Protest nation: from the Boston Tea Party to the modern-day Tea Party and the Women's March, America has been shaped by protest movements.

• Author: Brown, Bryan
• Position: TIMES PAST

It was a gray January Saturday in Washington, D.C., but nobody was resting. Just one day after Donald Trump had been inaugurated as president, the streets were jammed with people participating in the Women's March.

Near the U.S. Capitol, they cheered speeches defending the rights of women and minorities--whom they believed the incoming president had shown disrespect for during his campaign. Then, as if to make sure Trump would hear them, many of them marched to the gates of the White House.

The crowd in Washington was estimated to have been at least half a million people. Including the participants of more than 600 other "sister marches" around the country, the Women's March was likely the nation's largest single-day demonstration ever.

The massive gathering was part of a deep history of protest in the U.S., according to David Meyer of the University of California, Irvine. It all goes back, he says, to the first major American protest, the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when a band of American colonists boarded three British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The act of defiance was part of a struggle over taxes and control by Great Britain, but it also set the stage for a larger struggle: the fight for independence from Britain in the American Revolution (1775-83).

"Protests seize [the country's] attention and force figures like presidents to respond to them," Meyer says. The tradition is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government." For the nation's Founders, who had helped lead it from resistance to independence, Meyer says, this was a sign of how much they valued dissent.

"America was born from protest," says Meyer.

Many of the most influential American protests have been big marches, like the Women's March, often in the streets of the nation's capital. A 1913 rally in Washington for women's suffrage, for example, helped lead to ratification of the 19th Amendment (1920), giving women the right to vote. The 1963 March on Washington focused the nation's attention on civil rights for African-Americans and helped lead to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in voting, schools, and the workplace.

During the long fight for equality for African-Americans, many smaller acts of civil disobedience, such as boycotts of segregated buses and sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters throughout the South, also helped end discriminatory laws and practices, and the success of the movement as a whole helped prove how important protests were to social change.

Sit-ins & Burning Draft Cards

In the mid-1960s, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and a military draft ignited a new wave of resistance among liberal Americans, particularly young people. They believed the nation was needlessly meddling in another country's civil war--one that ended up costing more than 58,000 American lives.

Inspired by civil rights campaigns, activists engaged in different forms of protest, including staging sit-ins at universities and burning draft cards. Marches were crucial as well. On Oct. IS, 1969, about 2 million people rallied across the country to show their opposition to the war. Historians say the protests were a major reason the U.S. withdrew its troops from Vietnam in 1973.

Conservatives have also used protest as a tool to bring about change. In 2009, following the election of President Barack Obama, groups of concerned...