On our last day in Boston, we visited the Tea Party ship! This was a living history experience: we each became a character and went through the whole event with living history guides! When we entered, we each got a character card which said WHICH of the historical participants we were playing, along with information about that person. We listened to a rousing speech about taxes in a replica of the meeting house (we cheered), and to a speech urging us to stay calm and work within the system (which we booed). Then we went through a museum with several stages and exhibits and watched living history events take place in front of us, and got to see artifacts from the night itself, including one of the actual casks of tea! This cask had washed up on the shore near Boston and had been kept by a family for generations – some kids had used it for a dollhouse, so it had some children’s drawings on the side (which was super-cute) – before being donated to the museum in the 20th century. One very cool presentation had portraits on the wall, then two of them started moving and talking to each other and to us! They were on video, but the appearance was matte (not a shiny screen) and we didn’t guess that they would come to life like that. At the end of the tour we went aboard the tea party ship itself and got to throw a cask of tea overboard. Each kid got to do it (then they hauled it back up with a rope so the next person could do it). It was well done. We had many different experiences of history on this trip -- many different ways of trying to get historical concepts across to the public -- and living history exhibits are always really vivid and memorable. I even remember tossing the tea overboard when I was a kid visiting my sister in Boston, and now my kids got to do it too! One of the things that I really noticed about the Tea Party was how careful the original participants were to destroy NOTHING but the tea. The captain and crew did not get in the way – it wasn’t their tea, it belonged to the East India Company. The participants carefully checked the ship’s inventory list and made sure to throw nothing else overboard. They were also careful NOT to damage any part of the ship or harm the crew in any way. At one point a Tea Party participant broke a padlock on the ship, which belonged to one of the captains, and the participants replaced the padlock with a new one the next day. This was supposed to be a surgical strike against the tea and ONLY the tea. As I get older and learn more about history, and public protests, I can see how important this level of control was: if you are protesting, it’s important to stay tightly focused on the cause itself, and not let anger boil over into more general destructiveness. Destroying targeted property, like the tea, is going to make the owners angry (which is part of the point) but the political point will be made if the owner loses ONLY the tea. The owner now has to think hard about the tea and why it was destroyed and why the residents were so angry about it. If, on the other hand, the participants damage OTHER property, besides the tea, then the owners’ anger can generalize in an easier direction -- getting mad at dangerous, destructive rioters – and their anger will gain a layer of self-righteousness. It’s important NOT to trigger that self-righteous response because that’s much harder to budge. The original problem is less likely to be solved if the owners’ response gets generalized and strengthened like this, so the Tea Party participants were careful to ONLY target the tea on these ships. (Note that it is also possible to sabotage a protest like this by infiltrating it with people who are instructed to become violent and destructive. This happens with some frequency. The violence and destructiveness then become the lightning rod for the counter response, and the original reason for the protest may get lost in the self-righteous countermove against disorderly conduct. If that happens, the protesters may get the movement back on track by trying to get the response to use excessive force, which may swing public opinion in their favor. And so on. There is definitely an element of political theater in all this, in enacting a scene in order to sway public opinion one way or the other). After the Tea Party ship we got lunch at a local Middle Eastern restaurant, and ate it in a local park right on the water. It was a beautiful day. We had a relaxing afternoon at the park – I lay on the grass for a while (just like a local!), and the kids played. It was good to relax and take it easy a bit after several days of visiting museums. We went through Little Italy again on our way home, and picked up some fresh pasta for dinner, and got gelato as a midafternoon snack. At the very end we visited a re-seller produce market, and went into a food hall with lots of local vendors and got some fun foods like apple donuts and interesting meats to put on the pasta for dinner.