On the night of December 16, 1773, a party of Bostonians boarded three British vessels and dumped over three hundred chests of tea into Boston Harbor. In addition to objecting to taxation without representation, the participants were also protesting the Tea Act of 1773, which forced them to pay a tax on top of the monopoly prices set by the East India Company and benefitted the family of the royal governor of Massachusetts. To commemorate the 250th anniversary of this harbinger of the Revolution, Benjamin Carp, Ph.D., professor of history at Brooklyn College, discusses the event by examining the actions of those who carried out the raid in the context of the global story of British interests in India, North America and the Caribbean.
About the Speaker
Benjamin L. Carp is the Daniel M. Lyons Chair in American History at Brooklyn College and an affiliate for the history program of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia and specializes in the history of the American Revolution and the eighteenth century, particularly in the seaport cities of eastern North America. He is the author of several books and scholarly articles, including Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (Yale University Press, 2013) and The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2023). Additionally, Dr. Carp contributed to the anthology Women Waging War in the American Revolution, edited by historian Holly Mayer, and has also written for wider audiences in BBC History, Colonial Williamsburg, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He has also appeared on podcasts such as The Alarmist, History Extra and Revolution 250, and on various radio and television outlets. For his book Defiance of the Patriots. Dr. Carp was awarded the 2013 Society of the Cincinnati Prize.