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A Supposed Boston Tea Party Artifact May Not Be From the Boston Tea Party at All

A historian says the Chinese tea label likely dates to the 1860s, not the 1773 protest it was long associated with.

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In 1987, the descendants of Boston-area blacksmith Thomas Wells donated a label belonging to a chest of Chinese tea recovered from the Boston Tea Party to the Old South Meeting House. It’s a museum today, but back in 1773, that’s where the Boston Tea Party was planned. The problem, as researchers have just discovered, is that the label was probably created somewhere between the 1860s and 1870s, about 100 years after the historic event.  

MIT historian Tristan Brown initially........

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