![]() ![]() Few had appeared in solo biographies, and if they did, it was often in fairly dim light. Thomas Young, Richard Henry Lee, and Charles Carroll. First given as a series of lectures at New York University in 1976, the essays gather a fairly random matrix of people for a group shot of colonial life: Samuel Adams, Isaac Sears, Dr. Maier’s prosopography of five men and their “worlds,” accentuated by a thoughtful “interlude” on the rigors of political life in the colonies, marked a change in how historians used individual biographies to retell the Revolution to post-bicentennial Americans. ![]() ![]() I wanted to know better what it was to be an American of the late eighteenth century and to live through the American Revolution” (xiii). And everything I admire about her as a scholar rolls in with the first lines of that barefaced preface: “Let me confess at the outset that this book, though it answers some questions of the sort historians are trained to ask, has also been-and was meant from the outset to be-a personal adventure. It’s often said that we tell old stories to get new ones, a truth self-evident in my favorite of Pauline Maier’s many works, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (1980). ![]()
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