Ben Carp on the Tea Party in Lexington, 21 Nov

Richard Kollen at the Lexington Historical Society tells me the group is sponsoring a free lecture by Tufts professor Benjamin Carp on 21 Nov 2008 at the Lexington Depot.

Ben’s talk, which begins at 8:00 P.M., is entitled “Lexington, the Locals, and the Boston Tea Party,” and will feature material from his upcoming book Teapot in a Tempest: The Boston Tea Party of 1773. That book is a new attempt to identify who exactly destroyed the East India Company’s tea in Boston harbor on 16 Dec 1773, and one of the questions Ben’s had to wrestle with is how many men from outside Boston were involved. I’ve written skeptically about the claims from descendants of Benjamin Rice of North Brookfield and Samuel Smith of Topsfield. But Lexington was closer to Boston than either of those towns.

Ben is also the author of Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution, which I wrote about back here.