The Tea Party...the true heirs to the American Revolution?

It started on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in a live hit with MSNBC commentator Rick Santelli. It was February 19, 2009 - less than one month after Barack Obama was inaugurated. Mr. Santelli and company wanted to "take the country back" from a President who hadn't even been in office for thirty days.

The revolution proclaimed - or re-proclaimed - by the former financial trader has been gaining momentum ever since. And this week, the self-appointed members of the Tea Party movement are claiming major victories in the mid-term elections.

Whether or not the Tea Party was responsible, the Democratic Party certainly did emerge from Tuesday's vote with historic losses in the House of Representatives.

But for Harvard historian and New Yorker magazine staff writer Jill Lepore, the story of the modern tea party movement isn't as much about making history as it is about making up history. In her new book The Whites of Their Eyes, she argues that the Tea Party movement, which claims to embody the principles of the Founding Fathers, has fundamentally misunderstood what the American Revolution was really all about.

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