Samuel Adams: A Life

The crucial question addressed by Ira Stoll's new biography of revolutionary firebrand Sam Adams isn't put directly until the final pages: "If Adams was so instrumental in achieving American independence and so influential even afterward, why then has his fame faded so badly with time?" The answer has to do with a stark contradiction: Sam Adams was a conservative revolutionary, an activist whose radical approach to politics was based upon his indefatigable commitment to protecting the ancient rights of Englishmen. In helping to make America independent from England, Adams ceaselessly harked back to England's own history.

Whereas American founders such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison were steeped in the rationalist political philosophy of the European Enlightenment -- an 18th-century phenomenon -- Sam Adams took his political inclinations from the 17th-century struggles between England's Puritans and the English Crown. If Jefferson's inspirations were Enlightenment philosophers like Montesquieu and David Hume, Sam Adams absorbed his worldview from Puritan militant Oliver Cromwell (Adams also shared Cromwell's knee-jerk anti-Catholicism).

Like Cromwell a century before, Adams jealously guarded the rights of Englishmen against royal infringement. And, like Cromwell, Adams found a source for both fiery rhetoric and steely determination in a strict reading of the Bible. For both men, liberty and public virtue were inextricably linked. During a dark period of the Revolutionary War, Adams wrote to a friend that " general Dissolution of Principles & Manners will more surely overthrow the Liberties of America tha...

















May 24: Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Works was published on this day in 1951. Included in this omnibus edition were most of the pieces upon which her reputation now stands, putting her in a rank…

Do you recall the tagline from the very first Superman movie? "You'll believe a man can fly!" Well, I'm tempted to craft such a hyperbolic assertion for China Miéville's…

advertisement
Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down

When a job at a French ad agency landed in his lap, novelist Rosecrans Baldwin had the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream of living la vie Parisienne. And though cold réalité intruded -- in the form of financial struggles and the limits of his rudimentary Français -- the result was a more mature take on the city of his fantasies, flaws included.

Why Cats Land on Their Feet

The feline acrobatics and other mysteries of everyday physics that Mark Levi explores in this charming book are just the beginning. A fun and enlightening workout for your gray matter.

Dead Men

Scott's doomed Antartic expedition and the haunting mysteries surrounding its failure lead to obsession in Richard Pierce's debut novel. As painter Birdie Bowers pursues her fascination with the explorer and his death, she risks both her body and her heart for answers.