Boston Tea Party

Rating:
Summary: The chain of events that led to the Boston Tea Party
Review: School children hear about the Boston Tea Party when they begin studying American history, but why colonists would dress up as Indians and throw shiploads of tea into a harbor in the middle of the night might seen a rather strange thing to do. Pamela Duncan Edwards provides a different take on the familiar tale with the aid of some knowledgeable mice that comments on the story on the bottom of each two-page spread (children will not be the only ones who are immediately reminded of the singing mice from the movie "Babe"). The story is related quite simply, using text that is clearly modeled the old nursery rhyme "The House that Jack Built" to build from the tea grown in a far off land that eventually end up in Boston harbor. While the text deals with the narrative chain of events, the aforementioned mice provided most of the historical detail (e.g., smuggling in cheaper tea from Holland) although some of their number are rather preoccupied with the idea of tea and the fear of cats.

The back of the book includes a time-line from the end of the French and Indian war in 1763 to the signing of the Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution in 1783, putting the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773 in more of a historical context. More important than the amount of information that Edwards works creatively into the story is the emphasis on the causality of these events. Understanding that history is not merely a list of chronological events but rather events that have causes and consequences is probably more important than any aspect of the Boston Tea Party.