On the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, we’re face to face, almost, with an American political type that’s gone missing in our third century. Check this resume: he’s principled, he’s prepared, a two-fisted aristocrat networked with farmers and workers; a thinker and writer at risk, without fear, talking ideas and enacting them, getting results; a man with no interest in money, no envy of riches or rank. He’s got a Harvard education, but no profession, no real career. He’s a republican, he’ll tell you, who takes self-government seriously—and the personal virtues that sustain it. The hero in this podcast is Samuel Adams of Boston, revived after two and a half centuries by the magical biographer Stacy Schiff.

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Stacy Schiff (credit: Elena Seibert).

Thomas Jefferson of Virginia saw Sam Adams as the man who lifted a tax protest up to the launch of a new nation—a bigger figure even than his second cousin, John Adams, main author of the U.S. Constitution.