AMY LLEWELLYN: Hello, my name is Amy Llewellyn. I am from Charleston, West Virginia. And my question is what is the significance of the Boston Tea Party.</s>DON KNUUTTILA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, BOSTON TEA PARTY SHIP & MUSEUM: What a great question. What a lot of people don't understand is that December 16, 1773, really is one of the most significant events of our history, the night of the Boston Tea Party. And I say it's one of the most significant events in our history because it really is the spark that ignited the entire American Revolution. It was the night when an angry band of patriots marched down from the Old South Meeting House to Griffin's Wharf, where they dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Now, what's most significant is that it wasn't really about the taxes. They were paying more for smuggled tea from Holland. It was about taxation without representation. We're now standing on the Brig Beaver II, which is a full-scale working replica of one of the three ships from the Boston Tea Party. And every day we celebrate the Boston Tea Party, every 30 minutes on the hour and the half hour, by starting off with an interactive town meeting and a protest aboard the ship, where we actually dump the tea into Boston Harbor.
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