In response to the first Boston Tea Party (depicted above), during which approximately $2 million (in today’s money) worth of tea was destroyed, according to History, the British government passed four laws, called the “Intolerable Acts” or, alternately, the “Coercive Acts.”

Specifically, the four acts were intended to punish Bostonians and beef up British presence and rule in the city. One act closed Boston Harbor until the British East India Company could recoup its losses from the December 1773 act of vandalism. A second, according to a companion History report, restricted Bostonians’ ability to govern themselves and appointed a committee sympathetic to the Crown to govern the city. A third made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in Massachusetts, and a fourth required colonists to feed and house British troops on-demand, a process known as “quartering,” and which would later be outlawed in the Third Amendment to the Constitution nearly two decades later.

Did the Acts succeed in subduing the colonists? Certainly not, as history has shown. And while it would be three years before the Continental Congress would declare independence, and 10 before that independence was formally recognized, the colonists would still continue to protest British rule in other, smaller ways. One such protest occurred, again, in Boston, in March 1774.