America's Tea Parties

February 1, 2016
Moss (Barbed Wire Baseball) again delves into America’s past, digging beneath the veneer of textbook accounts to reveal nuanced, lesser-known angles of a historical event. This time she spotlights the fact there was more than one “tea party” in the American colonies in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. After describing how Britain meant to prop up the near-bankrupt East India Company with unfair import taxes, Moss explains how steadfast colonists turned back British trading ships, disposed of their cargo, or otherwise disrupted the tea trade in New York, Charleston, and Philadelphia, in addition to Boston, where “men and boys smudged their faces... to look like proud Mohawk Indians. Nobody could have mistaken them for real Mohawks, but they were definitely proud!” Conversational storytelling helps ameliorate the myriad names and dates, and a detailed time line clears up any chronological confusion. Archival images, documents, and maps contextualize the “tea revolts,” as do sidebar explorations of such topics as Sons of Liberty resistance groups and the practice of tarring and feathering. An extensive bibliography, index, and author’s note wrap up this thorough and involving account. Ages 8–12.

Starred review from February 1, 2016
Moss reminds readers that the tea parties of the 1770s were not strictly a Boston affair, no matter how much the city enjoys its spuriously unique association. Like the powder alarms that peppered the Colonial countryside, there were four serious "tea parties" that met the ships of the East India Company in 1773 and 1774. Evincing Moss' bright and smart research work, this story of the various tea parties is embellished with lovely period maps, political cartoons and broadsides, prints, and paintings by John Singleton Copley and Joseph-Siffrede Duplessis. As well as covering the instigations and outcomes of the parties in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston, North Carolina, Moss adds boxed items to throw particular light on the Sons of Liberty, coffeehouses, the East India Company ("with great wealth comes great temptation. And great temptation often leads to gross corruption," a very telling example of a corporation "too big to fail"), taxation, and tarring and feathering (she lets the Bostonians off the hook--it "rarely caused permanent damage"). Moss adds political commentary that is both stirring--Benjamin Franklin writing that England's Parliament has "no idea that people can act from any principal but that of [self]-interest"--and provocative, as with her own question to readers: "What price does a moral standard have, after all?...What principals are worth paying for?" That meant taxation without say to Colonials; we might ask ourselves about working conditions and terrible wages. A very fine piece of historical reclamation that broadens our understanding of the road to revolution. (Nonfiction. 11-14)

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March 1, 2016

Gr 5-8-Though most students are familiar with the story of how patriots poured tea into Boston Harbor to protest the tax, they may not be aware of the stories of similar tea protests in other colonies. Moss explores four different cities (Boston, Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia), describing how anger over the taxes on tea helped fuel the American Revolution. The historical accounts are expertly told, and readers will be easily drawn in. The author explains why the tax was initially put into place and then moves through the events surrounding the selling of tea. Primary documents that include letters, advertisements, maps, and newspaper articles are interwoven. VERDICT A great purchase for supplementing American Revolution curriculum units.-April Sanders, Spring Hill College, Mobile, AL

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