Artist Rob Brun

On December 16, 1944, the Germans launched the last major
offensive of the war, Operation Autumn Mist, also known as
the Ardennes Offensive and the Battle of the Bulge, an
attempt to push the Allied front line west from northern
France to northwestern Belgium.

The Battle of the Bulge, so-called because the Germans
created a “bulge” around the area of the Ardennes forest
in pushing through the American defensive line, was the
largest fought on the Western front.

American troops man trenches along a snowy hedgerow in
the northern Ardennes Forest during the Battle.  

An American artilleryman shaves in frigid cold, using a
helmet for a shaving bowl.

An American tank moves past another gun carriage which
slid off an icy road in the Ardennes Forest during the
Battle of the Bulge.

Belgian residents of a northern Ardennes hamlet flee the fighting during the
Battle of the Bulge.        
        
       

In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists
disguised as Mohawk Indians board three tea ships
and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

The midnight raid, popularly known as the “Boston
Tea Party,” was in protest of the British Parliament’s
Tea Act of 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering
East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax
and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American
tea trade.

The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut
even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and
many colonists viewed the act as another example of
taxation tyranny.

The term ‘Tea Party’ was not actually used at the time
and was coined in the 1830s when the Revolutionary
generation looked back with nostalgia fifty years later.