1773: The Boston Tea Party

 History.com has this for 16 December:

In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump over three hundred chests of tea into the harbor.
The midnight raid, popularly known as the Boston Tea Party, was a 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.
When three tea ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, arrived in Boston, the colonists demanded that the tea be returned to England. After Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused, Patriot leader Samuel Adams organized the “tea party” with about sixty members of the Sons of Liberty, his underground resistance group. The tea dumped in Boston Harbor on the night of December 16 was valued at some eighteen thousand dollars in eighteenth century money; a small fortune today, ranging from $545,000 to $10,100,000.Parliament, outraged by the blatant destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.

Rico says the Brits threw it all away for some paltry tax money...