Oh Boston, it was wicked awesome! Ha! I am not a city girl but I have to admit that I do love Boston... The history of the city might have something to do with that. Although Philadelphia is the birthplace of the United States, Boston is the "cradle of liberty," the center of resistance that led to the American Revolution and the United States making it the perfect place to end our trip, at least in my opinion.
Wednesday night's visit to Fenway Park was an absolute blast! I wish I lived closer to a MBL team (the SA Missions don't count). Although the Sox were not victorious, the game was well worth it and so was however many dollars I paid for that Fenway Frank... yum!
We spent parts of Thursday and Friday visiting the sites on the Freedom trail. Thursday started off with a tour of some of the sites on the Trail. Our guide was one of the best, if not the best tour guide we've had on our entire trip (Jane was not a tour guide - he can't be her). He shared several interesting, mostly comical, facts about various Patriots. (Samuel Adams crowd surfing; an almost juvenile competition between John Hancock and George Washington) Although these stories did not, by any means, knock these men down off the pedestal I have placed them on for being extraordinary men, they did make the men a little more human.
After our tour, we headed to one of the more interactive stops on the Freedom Trail, the harbor, where we participated in a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party, Mohawk Indian feathers and all. The "destruction of the tea" was the culmination of the resistance to the acts imposed on the colonists by the British Crown and Parliament. In late 1773, three ships arrived in Boston harbor carrying 342 crates of King George's tea. After the Boston officials refused to let tea be shipped back to England, a group of colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded the ship and dumped the tea into the harbor to avoid having to pay the tax on the tea. Other port cities protested the Tea Act, but it was Parliament's reaction to the Boston Tea Party and the subsequent actions taken against the city of Boston and all of Massachusetts that established Boston's place in the history books. Those actions came in the form of a series of acts known as the Intolerable or Coercive Acts and contained several provisions including closing the port of Boston, stripping Massachusetts of its self-government, and the forced quartering of soldiers within Boston. The colonists reacted with more protests and a petition from the First Continental Congress to the King requesting a repeal of the acts. The request was ignored and tensions rose to the breaking point in April of 1775 just outside of Boston at Lexington and Concord.
Make sure to check back... I'll post again with more on the Freedom Trail!
Dump the tea into the sea!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment