http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11051/pub_detail.asp
The modern-day Tea Party is a loose amalgamation of people who came together in March 2009 to protest against passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act otherwise known as Obamacare. There was a large gathering in Washington, D.C. with estimates of several hundred thousand to a million participants.
There had been other events associated with the Tea Party movement and in the 2010 midterm elections the movement was credited with returning power to the Republican Party in the House of Representatives by supporting candidates that associated themselves with the movement. It is, however, not a political party in its own right.
The story of the original Tea Party that occurred on December 16, 1773 is told in a new book, “Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot” (Quirk Books) by Joseph Cummins, a historian who quite coincidently lives in Maplewood, NJ, my home town for more than sixty years until I moved to an apartment complex one town over. Maplewood has a number of homes from the Revolutionary War era so a sense of history pervades the community. Just up the road is Morristown, the site of one of George Washington’s winter headquarters and Jockey Hollow where his soldiers were billeted.
Cummins’ book is a useful and perhaps surprising reminder that Boston was not the only site where British tea was dumped overboard rather than pay even the threepence tax on it. There were in fact similar events in Philadelphia, Charleston, New York, and in the other colonies, Chesterown and Annapolis in Maryland; York, Maine; Edenton and Wilmington, North Carolina; and Greenwich, New Jersey.
