This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, a political protest that occurred on December 16, 1773 in Boston. Bringing vividly to life the diverse array of people and places that the Tea Party brought together — from Chinese tea-pickers to English businessmen, Native American tribes, sugar plantation slaves, and Boston’s ladies of leisure — Professor Benjamin L. Carp will share with us how a determined group of New Englanders shook the foundations of the British Empire, and what this has meant for Americans since.

Benjamin L. Carp is the Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History at Brooklyn College and teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His latest book is The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution. He also wrote Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (Yale, 2010), which won the Cox Book Prize from the Society of the Cincinnati in 2013, and Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford, 2007). He has written about nationalism, firefighters, wet nurses, Benjamin Franklin, and Quaker merchants in Charleston, for scholarly journals like Early American Studies, Civil War History, New York History, the William and Mary Quarterly, and popular publications such as BBC History, Colonial Williamsburg, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and he previously taught at the University of Edinburgh and Tufts University.

Please see the Lincoln 250 site for more information about this historic celebration.