The Tea-Tax-Tempest, or the Anglo-American Revolution

Magic lantern shows --- done with the equivalent of a slide projector --- were a popular entertainment throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here, the gods receive a magic-lantern news update on the political strife in Britain’s American colonies, which had declared their independence two years earlier. The trouble seems to emanate from a teapot at the center of the slide, a reminder that a tax on tea lay at the root of the turmoil. Guttenberg suggests that France has a hand in the dispute, in the form of the symbolic French rooster that keeps the teapot boiling by fanning the flames.