American history was made by a handful of men, many of whom antiquity would never know, in the dead of night on Dec. 16, 1773, on a cold dock in Boston.

Known as "the destruction of the tea" until 1834 when the phrase "Boston Tea Party" was coined, the event defined one of the first formal steps of the American Revolution.

Men, dressed as Mohawk Indians and sworn to secrecy to protect their identities, marched through Boston, boarded three East India Company ships and tossed what would have been a fortune at the time into the harbor.

In doing so, those men - all Sons of Liberty - ingrained themselves into a nation's consciousness. They became a symbol for liberty enshrined in art, history and popular culture for more than 200 years.

Today, more than at any point in history, the Boston Tea Party has captured the political imaginations of thousands if not millions of Americans.

Inspired by their story, people flock to a modern "Tea Party" funded and bankrolled by the Koch Brothers (among others), uniting these Americans against taxation.

They stand, they believe, in the very footprints of their forefathers - fighting against government taxation and infringement upon the rights of the individuals.

Depending upon how you read history, they may be right. The Boston Tea Party is often presented as a simple protest against taxation, but the true story of that cold December night is far more complicated, and indeed more relevant to today, than we are taught in our increasingly defunded schools.

On May 10, 1773, the British Parliament passed a law known as The Tea Act. This law granted the British East India Company, one of the largest companies in the world at that time, a monopoly on sales of tea in the American colonies.

Designed not as "punishment" for the American colonies, nor indeed as a tax on tea (tea had been taxed in the colonies since the 1767 Townshend Revenue Act), The Tea Act was essentially a bailout policy for the lumbering, powerful and multinational British East India Company, which had been sinking into debt.

It gave the British East India Company permission to ship tea to the colonies where it was sold directly to consumers by agents of the company.

The Tea Act waived certain duties that all other merchants were required to charge on that tea once it was sold in the American colonies.

This allowed the company to immediately ship 17 million pounds of unsold surplus tea to markets in the colonies, where it could be sold at a reduced rate, undercutting local businesses and the smaller importers who were still required to pay onerous duties to import tea, and could not compete with the duty-free wholesale rates of the East India Company.

Already unhappy about the continuation of taxation on tea dating from the Townshend Revenue Act (tea having been the only tax enacted then that was not later repealed in 1770) many local leaders saw the Tea Act of 1773 as a direct attack against the economic well-being of colonists and local merchants.

Unable to compete against an already powerful corporation, tensions boiled over at the idea of colonists being undercut by this alliance between corporate and government interests.

Throughout the colonies people protested, refusing to unload East India Company ships importing tea, and sending dozens of them back, still full, to England.

Only in Boston, where two of the direct merchants for the East India Company were sons of the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, were the ships held at harbor.

As Hutchinson worked to resolve matters, Boston hit a boiling point, and what has long been considered the first blow of the American Revolution was struck.

The story of the Boston Tea Party - as we tell it to ourselves - continues to be a story of protest against government taxation. It is a story of individuals standing up against bad British government.

We conveniently forget the nuances, the fact that only East India Company ships were targeted, and the fact that colonists had grumbled about, but lived with, a tax for years.

As much as we may hate it, and as much as it may go against the very being of the modern Tea Party, funded and bankrolled as it is by some of the largest corporations in the world, the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 was a protest against corporate control of government.

But why would we tell that story?

Why would we paint a picture of American freedom and individualism that includes freedom from corporate control?

We do so because the real story of what happened in December 1773 is the story of a struggle that has truly never ended, just shifted and morphed and grown with time.

Sure, the colonialists won the American Revolution. But the question remains: Will we ever realize that part of that revolution was a revolt against corporate control of government, or realize that the battle is still being waged today?

Callie Vandewiele writes a monthly column for the Sandy Post, Estacada News and The Outlook. For this month's column, she credit the historical references, dates and name to Thom Hartmann's book, "Unequal Protection," published in 2010.