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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks during an event with House Democrats and climate activists to highlight the aspects of the Build Back Better Act that focus on combating climate change, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 28, 2021.

Photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Last month, before jetting off to the 26thUnited Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, President Joe Biden released a new framework for the hotly debated Build Back Better Act. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., had spent weeks picking off some of the most popular and transformative policies in the Democrats legislation, cutting a proposed $3.5 trillion investment in a more humane social safety net and stable climate roughly in half in the process. Paid family leave, a clean energy performance standard for utilities, and Medicare expansion were among the many policies axed by the senator. On the other hand, in the new White House outline, which was crafted to court Manchins and ArizonaDemocratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinemas votes, the total proposed spending to address climate change had survived largely unscathed, shrinking modestly from about $600 billion to $555 billion.

With a deal seemingly at hand,on November 1, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, saidin an interview that her left-leaning faction in the lower chamber was taking the presidents word at the fact that he believes he can get 50 votes in the Senate. House progressives would give their support to the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act with faith that Manchin and Sinema would in turn give theirs to Build Back Better.

Some of my green comrades were ready to take a victory lap. Climate activists successfully built enough power within the party that Democrats defended climate spending *above all else* in the bill, tweeted influential climate writer David Roberts. I promise, it wont hurt them at all if they take maybe just a brief second to celebrate this progress & pat themselves on the back. Like the good little lefty climate influencer I am, I smashed that retweet.

But as it turned out, Biden did not have the votes. At a hastily organized press conference, alsoon November 1, Manchin gave sweeping yet vague remarks about the potential for new legislation to balloon the national deficit and juice inflation, widening the gulf between him and other Democrats while offering little of substance that might bridge it. Im open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward, the senator said, but Im equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country.

A deal has yet to be reached, and everything is still on the table. But for a moment, the mirage of victory revealed something noteworthy, perhaps even remarkable, that has largely been overshadowed by headlines about Manchins recalcitrance: Advocates, activists, and wonks succeeded at getting all but one or two Democratic senators on board with much of their agenda.

And by this measure, the Build Back Better Act would be considered a success story in almost any other realm: 48 or 49 senators came around to the climate legislation equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. This new consensus is no small achievement. The last time that Congress tried to do something big for the climate, legislation was all but dead on arrival.

In 2009, Congress began negotiating the details of Waxman-Markey, legislation to put a cap on emissions that would be reduced over time and enforced through a market for tradable emissions credits. The idea, popular among economists and tolerated by some corporations, was modeled after a similar cap-and-trade system that proved to be a cost-effective strategy to reduce acid rain.

Given its market-friendly structure, cap and trade had actually been endorsed by both parties presidential candidates in the 2008 election. A coalition between big business and green groups, called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, or USCAP, had started hammering out a legislative blueprint beforePresidentBarack Obama was sworn into office.

And in the early months of the Obama administration, things were looking good for the cap and traders. While health care reform hit an early roadblock, environmentalists would secure the confirmation of Obama appointees who were champions of their emissions trading approach in short order. And while the president himself largely stayed above the fray in both the climate and health care fights a purposeful decision made by advisers keen to distance the chief executive from the unpopular backroom dealmaking common in Congress Obama was willing to knock congressional heads together when needed.

Cap and trade seemed like a plane gathering speed down the runway, about to take off.

Cap and trade seemed like a plane gathering speed down the runway, about to take off, observed Harvard University political scientist Theda Skocpol.

But then, in the summer of 2009, thecap and traders ran into this much more powerful and organized thing called the tea party, which was packing normally sleepy town halls to berate Democratic members of Congress into submission. This spelled disaster for USCAP.The coalition had been an insiders game, a strategy carefully crafted by wonks, lobbyists, and environmentalists that relied on businesses to provide cover for moderate Republicans to vote for cap and trade.

But when Sen. John McCain faced a primary challenge from a right-wing radio talk show host eager to ride the tea party wave in 2010, he, and every other friendly Senate Republican, caved. The maverick had once been considered key to USCAPs bipartisan strategy, but ultimately, his party used the power of the filibuster to kill Waxman-Markey. The House of Representatives passed Waxman-Markey in a vote similar to the current makeup of the lower chamber: 219-212. And thats where things ended. The bill never even made it to the Senate floor for a vote.

A demonstrator with the Peoples Climate Movement stands with a sign reading Water is Life in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2017.

