Old South Meeting House was built in 1729 for Boston's Third Church, a Congregational congregation whose meetinghouse stood near the center of a busy port town. The large brick building served worshippers, but its size also made it a public gathering place when crowds outgrew nearby halls. Colonial religious and civic life overlapped here: sermons, political meetings, and neighborhood disputes all unfolded within walls that still stand on Washington Street.

Resistance to imperial policy gave the meetinghouse a second role. In 1768 residents gathered over the seizure of John Hancock's ship Liberty and the impressment of sailors. After British troops fired on civilians in March 1770, a mass meeting at Old South demanded that soldiers leave Boston. Such assemblies were neither unanimous nor equally open to everyone. Women, enslaved people, and free Black Bostonians lived with the consequences of the decisions, even when the formal public voice was dominated by men with social standing.

The best-known meeting came on December 16, 1773, after ships carrying East India Company tea entered Boston Harbor. Thousands debated what should happen to the tea and whether it could legally be sent back to England. When the meeting broke up, participants went to the waterfront and destroyed the cargo in the action later called the Boston Tea Party. The meetinghouse was the arena for debate, not the place where the chests were thrown overboard. Parliament's subsequent coercive measures deepened the imperial crisis.

British forces occupied Boston during the first year of the Revolutionary War. Soldiers turned Old South into a riding school, removing furnishings and damaging the interior. After the evacuation in 1776, the congregation repaired the building and resumed worship. In the nineteenth century Boston's commercial district expanded around it, and the congregation eventually moved. A demolition threat in the 1870s prompted a preservation campaign; supporters raised money to save the structure and open it as a public history site in 1877.

Today Revolutionary Spaces interprets both the building's religious roots and its use as a forum for dissent. The surviving 1729 fabric carries traces of rebuilding, changed streets, and successive museum uses. Exhibits and programs connect familiar Revolutionary episodes with questions about who could speak, assemble, or claim rights in colonial Boston. Its survival also tells a later history: residents chose to preserve an old urban building as evidence that collective action could shape civic memory. The building remains a material reminder that a meeting could move from words to action, and that the meaning of protest has been debated by later generations as well.