The newsroom was abuzz Wednesday as activists for the global environmental organization Greenpeace made a daring - and illegal - demonstration at Mount Rushmore.

In a technological and marketing terms, it was a spectacular success. Twitter feeds began rolling in late in the morning, shortly after a trio of demonstrators rappelled down the mount and unfurled a massive banner alongside the Memorial's depiction of Abraham Lincoln.

There was streaming video and news releases that blasted out around the world. Photos were on the way, and Facebook entries to the Black Hills page showed a dramatic spike.

And we here at the Journal were pretty busy too. Needless to say, a demonstration in the heart of the Black Hills and western South Dakota about environmental issues - and, more specifically, global warming - is an explosive mix for news.

How effective will the protest be? That's hard to say. Greenpeace protesters say the goal was to urge U.S. President Barack Obama to aggressively address the threat of global warming at the G8 conference.

Odds are, it won't move him from the playbook, at least not significantly. But you never know. All great protest movements begin from a single action.

I'm just saying that I don't know if making a run at Rushmore will compare to some of the greats of all time. Here's a short list of some relatively successful protests you might have heard about.

Boston Tea Party

No, no, not the one dominated by disgruntled Republicans seeking to prevent the growing expansion of federal government and held this past April on Tax Day. I'm talking about the original one and only upon which political activists of today took the name.

The original tea party was akin to a 17 or 18 year old teen seeking out its own independence. In some ways, at least looking back, it seemed almost inevitable. The colonists, hit with increased taxes by Great Britain, fought back with an act of daring that seemed kind of childish. They took the tea, which England was taxing so heavily, and threw it into Boston Harbor - at least that's the short version of it.

Physically, it wasn't all that significant. The tea didn't have to be that big of a deal. But an angry England lashed back at the insolent colonists, passing the Intolerable Acts that essentially closed the Port of Boston. From there, the dominoes began to fall that eventually led to the War for Independence and the birth of the United States.

Anti-war protest in Rome, around the world

The Boston Tea Party may have had a big place in history, but it was pulled off by a relatively small group, 200 men or so.

When it comes to big protests, you have to get closer to current times. According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the largest protest of all time took place on Feb. 15, 2003, in the days leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ensuing war.

Disturbed by a growingly aggressive United States, anti-war protesters took the streets in virtually every country in the world - including the U.S., to its credit. (The only significant region that lacked public protests was mainland China.)

The largest gathering was in Rome, where about 3 million people gathered to protest the build up toward war. Globally, an estimated 36 million people took part in the demonstrations.

However, whereas the Boston Tea Party was a success in its eventual consequence, the anti-war protesters efforts largely failed. On March 20, 2003, the invasion of Iraq began and U.S. forces remain there today, albeit in a much reduced role.

Rosa Parks

If you ever doubt the power of an individual, you simply have to recall the story of Rosa Parks.

Parks was a simple seamstress whose simple action of defiance sparked one of the largest civil-rights movements in modern history (all apologies to the independence movement in India and Ghandi's broad influence there). On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white passenger. Her arrest sparked a bus boycott led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which essentially launched the American civil-rights movement.

While the movement didn't solve all racial issues in the U.S., it did bring them to light and began a path where segregation and other acts of discrimination were admonished and, many of them, eliminated.

Martin Luther

Sometimes, protests come in words, not action. Thus is the case of perhaps the greatest theological protests in the history of man.

On Oct. 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses in response to his growing discouragement with the practice of the Catholic Churches' payment of indulgences for the forgiveness of sin.

The document, outlining the need for spiritual repentance and admonishing the Church for its more worldly practices, proved to be unpopular. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Germany issued an edict allowing anyone to kill Luther without consequence of law.

But that only galvanized a movement behind Luther, leading eventually to the Protestant Reformation, a move that reshaped Europe and Western civilization from that point forward.

Tiananmen square

Sometimes, a protest can be immensely effective in getting the message out but fail at its ultimate goal.

Such is the case of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Set during the time of the fall of a number of Communist governments worldwide, a small group in mainland China led a series of protests against the government there. Sparked by the death of a popular pro-democracy official (Hu Yaobang), as many as 1 million people participated in the poorly organized protests.

Meanwhile, the Chinese central government moved in to break up the protests, and they did so with a heavy hand. The following conflict resulted in the deaths of as many as 50 soldiers and policemen and as many as 400 to 800 civilians.

The brief movement's lasting image of a solitary man standing in the advance of a military tank is one of the most visceral of the modern day protest movements.

In the end, though, democracy did not come to mainland China. The effects of the protests, in hindsight, seem largely negligible, although it did show that China's long held practice of isolationism was breaking down with advent of technology and a more global economy.