As a student of history, there have been many occasions where something I assumed was historical fact turned out to be mere narrative with no grounding in reality. For example, like many Americans, I grew up believing that the Boston Tea Party happened because the colonists were angry about a British tax on tea. I later discovered that the reality was quite different; the Boston Tea Party occurred in protest over the British government's plan to subsidize the operations of the East India Tea Company and grant it a monopoly in the colonies, the purpose being to make British tea cheaper than the tea the Boston merchant class were smuggling up from the Indies. The Tea Party was thus not a protest against expensive tea, but an act of protectionism against
cheap tea. The story I'd grew up with about protesting a British tea tax was just a popular narrative—and a completely backwards one at that.
