Thomas Jefferson called him “truly the Man of the Revolution.” Governor Thomas Hutchinson called him the greatest incendiary in the King’s dominions. Both were describing the same Bostonian: Samuel Adams, the organizer who turned local anger into a continental cause. About 1772 – Demanding the troops leave after the Massacre. Adams was born in Boston on September 27, 1722, cousin of John Adams and heir to a malt-making family. He studied at Harvard and even argued, in a thesi

The Hero of Two Worlds Who Crossed an Ocean for Liberty It was not that long ago. Only a little more than a decade before the American Revolution began in earnest, a young George Washington had fought against the French as a British colonial officer in the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Washington had seen French soldiers as the enemy on the frontier. Yet history turned with astonishing speed. In 1777, a nineteen-year-old French aristocrat named Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roc

Perhaps one of our nation's most complicated patriots Picture a stormy Philadelphia night in June 1752. A middle-aged man in a plain coat stands in an open field beside his young son, William. A silk kite rises into the black clouds, twine dancing in the wind, a brass key dangling from the string. Thunder cracks. A spark jumps from the key to Benjamin Franklin’s knuckle. In that single, electrifying moment, he tamed the heavens and proved lightning was electricity. The world