The Tea Party and The Battle Over American History

The rhetoric of the Tea Party is peppered with references to the American Revolution. And the eponymous event — the one that took place in 1773, when the Sons of Liberty emptied hundreds of crates of British Tea into the Boston Harbor — is just one such example. But the modern-day Tea Party is hardly the first political movement to use the past as political fodder. That issue is at the heart of a forthcoming book by Jill Lepore, the New Yorker writer and Harvard historian. In the “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History,” historian and writer Jill Lepore says the 1773 Tea Party has been a political device for many groups over the years.