The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams
by: Pauline Maier

Softcover. NY, Vintage Books, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 309 pages. The "old revolutionaries" were Samuel Adams, Isaac Sears, Thomas Young, Richard Henry Lee, and Charles Carroll. Of widely varying backgrounds and interests, all of them had their greatest influence in the years between 1769 and 1776, and all of them saw their power transferred after the war to the men we know as "the Founding Fathers." In telling the stories of these men, Maier shows how the American Revolution was less a collective movement than a commitment to an ideal of a republic, which different people interpreted differently. She describes not just why Americans made the Revolution, but what the Revolution did to them.