Photo: Astrid Riecken/Getty Images

For the better part of the next decade, climate advocates wandered the wilderness, looking for answers. Why had Democrats succeeded at passing the Affordable Care Act but failed at passing Waxman-Markey? The most influential response came in the form of a 2013 postmortem written by Skocpol. The Harvard scholar devoted more than 140 pages to this question, but her answer can more or less be summarized in a single word: organizing.

In 2009, the health care fight was organized very differentlyfrom the fight over climate, Skocpol wrote. While climate change legislation was pushed by moderate, highly professionalized environmental organizations like USCAPthat broker stakeholder partnerships, she wrote, in health-reform politics, new funding and capacity-building went into various umbrellas for consumer advocates and, most importantly, into a slightly left-of-center effort called Health Care for America Now (HCAN) that would orchestrate organizational networks in dozens of states to conduct local events and pressure members of Congress from beyond the Beltway.

Unlike the business-oriented, middle-of-the-road approach taken by USCAP, Health Care for America Now pushed on what Skocpol described as the left edge of the possible. While many on the right still cling to the hope that a Republican Congress or conservative Supreme Court will take away millions of Americans health care a testament to the enduring power of the tea party even the most technocratic environmentalists have abandoned cap and trade. As Skocpol concluded: The political tide can be turned over the next decade only by the creation of a climate-change politics that includes broad popular mobilization on the center left.

Remarkably, over the course of the 2010s, climate activists built such a movement. After decades of professionalization, environmental groups started investing in grassroots organizing again. They built up mailing lists by explicitly taking on corporate polluters and engaging their bases in campaigns to stop extractive projects and to pass new laws where the political fundamentals allowed for reforms. They gathered by the thousands to block the construction of fossil fuel pipelines on Indigenous lands in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota.

Their numbers grew. And they brought those numbers to the streets, marching by the millions in New York City, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Perhaps most importantly, through campaigns like the school strikes for climate, they swelled the green ranks with youth, many younger than 25 and someeven younger than 15. And where the big old green groups had failed them, young people founded new organizations like the Sunrise Movement.

In 2018, the then-little-known youth climate movement was among just a handful of organizations that endorsed a Puerto Rican bartender from the Bronx named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her primary challenge against the third-highest-ranking Democrat in the House. Her victory won them and many others on the left an audience with the Democratic establishment, most notably Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader, an old-school New York politician eager to guard his left flank from the threat of a primary.

Later that year, Sunrise led a sit-in in House Speaker Nancy Pelosis office, calling on Democrats to back a Green New Deal. Ocasio-Cortez worked with Sen. Ed Markey, the elder statesman after whom Waxman-Markey was named, on a resolution outlining their vision. In the 2020 Massachusetts Democratic primary, Sunrise defended Markey against a challenge from a youngU.S. representative with the last name Kennedy. There are 20-somethings who now call the 75-year-old senator their Green New Daddy on Twitter.

Biden and his party never wholly endorsed Markey, Ocasio-Cortez, and the Sunrise Movements Green New Deal. But the 46thpresident did cite the resolution as a source of inspiration. The Build Back Better Act especially its climate provisions looked, to me and others, to be progressive and ambitious in its original form. Sunrise and the climate movement won a whole heck of a lot on the left edge of the possible. It just so happened that the possibility-defining 50th vote belonged to the guy who got elected aiming a rifle at the last climate bill.

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How Climate Activists Pushed the Left Edge of the Possible - The Intercept

Recent school board elections across the country saw a slate of conservative candidates running to oust long-time incumbents from office. Running on issues that inflame community members like the spread of the coronavirus, Critical Race Theory, and the content of library books conservative issues in several districts were successful in winning office in school board elections across the state of Texas.

In Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District (ISD) one of the largest school districts in the state long-time board member Rev. John Ogletree was defeated after a controversial Resolution Condemning Racism was approved by the board of trustee in September of 2020. Allegations that the district was promoting Critical Race Theory followed the action. Ogletree is the founder and pastor at the First Metropolitan Church in Houston, Texas, and the president of the board of Pastors for Texas Children a statewide public school advocacy group. Ogletree had been a membr of the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD Board of Trustees since 2003.

Nearby Houston ISD saw a similar slate of conservative candidates use these wedge issues to gain traction in their election, resulting in run-off elections that could unseat incumbents and empower far-right conservative candidates.

