Exactly 240 years ago today, on the 16th of December, 1773, a gang of Bostonians dressed as Indians boarded the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver and dumped 90,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor.  That fateful action on December 16, 1773, and Parliament’s inflammatory response — closing the Port of Boston, altering the colony’s charter, radically limiting popular government in Massachusetts, allowing the quartering of troops in private houses, among other arbitrary measures — precipitated the American Revolution.  The Boston Tea Party, like the revolution more generally, seems to be a relic of a bygone age, despite the modern namesake it’s inspired.  Is it just the appellation that reverberates today?

Some scholars, most notably Harvard’s Jill Lepore, reject any comparison between 1773 and the present, accusing the modern Tea Party of “historical fundamentalism” for, in part, making “political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets.”  But that criticism rests on a fundamentalism of its own, presupposing that the past is so distinct from the present that the political practices, ideas, and modes of 1773 cannot possibly be applicable today.  America’s revolutionaries did not think about history that way, nor do many Americans today.      MORE …