed the Tea Act and the broader principle of taxation without representation.
The protest was not simply a dispute over the price of tea. The Tea Act allowed the East India Company to sell tea directly in the colonies, while colonists still objected to Parliament’s power to tax them. Britain responded with the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by many colonists.
A common mix-up is confusing the Boston Tea Party with the Boston Massacre, which occurred in 1770. The Tea Party took place nearly two years before the Battles of Lexington and Concord began the Revolutionary War in 1775.