Rural Texas was not spared these match-ups either. In Granbury, Texas retired principal and long-time board member Nancy Alana was defeated by challenger Courtney Gore.

Some moderate pundits worry that this may be a repeat of what happened when the Tea Party first gained steam a decade ago electing conservative candidates to school boards around the nation. Back then, Tea Party candidates often used their platform as elected school board members to propel themselves to higher offices like state representative or state senator, thereby grabbing control of state legislatures across the country.

According to staff writers for Reform Austin, This appears to be a nationwide strategy by conservatives to take over school boards and cultivate a farm team of candidates for higher office.

Confusion over the definition of critical race theory seems to abound, even among those challenging it. This lack of clarity doesnt seem to dissuade them from using it and other issues in elections.

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Are Conservatives Running School Board Candidates in Preparation for Future Elections? - Reform Austin

Henry Scott | for Editor & Publisher

In recent years at least 1,400 local news publications, most of them digital, have begun to fill Americas large and growing local news desert. But are they really greening that desert by filling it with legitimate local news? Or are they just trying to exploit it financially and politically?

As documented in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, most of those sites are funded by rightwing individuals or organizations. (A left-of-center organization is behind nine of the local news sites.) Less discussed are the 174 news sites focused on American cities and states managed by interconnected companies headquartered in Dubai, Bahrain, and Sydney, Australia.

Penelope Muse Abernathy, now a visiting professor at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, authored the 2020 The Expanding News Desert report when she was with the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism.

These hyper-partisan news sites have launched as the United States has seen a sharp decline in local newspapers and websites. For example, the 2020 issue of The Expanding News Desert, a report by Penelope Muse Abernathy of the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism, states that over the past 15 years, the United States has lost 2,100 newspapers, leaving at least 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 without any at the beginning of 2020.

Those were local newspapers that reported on high school sports, local business openings, the deaths of prominent residents, and what would be happening on Halloween and Christmas. But most importantly, they also were the go-to place for people who wanted to know what their city, county or state government was (or wasnt) doing about important issues, like crime and real estate development. Sometimes, their publishers were people a reader might run into at a local restaurant or community event and could call or email to share a story idea (or a complaint.)

Thats the sort of coverage that is hard, if not impossible, to find in the newcomer news sites, some of which claim to be covering communities where a traditional local newspaper still exists. So, why do these sites exist? How do they generate the revenue they need to survive? And what is their impact on the remaining traditional publications and the communities the newcomers purport to serve?

The investigations by the Times, the Tribune and the Tow Center have revealed that most of the newcomers are part of networks operated by entities like Metric Media, LocalLabs, Franklin Archer, the Record Inc., Star News Digital Media and Local Government Information Services (LGIS), all with connections to and funding from conservative organizations and individuals.

Brian Timpone

In addition to their conservative political affiliations, most of those networks have a relationship with Brian Timpone. Timpone is a former TV journalist and media entrepreneur who has launched some of those sites with support from organizations like Liberty Principles, a political action committee whose stated mission is to elect more Republicans in Illinois.

On the other side of the political spectrum is Courier, or CourierNewsroom.com, a left-of-center company with a similar mission, which publishes news sites focused on eight of what it has identified as national election swing states, such as Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Cardinal & Pine, a left-wing publication focused on North Carolina and produced by the Courier Newsroom, uses social media (particularly Facebook) to direct articles from its site to swing-state users and build a custom audience.

With ties to Democrat operatives, Courier was founded in 2019, ahead of the 2020 midterm elections, by Tara McGowan, a Democratic strategist who worked on Barack Obama's re-election campaign. While Courier Newsroom is a for-profit entity, it has received $25 million in donations from liberal backers, like the billionaire investor George Soros, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs, the majority owner of The Atlantic. It also solicits contributions from its readers; however, they are not tax-deductible.

The news sites owned by foreign corporations include Big News Network, headquartered in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. It describes itself as the largest online news service on the Web and boasts that it uses unique spidering software to generate content and links from thousands of other sites. Then, it publishes that content on its own 500 news sites (174 of which are focused on U.S. cities and states). Those sites are managed by Midwest Radio Network in Sydney and Mainstream Media in Bahrain.

These news sites dont appear to be taking revenue from legacy news media. Few of them seem to carry any advertisements for local businesses, and most of them instead have ads placed by Google AdSense or other contextual advertising networks. Google AdSense advertisements placed on an extensive network of hyperlocal news sites are likely to generate traffic because of the size of the overall audience they reach. But a local business is unlikely to advertise to reach an audience outside its market.

