A Year of Dumping Tea Dangerously

My new book Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot ) is getting some good notices--at least, New Jersey Monthly finds it "engaging." The reaction the book is getting around the internet is interesting. The phrase "tea party" in the title is incredibly polarizing. Some people, without reading the book, see the word patriotic in the title and think it must be a current-day Tea Party screed, while others who empathize with the Tea Party are certain it's sympathetic to them.

In fact, like most of my books, its nonpartisan--aiming for the history that people have forgotten. In this case, the book is about the tea parties that took place during colonial times--aside from Boston. Up and down the eastern seaboard, from York, Maine, to Charleston, South Carolina, colonists dumped tea, burned tea, and boycotted tea. They threatened those who delivered tea —be they ship’s captains or humble peddlers—with everything from tarring and feathering to financial ruin. They scorned neighbors who drank tea and concocted an entirely fictitious sickness narrative around tea; they claimed tea stunted growth, turned men into pygmies, and transformed women into, as one patriot writer put it, “God knows what.” They claimed that tea was stomped into chests by Chinese men with dirty feet, that it was infested with bugs.

Taken together, these ten tea parties form an untold narrative of American independence, a narrative that contains the DNA of future American protest movements.  Americans in 1773-74 put aside their geographical and cultural differences to band together as a nation—as one. This had never happened before the tea parties. Colonists overcame what historian T.H. Breen calls “local jealousies and mutual ignorance, profound fear and clashing identities” to find “a common political vision”—what one tea-burning group of citizens called “a general American union.”

More about the book in another post. As we face the most fractious general election year in recent memory, I think the colonial Year of Dumping Tea Dangerously can teach us something.