The Old Revolutionaries

The "old revolutionaries" were Samuel Adams, Isaac Sears, Thomas Young, Richard Henry Lee and Charels Carroll, five men who played significant roles in the American Revolution, and who are usually overlooked in history books today. Of widely varying backgrounds and interests, all of them had thir gratest 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, Pauline Maier shows how the American Revolution was less a collective movement than a committment to an ideal of a republic, which different people interpreted differently, and she describes "not just why Americans made the Revolution, but what the Revolution did to them."

PAULINE MAIER was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1960, was a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics in 1960-61, and took her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1968. She taught at Harvard, the University of Massachusetts (Boston), University of Wisconsin, Yale University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she has been William R. Kenan, Junior, Professor of American History since 1990. She was the author of From Resistance to Revolution, The Old Revolutionaries, and The American People: A History, a single-authored text for junior high school, as well as numerous other articles and reviews. She died in 2013.