Some sites, like the seven published by Star News Digital Media, carry politically oriented advertising, such as an ad promoting an investment services firm that offers socially conservative investment options and an ad promoting Steve Bannon's Bannon's War Room on Rumble, the online video platform. Those sites are focused on Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, which Star News describes as battleground states. Star News was founded in 2017 by three people Michael Patrick Leahy, Steve Gill and Christina Botteri connected with conservative political groups like the Tea Party.

The Raleigh Times, which launched in 2002 by Sydney-based Midwestern Radio News, appropriated the name of the 110-year-old newspaper owned by The News & Observer that closed in 1989.

Seven sites purport to offer the news of Raleigh and Wake County, North Carolina, with one managed by the Australian Midwest Radio Network and six others by Metric Media, which Brian Timpone controls. One is Midwest Radio Networks RaleighTimes.com, launched in 2002, which appropriated the name of the 110-year-old newspaper owned by The News & Observer that closed in 1989. Despite the proliferation of such news sites in Wake County, Patti Vargas, vice president for advertising for the Raleigh News & Observer, said it hasnt been affected financially. It doesnt have an impact on our advertising revenue, Vargas said. RaleighTimes.com uses contextual advertising posted by Media.net, which Miteno Communication Technology of Beijing owns.

In a telephone interview, Brian Timpone says he doesnt believe the conservative news sites he controls impact the advertising revenue of local legacy media. The newspaper business revenue model they make money on things we dont do, he said, citing publication of print ads, advertising inserts, subscription paywalls and conventional digital ads.

Google Adsense ads are carried on North Raleigh Today, which is published by Metric Media, the company connected with Brian Timpone, whose focus is on producing content relevant to a particular advertiser and aggregating an audience to read that content.

His news sites carry ads placed by Google AdSense. Still, Timpone said his focus is on producing content relevant to a particular advertiser and aggregating an audience to read that content. Our sponsors come to us and say wed like to attract these types of people. What kind of news can you create that is going to attract them?

The more than 900 local news sites controlled by Metric Media publish links to local newspaper stories and television station news stories, as well as press releases. They also publish many stories based on publicly available data coming from Timpones LocalLabs. LocalLabs is the successor to Timpones Journatic, which sparked controversy when This American Life, the radio program, revealed that it was using freelancers from around the world for stories that were plagiarized or carried fake bylines.

LocalLabs publishes local Census data, ratings of local hospitals, local real estate sales, the salaries of local school teachers, the expirations of licenses of lawyers, the names of donors to political candidates, and the names of teachers who have signed a pledge to teach critical race theory which has drawn sharp criticism, even from conservatives. In addition, several of its sites include a story promoting Acellus, an online teaching software product, which isn't labeled as sponsored content. Finally, as an indication of its political leaning, Media Metrics Buffalo (New York) Ledger site continues to feature a November 2020 story about a Buffalo resident who thinks the presidential election was fraudulent.

The conservative Center Square, which publishes 39 news sites focused on specific states, carries Google ads and says it offers digital advertising targeted by geography, story topics and other key demographics. However, no such ads appeared in a recent review of those sites. Center Square is a project of the nonprofit Franklin News Foundation, which receives most of its revenue from donor-advised funds that dont reveal the identity of their backers and is associated with the State Policy Network, a group of conservative and libertarian think tanks.

According to Bloomberg News, the left-leaning Courier Newsroom is not so much focused on building regular audiences for each site but on using social media, particularly Facebook, to direct particular articles from those sites to swing-state users and build a custom audience. While Courier Newsroom's stories have been described as accurate, they have been criticized for targeting specific audiences for political purposes. As an example, Courier Newsroom spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote negative stories about Donald Trump through Facebook. Bloomberg reports that Courier articles drew more than 25 million views in a single month. A review of traffic data for those sites shows that many had a surge in viewers before the November election and into December. Only one of the nine sites published by the left-leaning Courier Newsroom says on its site that it solicits advertising. Iowa Starting Line, which merged with Courier Newsroom in June of this year, emphasizes the amount of influential actors in state and national politics and media that follow our website.

As noted above, Midwest Radio Network used contextual advertising services provided by Beijings Media.net, suggesting that its 174 sites focused on American cities and states are also unlikely to harm legacy media by drawing advertising from local businesses.

