Charter Books and the Newport Historical Society commemorated the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party in this special evening event at the Colony House. Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff (author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams) met with Brooke Barbier (author of King Hancock: The Radical Influence of a Moderate Founding Father).

In both writers’ works, the Boston Tea Party in December of 1773 is a pivotal moment and a point of no return for two Boston men. One was a failed businessman and a firebrand for a nascent Patriot movement. The other was an enormously privileged merchant whose paradoxically moderate radicalism would prove crucial in the march toward American independence.

Schiff and Barbier discussed Adams, Hancock, and the circumstances in New England that led to Revolution less than a year and a half after the Tea Party. And what better location than the center of Rhode Island’s colonial government in the 1770s?