Boston Tea Party is protest template

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BOSTON, April 20 (UPI) -- The Boston Tea Party has become more than a moment in history, now representing a template for protests across the nation, a historian says.

Tea Party historical consultant George Quintal Jr. said the event nearly 235 years ago has been mimicked countless times since by protesters in Boston and across the nation, The Boston Globe reported Sunday.

"That's the American way of protest," Quintal said. "We started out protesting with the tea party."

Included among the tea party-inspired protests have been the dumping of federal tax forms by tax opponents or the mass dispersal of leis by angry Hawaiians.

The organization 911truth.org even got into the act by throwing copies of the federal government's Sept. 11 Commission Report into Boston Harbor.

But the Globe said official crackdowns on such actions are as severe as ever since the activist group was forced to hire a boat to remove the paperwork from the water.

Those wanting to invoke the historical protest spirit might emulate the methods of third-party supporters who attached ropes to televisions they threw into the harbor to facilitate their immediate removal.