One source of legacy media ad revenue that may be at risk is election campaign advertising, although Penny Abernathy thinks the impact might be most significant on local television stations. The National Conference of State Legislatures has reported that spending on digital political ads in the 2019-2020 election cycle was three times that in 2016. The shift of that spending from video to digital indeed may have a negative impact on traditional television advertising. But if that money isnt siphoned off by the politically oriented and foreign digital news sites, it likely could benefit legacy publishers of local news sites.

Abernathy, who now is a visiting professor at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, said: I view most of these sites as sleeping dogs that come to life around election time, or when there is a hot partisan issue. These sites are very different from those of the latter-day media barons. There is a total lack of transparency about who is funding them, how to contact anyone responsible for the site, or even whether the reporters doing the stories are located in this country.

So far, the real threat from these sites has been the spread of misinformation. As more and more election dollars transfer from TV to online, at least for now, these sites pose more of a revenue threat to local broadcast organizations than newspapers (which have historically received little revenue from candidates compared to TV).

Abernathy said that spread of misinformation by these digital newcomers poses a risk to the integrity of local news media. The results of a Gallup poll released earlier this month (which sought Americans' opinions on all media national and local) show that only 36% of Americans say they trust news media. Between 1972 and 1976, 68% to 72% of Americans expressed trust in the mass media; yet, by 1997, when the question was next asked, trust had dropped to 53%, Gallup reports. Trust in the media, which has averaged 45% since 1997, has not reached the majority level since 2003.

That integrity traditionally has been based on the principle that a news organization must give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved. Adolph S. Ochs stated that principle on April 18, 1896, after he bought The New York Times. However, it took decades for the principle to be widely embraced.

Timpone argues that that integrity is long gone. Newspapers built this faux independence from the newsroom, (that) the newsroom is full of people who were perfectly objective. ... But the newsrooms are all left-wing; there's no diversity of opinion, he said.

Timpone is open about the fact that his news sites have an advertiser-sponsored direction. But he also emphasizes that the data-based stories they publish on things like teachers signing critical race theory petitions and people donating to political candidates are locally focused and that the data is accurate.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Timpone said his publications reflected journalism in the 18th and 19th centuries when newspapers and reporters werent reluctant to promote political and cultural positions. I'm a conservative Republican. I don't hide from it, and I never will, he said. You can call me biased. You can call me one-sided. ... I just don't lie about it. I try to be fair in my coverage.

Stories on those sites managed by Dubais Big News Network focused on American states and cities dont appear to contain content with a particular bias. However, Disinfo Lab, a nonprofit organization that investigates disinformation campaigns targeting the European Union, in 2019 published an investigation that revealed that fake negative content about Pakistan and China was distributed by Big News Network, which primarily targeted Indian residents.

The Center Square produces news that can be republished, with credit, by any other news organization. That news is said to be reported from 39 states (not including Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah and Vermont.) Its website lists only 10 reporters and five regional editors. The website also shows articles from several freelance contributors. While there is no evident bias in Center Square stories, its opinion pieces are from conservative sources, like Real Clear Wire's Sean Spicer, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and the Center for Individual Freedom.

In an essay in Time magazine, Matthew Pressman, an assistant professor of journalism at Seton Hall University, wrote, Trying to attract a mass audience with objective coverage, as newspapers did in the mid-20th century, is a fools errand especially in a social-media age when provocative articles get shared more widely than studiously objective ones.

But, Pressman wrote, ... those who see objectivity as a barrier to truth-telling are misunderstanding its requirements. It does not prevent journalists from making judgments about the news; it simply asks that those judgments be based on dispassionate analysis.

After studying the evolution of objectivity in American journalism, Im rooting for it to survive. Fifty years ago, facing a similar crisis, the press adjusted but didnt abandon its fundamental principles, and it led to what, in retrospect, was a golden age of journalism. The odds may be against it, but the same thing could happen today.

Henry (Hank) Scott is a long-time journalist and media business executive whose Media-Maven LLC (www.Media-Maven.com) provides a variety of services to media startups and existing publishers.

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Exploiting the local news desert - Editor And Publisher Magazine

GARDNER There are perhaps only a few local residents who realize that there is a strongGardner connection with the Boston Tea Party and nowthat connection has been formally commemorated.

