The punch-drunk patriots boarded the ships and spent hours tossing the tea crates into the harbor, their efforts reportedly slowed by mandatory barf breaks. One Son of Liberty, John Crane, was knocked unconscious by a falling crate and mistaken for dead by his comrades. Thus did they waste additional time trying to figure out where to hide the body, eventually determining that the best place for it was in a pile of wood shavings in a shop near the dock. Given the situation and BAC levels that night, this is admittedly not the worst place Crane could have woken up.

The destruction of the tea outraged even those British officials who'd been supportive of the colonists, prompting Samuel Adams, whose speech had partially inspired the protest, to launch a propaganda campaign to shape public reaction to it. Thanks to the publicity efforts of the most recognizable face of America's craft beer renaissance, this heroic act of patriotic defiance is barely remembered for the drunken hissy fit it mostly was.

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And speaking of the founding fathers ...

When Washington was informed of the Christmas miracle, he ordered his men to empty the kegs. He then presumably learned a valuable lesson about clarifying what he actually meant. Within nanoseconds, the American forces dedicated themselves to chugging the booze out of existence.

According to witnesses, the soldiers "drank too freely to admit of Discipline or Defense." Some strutted about shoeless and half naked, stealing helmets from their Hessian prisoners and wearing them like the drunk asshole at a party who puts a lampshade on his head.

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The next day, Washington took his army and new prisoners back across the Delaware, explaining in a letter to Congress that his forces were too small and far away from supply lines to hold the river bank. He left out the part about the drunken animals under his command being too lit to even care about, much less defend against, imminent British retaliation. The evacuation was hampered by soldiers tumbling into the icy, pee-filled river, but eventually, Washington got his men to safety. He was, after all, the designated driver.

Merrymount's founder, Thomas Morton, had nothing but contempt for Puritan intolerance. He banned forced labor and invited all to come to Merrymount to live and trade as equals, a deal sweetened by the promise of endless barrels of "excellent" home-brewed beer. Morton also had a hippie-like admiration for the Algonquin Indians, whom he always invited to Merrymount's very regular keg parties, encouraging his sausagefest of a colony to slap Puritan sexual and racial taboos in the face by pounding brews with Indian bros and hooking up with Indian "lasses." Most offensive of all was Morton's 80-foot-long erection ... of a maypole upon Mount Wollaston; a visual "fuck you" that reminded the Plymouth colonists of the pagan-influenced "merry old England" customs and concepts of "having fun" they'd wanted to leave behind.

What's more, Merrymount soon became the lone colony that was growing and thriving. Their controversial "treating Indians like human beings" policies scored them all the best trade from Maine to Rhode Island, along with sweet hunting, fishing, and agricultural tips. This outraged the Puritans, who couldn't understand how Morton's den of sin and sex was receiving God's bounty, while their regimen of prayer, social repression, and self-denial earned them starvation. Eventually, the Pilgrims decided this misallocation of God's favor had to be fixed.

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Miles Standish led an armed posse to invade Morton's colony, only to find that the guns were unnecessary. It was the morning after a typical Merrymount rager, and no one was sober enough to fight back. Morton was arrested and banished back to England, the maypole was chopped down, and the Pilgrims repurposed Merrymount's supplies as their own, praising God for blessing them with the bounty they stole.

Morton's nearly successful attempt to restore Merrymount and get the Pilgrims' royal charter revoked was thwarted by King Charles' own Puritan woes in the English Civil War. Merrymount now survives solely in the name of the neighborhood built upon its location, and a bitter short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Had the Puritans not been such literal killjoys, and if the Merrymounters had just laid off the bottle for one night, we might live today in a world in which The Scarlet Letter reads more like Van Wilder.

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But it's not only American history that was continually altered by drunken shenanigans ...

Based on that unimpeachable evidence, Athens -- the birthplace of logic -- tried, convicted, and sentenced Alcibiades to death in absentia, and ordered the seasoned military leader to return home to serve his sentence right on the eve of their campaign against Sparta. Alcibiades chose another option: He defected to the Spartans and served as their "military adviser." Unsurprisingly, the Sicilian Expedition, and ultimately the rest of the war, was an unmitigated disaster for the Athenians.

Alcibiades, on the other hand, fled Sparta after sleeping with the king's wife, then served the Persians for a while before falling out of favor with them too, for unspecified reasons. And somehow, he still convinced Athens to take him back, all within a few years. Pretty smooth for the guy sentenced to death for divine dong-smashing, and who was made fun of by Plato for his long and uncomfortably detailed "I love you, man" speeches.