Joseph Payson, a Gardner resident who participated in the famed Boston Tea Party, was recognized by local officials at the Old Burying Ground on Oct. 25. A commemorative plaque was placed on Paysons gravestone as part of a movement sponsored by the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, a group dedicated to recognizing all members of the Dec. 16, 1773, protest event by the time of its 250th anniversary in two years.

Payson, who was born in Roxbury in 1743, served in the Revolutionary War following his participation in theBoston Tea Party, in which American colonists expressed their displeasure with Englands tax policies by dumping chests of tea into the citys harbor.

(This ceremony) really helps to bring our local history home, in a literal sense of the term, said Mayor Michael Nicholson. In elementary school and in middle school, you learn about our American history, you learn about the Boston Tea Party and the effects that it had, and you learn about the American Revolution and who fought there, but I think a lot of the times you forget that it was right in our backyard.

Battle of Bunker Hill: How a war hero mortally wounded on the battlefield became Gardner's namesake

Payson lived at 48 Chapel St. in the residence that eventually became the former Hunter Farm, which local residents of a certain age will remember was a popular spot to buy homemade ice cream between the years of 1964 and 1984. Gladys Hunter, whose family operated the farm and who still lives in the house, is the grandmother of City Council President Elizabeth Kazinskas.

Marion Knoll, the coordinator of the Gardner Museum, said Payson, who worked as a shoemaker in addition to being a farmer, was one of the original signers of the petition to incorporate Gardner into a town in 1785.

At Gardners second Town Meeting in September of 1785, Joseph Payson was elected sealer of leather, a town officer who had the authority to see that all (leather products) were made honestly in quality and quantity, Knoll said. (Payson) put a seal or stamp of approval on all the items that he inspected and certified.

More history: Nine Revolutionary War Veterans Honored in Brewster

Payson is listed as a head of household in the Gardner census of 1780, a year in which only 530 inhabitants lived in the community, according to Knoll.

Payson died peacefully in Gardner on April 13, 1833.

The image depicted on Paysons commemorative marker was inspired by Nathanial Curriers The Destruction of the Tea at Boston Harbor lithograph created in 1846, a popular and often-used artistic representation of the Boston Tea Party. The marker will be on display indefinitely, according to officials.

We believe that the Boston Tea Party is the single most important event leading up to the American Revolution, said Even OBrien, creative manager of the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. Its principles and values speak through the generations, and ideas of protesting against injustice and tyranny are things we all can relate to, even just shy of 250 years later.

Since 2019, a total of 87 commemorative markers have been placed at graves of known Boston Tea Party participants buried within some of the states oldest burying grounds. Over the next two years, leading up to the 250th anniversary of the event, which will take place on Dec. 16, 2023, the group plans to place additional markers at the graves of all 125 known participants buried throughout New England and the U.S.

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Gardner resident honored for his role in Boston Tea Party, nearly 250 years later - The Gardner News

Embrace the magic of the holiday season by joining the star of The Nutcracker and her friends for a special one-hour meet-and-greet tea party in The Hanover Theatre and Conservatory for the Performing Arts' McDonough Room on November 7, 2021.

Seatings are available at 10:30 AM, 12:00 PM, & 1:30 PM. At this exclusive event, Clara will read the story of The Nutcracker ballet and whisk your child off to a sensational hour of dancing, decorating cookies, and a pretend tea party!

Take personal photos with this iconic ballerina, receive a signed autograph picture and enter for a chance to dance away with Clara's famous pointe shoes!

"There is no other event like Cookies and Tea with Clara at The Hanover Theatre," said Jennifer Agbay, director of dance. "To witness young girls and boys arriving in their Sunday best is truly one of the best times of the year!"

Cookies will be provided for decorating and taking home but will not be consumed during the event. Tickets are $20. Parents need not to buy a ticket. They may observe the event, but seating is for children only. Tickets are available online at TheHanoverTheatre.org, by phone at 877.571.SHOW (7469), or at The Hanover Theatre box office located at 2 Southbridge Street in downtown Worcester.

Note: Due to COVID-19, this annual event has been modified. Attendees will be REQUIRED TO WEAR MASKS at all times. Children will take part in an "imaginary" tea party (no juice will be served). Cookies will be provided for decorating and taking home, but will not be consumed during the event.

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Join Clara For A THE NUTCRACKER Meet and Greet Tea Party At The Hanover Theatre - Broadway World